Malta’s PM sworn in after landslide election win
Malta’s Prime Minister, Robert Abela has been sworn in after a landslide victory in elections that delivered his Labour party a third term in government. Labour won 55.11 percent of the vote, as final results showed on Sunday a bigger win than in 2017 or 2013 despite low turnout and the legacy of scandal over the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. It was the first electoral test for Abela, a 44-year-old lawyer, since he took the helm of the Mediterranean island nation in January 2020 following a Labour party vote.
His predecessor Joseph Muscat was forced to quit after being accused of shielding his allies from the investigation into Caruana Galizia’s 2017 assassination in a car bomb. In Saturday’s vote, Labour secured a majority of almost 40 thousand votes over its Nationalist Party rivals a huge margin in the EU state which has just 355, thousand registered voters.
