Costa de la Luz
Peter Caruana wins the Gibraltar elections
By h.b.
Oct 12, 2007 - 8:41 AM

Peter Caruana has won the elections in Gibraltar by a slim margin, and now starts his fourth mandate on the rock.
Turnout in the General Election yesterday was 81.4%, and Caruana wins despite exit polls indicating that this rival Joe Bossano was the victor.
Peter Caruana attracted 8,333 votes while Bossano could only obtain 7,561, and that translates into ten seats in Parliament for Caruana and seven for Bossano.

Caruana is just coming up to his 51st birthday, and has been Chief Minister of Gibraltar since 1996, when the Gibraltar Social Democrats first came to power, when GSD defeated Joe Bossano’s party, the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party, who had been in power since 1988.

Bossano was now standing as a joint GSLP/Liberal candidate, and said that he may bring in a referendum on the future of the Rock if he had been returned to power on what is known as the Córdoba deal. It agreed joint use of Gibraltar Airport – together with a new terminal - improvements at border controls and on telecommunications, and pension payments for Spaniards who worked on the Rock before 1969. The first commercial flight from Spain landed at Gibraltar Airport last December, but the announcement has come only this week that the service between Madrid and the rock is to be suspended because it is not profitable.

What the Córdoba deal did not address was the question of sovereignty of Gibraltar.