After another poor election showing, what comes next for ADPD?
It’s been three weeks now since Malta voted in the European Parliament and the local council elections. The dust has now settled and much analysis has been made. There has been due focus given to the Labour Party and to the Nationalist Party, a
It’s been three weeks now since Malta voted in the European Parliament and the local council elections. The dust has now settled and much analysis has been made.
There has been due focus given to the Labour Party and to the Nationalist Party, and much said about the record number of people who backed independent candidates. Yet flying under the radar were Malta’s traditional third party – ADPD.
Under new leader Sandra Gauci – an outspoken teacher turned social media commentator turned politician – there was hope that Malta’s traditional Green Party would be able to rid itself of the shackles of the poor election results of the last 20 years and offer a viable third option away from Malta’s tiresome political duopoly.
Yet, as thousands flocked away from the PN and the PL – not many went to ADPD. The party registered a paltry 3,109 votes in the European elections – just 1.19% of the vote share.
In the meantime, 100,000 people or so opted not to vote and 22,352 people chose to vote for an independent candidate. Most popular among those independent candidates was former AD leader Arnold Cassola who registered 12,706 votes – almost exactly four times as much as ADPD did as a whole.
So where does ADPD stand now? Where did it go wrong for the party in 2024? Why has it failed to capitalise on the wave of pro-environmentalism and non-major party support? And most importantly, what comes next?
The history of Malta’s Green party
Tracing the history of ADPD is relatively straightforward. Officially founded in October 2020, ADPD is the merge of two small parties – the traditional third-party Alternattiva Demokratika (AD) and the more recently set up political party Partit Demokratiku (PD).
On the back of poor showings in the 2019 European Parliament elections, the two parties opted to merge together and create a single political force in the hope that it could present a more united front against the PN and the PL.
But the roots stem further back. AD was founded in 1989 when Toni Abela and Wenzu Mintoff split from the PL. They were both kicked out of the party, but Mintoff – then an MP – retained his seat in Parliament and therefore became AD’s first – and to date, only – MP until the 1992 elections.
The party obtained 4,186 votes (worth 1.7%) in those elections, but subsequently lost support in every election, and only exceeded that number again in 2013.
The flipside however came in Europe.
In the 2003 general election, by now led by Harry Vassallo, AD campaigned in favour of Malta’s accession to the European Union and therefore told voters to give their first preference to the PN in order to secure the referendum result, and then worked on obtaining second preference votes.
This resulted in AD’s worst general election performance on record as the PN rebuked AD’s appeal for people’s 2s on the eve of the election, but it set the stage for its best ever performance a year later in the first European Parliament elections. In the 2004 European Parliament elections, AD’s sole candidate Arnold Cassola registered 22,938 votes – equivalent to 9.33%. Malta had just five seats to fill in the EP at the time. Had it had six, like today, then Cassola would have been elected.
Fast forward however, and support has dwindled.
The last election that AD contested as a party was in 2019, and it registered just 1,866 votes (0.72%) as it was overtaken by both Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa, and the PD it would later merge with.
PD itself was founded in 2016 by former PL MP Marlene Farrugia, who was later joined by her partner Godfrey Farrugia. Both were elected to Parliament in 2017 as they contested as part of a coalition under the PN’s ballot sheet – but when they both departed the party, much of the popularity the party had departed with them.
The ADPD movement: A success or a failure?
ADPD has now contested three elections as a merged party: the 2022 general elections, the 2024 European Parliament elections and the 2024 local council elections.
The merging of the two parties was meant to shore up third party support and create a united front. As it happens, however, the new party has not even managed to maintain the same level of support that AD and PD had as separate parties.
In the 2017 general elections, AD registered 2,564 votes, while PD candidates (contesting under the PN’s ballot sheet) registered 4,741 votes. So the two parties together won 7,305 votes.
Five years later, in the 2022 general elections, ADPD managed to muster 4,747 votes – a drop of around 35%.
There’s a similar pattern in the European elections: in 2019, AD registered 1,866 while the PD registered 5,276 votes. That means that the two parties registered 7,142 votes between them. Support, clearly, had remained roughly the same as it was in the 2017 general election.
But this year, ADPD registered 3,109 votes – a drop of 56.5% when compared to 2019.
In the 2019 local council elections, AD registered 1,997 votes while PD registered 555 votes – a total of 2,552 votes. This year, ADPD registered 2,124 votes. It’s less in terms of votes – but the party did successfully elect two local councillors – something neither AD nor PD managed to do in 2019.
But from a broader perspective, the numbers don’t lie. ADPD was meant to unite support against the PN and PL – instead it lost a good chunk of the few votes that it had from the outset.
A matter of identity
The fact of the matter is that the name ADPD simply doesn’t refer to anything tangible.
Current ADPD chairperson Sandra Gauci had said in 2023 that she was eyeing a rebranding of the party, and said it again as she sullenly told journalists about the party’s poor showing in the European Parliament elections earlier this month.
That rebranding can’t come soon enough, if the party is to ever be remotely successful.
The fact is that the acronym ADPD just doesn’t mean anything to voters. AD is an acronym largely associated by voters as being a political movement which has had little-to-no electoral success and is now long past it’s sell by date. PD existed for a mere three years and revolved almost solely around two former PL MPs.
AD has had 35 years to make something happen, and hasn’t, while if you look at the current make-up of ADPD – there is almost nobody left from PD. Only Mark Anthony Zerafa – a local council candidate in Birkirkara – remains from the short-lived party.
The party needs to wipe the slate clean and radically change its identity to one which voters can relate to.
A matter of communication
Identity may be a cornerstone of politics, but communication is everything. The past years have shown that this is an area where ADPD is particularly lacking.
The party’s outreach with the press and the people is overshadowed not just by the major parties, but also by its own direct competitors.
A cursory look at our email inbox shows that between 1 May and Election Day, ADPD issued 22 press releases, while independent candidate Arnold Cassola issued 36 press releases.
That’s not all: taking social media following, ADPD has less followers than both Cassola and Conrad Borg Manche – who as an independent candidate also received more votes than ADPD did.
Hosting a single press conference on a Saturday morning, as ADPD does on a near-enough weekly basis, and hoping upon hoping to get some column inches in the Sunday newspapers just isn’t a viable PR strategy anymore.
It’s also a matter of content: realistically there are broad similarities between Cassola and ADPD. Both are decidedly pro-environment and anti-corruption, and both try to go against the grain of mainstream politics.
There is the moral quandary that ADPD is pro-choice and Cassola is not – but given that the most recent survey on the matter showed that youths are more likely to agree with abortion than not and the fact that the demographic which gravitated away from the major parties were youths, one would have expected ADPD to benefit out of the two abortion stances.
So what made Cassola stand out when compared to ADPD? His presence on social media, while sporadic, rugged, and sometimes messy, focused on issues which people actually wanted action on: be it something as simple as a rusted railing in Marsascala or something decidedly more complex as seeking a Standards Commissioner investigation into an errant minister.
This is not to say that ADPD does not care about what the people want action on: but neither does the party emphasise on it.
A strategic re-think?
So far, ADPD – and both AD and PD in their previous iterations – put most of its focus into the country’s big elections: the general election and the European Parliament election. Local council elections were not necessarily an after-thought, but it doesn’t feel like all that much focus was given to them either.
Modern day electoral patterns suggest however that ADPD may benefit more in the long-run if it were to give a more local focus to its politics.
Never before has there been a parliament with more people who came from local council backgrounds. Never before have there been so many non-major party candidates elected to local councils.
It’s clear that the people are ready to start moving away from party politics on a local level. ADPD itself benefitted from this as it elected two councillors. Ralph Cassar won his seat in Attard back, and Sandra Gauci was elected in St Paul’s Bay.
Perhaps it is time for ADPD to do a bit of a strategic re-think and focus more on building a more grassroots following by focusing on fielding more candidates on a local level. Getting more candidates working on the ground and subsequently elected into local councils can create the right environment for them to improve their – and their party’s – profile, and that can translate into better results in major elections.
Local councils can also be a good opportunity for ADPD to show that its people can get things done when in a position to do so – an opportunity the party has never had thus far.
Increased credibility leads to more votes. Just look at Steve Zammit Lupi as an independent councillor: he went from 947 votes in 2019 to 2,342 votes this year – a tally convincing enough to see him appointed as mayor.
Perhaps this is the type of thing that ADPD should be aiming for in order to strengthen its support.
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