The local council of the sleepy town of Għargħur has hit the front pages in recent weeks, after councillors ousted the mayor, flipping the council’s previous PN majority to a PL-led one.
The turmoil led to protests and earnest appeals for new elections, with several people across social media painting conflicting pictures of the situation. Some have taken to tallying councillors’ individual vote counts to label the new council illegal or illegitimate, while others have claimed that the situation was precipitated by the council being mired in financial scandal.
We examine some of these claims, tracing the steps that led to the messy situation.
PN-led council elected in 2024
Last June, Għargħur residents voted to elect their council, with PN winning just over 62 per cent of the vote, or 1,253 of the just over 2,000 valid votes cast. The remaining 759 votes, almost 38 per cent, went to PL candidates.
The results meant that PN held three of the council’s five seats, with PL taking two seats.
The majority of PN votes went to Helen Gauci, who was promptly named mayor.
This wasn’t Gauci’s first stint in the council.
She had been elected to the council in 2019 and served as mayor throughout the term, despite coming second among her party’s candidates because frontrunner 16-year-old Abraham Aquilina was too young to lead the council.
However, Gauci has now been ousted after losing a no-confidence vote prompted by the resignation of deputy mayor Francesca Attard, one of the other two PN members of the council.
Attard stepped down from PN last month, saying she wanted to work “free from political pressure”. She stayed on as an independent councillor, effectively robbing PN of its majority on the council and catapulting PL councillor Mariah Meli to the role of mayor.
Why did Francesca Attard resign?
Attard argued that her complaints over Gauci’s mayorship boil down to her alleged mismanagement of the council, frequently leaving council members in the dark over key decisions.
Shortly after her resignation, Attard expressed her unhappiness at the council’s decision to sublease a historic fort in the town to NGO Friends of Don Bosco without the contract being presented to the council for scrutiny and without ensuring its free use for the council and the community.
Speaking to the podcaster Ricky Caruana earlier this week, Attard pointed to several other instances of mismanagement.
Auditors were yet to sign off on some of the council’s past financial accounts, she said, having found instances of overpayment for construction projects and unexplained discrepancies in financial reporting.
Attard also bemoaned the absence of pre-council meetings and councillors’ lack of visibility into council-issued tenders.
She said that despite raising these concerns within party structures over several weeks, no action was taken, forcing her to resign from the party altogether.
The PN promptly disputed several of Attard’s claims, saying that the community’s free access to the fort would be ensured and insisting that the agreement to sublease the fort to an NGO had been agreed upon by the previous local council.
Meanwhile, Gauci insisted that the accusations of financial mismanagement were unfounded, saying the council had never paid out money without appropriate documentation.
Councillors duke it out
However, the accusations of mismanagement were exacerbated when a promoter, Edwin Micallef, publicly confronted Opposition Leader Bernard Grech over unpaid dues he was owed for a boxing event held a year earlier. In the widely shared clip, Micallef can be seen telling Grech that he is owed €23,500 in unpaid fees.
According to Attard and the PL councillors, Gauci had unilaterally approved the boxing event’s expenses, without ever presenting its budget or any contracts to the council for review and approval.
Gauci implicitly admitted as much, saying she was personally responsible for paying Micallef’s pending bill, despite the event having effectively taken place under the auspices of the council.
The latest twist in the saga took place at an emergency council meeting on Thursday 22 May, during which the council agreed to call on a joint investigation by the auditor general and the director general of the local government division.
In a report published late last year into the workings of local government throughout 2023, the auditor general had flagged Għargħur as one of several councils in which “issues of poor internal controls and lack of substantiating documentation were encountered”.
An attack on democracy?
A PN rally held on Wednesday evening dubbed the events in the council as an attack on democracy, with Gauci alone having won more votes than the three councillors who ousted her put together, calling for fresh elections to be held.
Gauci herself blasted the move as “a political conspiracy manoeuvre reminiscent of the 80s”, presumably a reference to the 1981 election in which the Labour Party governed after winning a majority of seats but fewer votes.
A constitutional amendment later introduced a mechanism into Malta’s electoral law to ensure that the party which wins the most votes is awarded additional seats, allowing it to govern.
Government officials have brushed aside calls for elections to be held, pointing out that council members are well within their right to overthrow a mayor in whom they have lost confidence.
The Local Government Act, the legislation governing how local councils operate, confirms this, clause 29 saying “The Mayor or Deputy Mayor shall cease to hold their office upon a vote of no confidence delivered by a majority of the Councillors in office”.
Others, such as former PL MEP Cyrus Engerer, have made similar arguments, saying that while elected councillors are given a mandate by their voters, they “should never be hostages to party labels” and are free to form new alliances.
Engerer himself is familiar with political bickering within local councils, having served as Sliema deputy mayor on a PN ticket before crossing the floor to join PL over then PN leader Lawrence Gonzi’s opposition to the introduction of divorce.
There have been several other instances of mayors quitting their parties throughout the years.
In 2011, Cospicua mayor Joseph Scerri stepped down from the PL after a court found him guilty of nepotism, continuing to serve as an independent.
The previous year, PN had expelled Sliema mayor Nikki Dimech from the party after he was charged with soliciting a bribe. Dimech, who denied the claims, stayed on as an independent mayor, until the council’s six remaining PN councillors ousted Dimech through a no-confidence vote.
More recently, Għasri mayor Daniel Attard resigned from the PN, effectively wiping out the party’s majority on the council and continuing to serve as an independent mayor. By the time the next election rolled around, he had switched allegiances altogether, finding himself elected as mayor once again, only this time on the PL ticket.
Birth of local councils marked by partisan bickering
Malta’s local councils were marked by partisan bickering from the start, with even the very involvement of parties within councils finding the two main parties at odds.
The Labour Party had refused to contest Malta’s very first local council elections in 1993, arguing that local governance should remain free from political party involvement, effectively handing PN an almost clean sweep of the elections, with PL-affiliated candidates running as independents.
The move was supported by the Church, with then archbishop Joseph Mercieca and Gozo bishop Nikol Cauchi saying that involving parties would dissuade valid people from contesting the election, prompting then prime minister Eddie Fenech Adami to declare himself “hurt” by the bishops’ statements.
By 1998, the Labour Party had changed its mind, fielding its own candidates for that year’s elections, as it has done ever since.
