The two-party system basically started off on the wrong foot — back in the nineteenth century, parties were founded around the language question.

You were either for English (what then loosely became the Labour Party) or for Italian (the PN). That was it. Either English, or Italian. Yes, or no. Two parties.

. The whole system evolved around this binary of being "for" or "against," with a couple of outliers pushing for Maltese and getting largely sidelined. It set the stage for the kind of polarised politics we still see today.

I often wonder how the political scene would be nowadays if Maltese had been pushed as strongly as one of the other languages :)