Alex Borg Has Done His Bit. It’s Now The PN’s Turn

For the first time in years, the Nationalist Party cannot blame its leader. That may not sound like much but it is. For over a decade, every post-election conversation eventually arrived at the same conclusion. The problem was the leader. Change the leader and things would improve. Then another election would arrive, another defeat would follow and the cycle would begin again. Alex Borg’s first election campaign has made that explanation considerably harder to sustain. Labour won. It remains the dominant force in Maltese politics and begins a fourth consecutive term in government. But there is a version of this result that the PN should feel reasonably good about, and it centres almost entirely on what Borg managed to achieve in his first campaign as leader. He took over a party that had spent years looking more focused on managing defeat than achieving victory. What he brought was energy, discipline and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to try things. The AI chatbot. The dating-app style platform matching voters to proposals. A campaign that felt like it had been designed by people trying to win rather than simply survive. Not every idea landed and not every proposal convinced, but for the first time in a long time the PN looked like a party that was thinking strategically rather than simply going through the motions. That strategic thinking extended beyond campaign gimmicks. For years, elections involving the PN had been fought on terrain chosen largely by Labour. The conversation would inevitably drift towards old wounds, internal divisions, ideological baggage or the latest episode in the party’s endless civil war. This time was different, partly because the PN was more disciplined and partly because voters themselves seemed less interested in pulling at loose threads. There was remarkably little scrutiny of either party’s proposals. Some of that reflected the reality that most people had already made up their minds. But some of it felt like something else: a quiet resignation that if there was no realistic prospect of changing the government, then perhaps it was easier not to look too closely at what was being promised. That environment helped the PN. It allowed the party to spend more time talking about the future and less time explaining the past. And Borg deserves considerable credit for that. Because what he brought to the party was something much rarer than policy expertise. He made voters imagine the PN governing again. Politics in Malta has never been particularly ideological. We vote for competence, confidence, authority and familiarity. We like leaders who look capable of handling the chaos that inevitably lands on a Prime Minister’s desk. There is a presidential quality to Maltese politics. A leader does not merely need to be right. They need to look like someone who can carry the weight of the country. That quality is rarer than people realise. Simon Busuttil did not have it. Bernard Grech did not have it. Adrian Delia perhaps had flashes of it and deserves some credit for beginning the process of reopening the PN to parts of Malta that had long stopped listening to it, particularly in Labour strongholds where the party had become increasingly irrelevant. But he never had the time, stability or experience required to fully develop it. Borg does. Not because he has all the answers. Not because he is the most experienced politician in the country. But because he communicates in a way that allows voters to picture him in the role. In many respects, that matters more than people are comfortable admitting. But this is where the more difficult conversation begins. Because leadership alone is not enough. If anything, Borg’s success has exposed a problem the PN has been able to avoid confronting for years. The party spent so long searching for a leader that much of the broader ecosystem surrounding it deteriorated in the process. Labour understood this and repeatedly returned to two lines of attack throughout the campaign. The first was Borg himself. The second was the people around him. Neither attack emerged by accident. Labour understood that Borg was resonating with voters in a way previous PN leaders had struggled to do and needed to undermine that appeal. Questions about his age and relative inexperience were therefore inevitable. And to some extent, they landed. There were moments during debates and interviews where Borg looked less comfortable when the discussion moved away from the retail politics at which he excels and towards the larger questions of economics, governance and how the machinery of the state actually works. Experience is accumulated, not inherited. A politician in his early thirties is unlikely to have encountered every challenge that eventually lands on a Prime Minister’s desk. The question is not whether Borg occasionally looked inexperienced. The question is whether he can build the structures around him that make those moments increasingly rare, allowing him to pick his battles carefully and ensuring that when he enters them he fully understands both the substance of the argument and how to communicate it in a way that resonates with voters. That was where Labour’s second line of attack became more interesting. Repeatedly, it sought to shift attention away from Borg himself and towards the people behind him. Who was helping shape policy? Who would govern alongside him? Who would help turn campaign promises into decisions? There is a grain of truth there, though not for the reasons Labour would like. Not because the PN lacks capable MPs, and certainly not because Labour possesses some uniquely gifted generation of politicians. Many of the ministers Labour today presents as evidence of its competence entered government with little or no ministerial experience. Ian Borg, who many expect to eventually succeed Robert Abela, is one obvious example. People learn and politics is full of individuals who grow into office. But politicians do not operate in isolation. They stand on top of structures. Advisers, policy specialists, researchers, economists, communications teams and the wider network of professionals who help a political party understand problems, formulate solutions and communicate them coherently. That is where the PN still has significant work to do. Because governing is fundamentally different from campaigning. Campaigns can survive ambiguity. Governments eventually have to choose. A campaign can carry contradictory messages if they appeal to different audiences. A government eventually has to reconcile them. The PN spent much of the election talking about concerns around migration and population growth while simultaneously advocating measures that would make it easier and cheaper for businesses to access foreign labour. Those positions may not be irreconcilable, but they require explanation and a coherent framework. They require the kind of preparation that allows politicians to adapt their message to different audiences without losing sight of the underlying argument. That preparation rarely comes from the politician alone. It comes from the structures around them. A party that genuinely understands Malta’s traffic problem produces politicians who can speak confidently about transport policy. A party that has done the hard work on housing produces candidates who can defend difficult trade-offs without looking uncomfortable. A party that has thought seriously about migration, energy or healthcare is less likely to find itself trapped between applause lines and reality. The encouraging part for the PN is that this is a solvable problem. Leadership is hard to manufacture. Structures can be rebuilt. And there are reasons to believe that process has already begun. The election result may not have delivered victory, but it delivered something else: relevance. Success attracts people. Individuals who might previously have kept their distance from the PN may now be willing to offer their expertise. Professionals who had concluded the party was beyond saving may be prepared to take another look. The openness to technology and innovation displayed during the campaign should not disappear now that the election is over. It should be expanded. The party should be recruiting. Not simply future candidates, but future contributors. Because the opportunity in front of the PN is more significant than the election result alone suggests. Borg has continued the work of making the party relevant in places where it had become increasingly uncompetitive, while a sizeable number of voters who might once have formed part of a winning coalition remain parked elsewhere. Some have drifted towards Momentum. Others remain politically homeless. At the same time, the government enters a fourth term facing a problem of its own making: expectations that have risen to extraordinary levels. None of this guarantees success. But it does mean the path back to competitiveness is no longer difficult to imagine. The harder challenge lies elsewhere. Winning attention and winning trust are not the same thing. Over the next five years, the PN must prove that the discipline, strategic thinking and willingness to modernise that appeared during the campaign were not simply election tactics, but signs of a deeper transformation. Alex Borg has shown that the party can once again persuade voters to listen. The rest of the party must now give them something to listen to. •