Malta's governing Labour party claimed victory on Sunday following general elections, citing preliminary results from a vote marked by the lowest turnout in decades.
Prime Minister Robert Abela said in a call with TVM News that his party had won a majority, without giving details, while in the counting hall in Naxxar, Labour delegates cheered and jumped for joy.
Final results are not expected until late Sunday or even Monday, but Malta's two main parties, Labour and the Nationalist Party, take samples from Saturday's vote to ascertain the preliminary result.
At the counting hall in the city of Naxxar, hundreds of party representatives watched behind perspex screens as officials verified the ballots and then sent them through electronic counting machines, before Labour members went wild.
But it remains to be seen by how much Labour has won, after a lacklustre campaign hampered by coronavirus restrictions and overshadowed by the Ukraine war - and what opinion polls had showed to be an inevitable Labour win.
The Electoral Commission said overnight that turnout looked set to be 85.5 percent, the lowest since 1955, and the first time it has dropped below 90 percent since 1966.
Just over 355,000 voters were registered.
Labour is also still tainted by the high-level corruption exposed by investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb in October 2017 - a murder that shocked the world.
A public inquiry last year found the state under former prime minister Joseph Muscat created a "culture of impunity" in which her enemies felt they could silence her.
Mr Muscat had already stepped down in January 2020, after public protests at his perceived attempts to shield allies from the probe into her death.
Mr Abela took over in January 2020 in a Labour vote, and has since moved to strengthen good governance and press freedom, although Ms Caruana Galizia's family say he has not gone far enough.
This was the first general election in Malta in which 16- and 17-year-olds were allowed to vote, although they have previously had that right in local and European Parliament elections.
