The PN’s theatre of the absurd

There are moments in politics when a party, rather than confronting its demons, chooses instead to punch itself squarely in the face.

The PN seems determined to make a sport of it. You’d hope the Party — once a bastion of European liberal democracy — had outgrown its siege mentality.

Instead, we have Alex Borg, the PN’s influencer-turned-leadership-hopeful, offering a clinic in political cowardice and media illiteracy.

This week, Borg — a man bidding to lead Malta’s main opposition party — declared, apparently without irony, that “The Labour Party’s media does not work in the Nationalist Party’s interests,” as if he’d just cracked the Da Vinci Code of Maltese politics.

Has he just discovered that party-owned broadcasters might, in fact, push their own party’s agenda? The revelation was followed by the similarly thunderous insight that “the interest of ONE is not to strengthen the PN.” Really.

That Labour’s TV station, ONE, does not exist to bolster the PN is neither a scandal nor a revelation; it’s a statement of the breathtakingly obvious.

Rather than confronting Malta’s toxic culture of party-owned media — a stain on any serious democracy — the PN opted for a tantrum. Its commission issued a formal directive barring candidates from speaking to ONE.

Interviews with the PN’s own media? Those require prior approval, too. Transparency, it seems, is just another casualty of internal paranoia.

Borg’s statement ignores the glaring hypocrisy. The Nationalist Party has long run its own broadcaster, NET — a channel whose editorial line is about as independent as a party press release. In a country where both major parties operate their own propaganda outlets, the real tragedy isn’t that ONE fails to serve the PN, but that both stations have poisoned the media landscape for decades.

And yet, rather than stand for a future beyond partisan echo chambers, Borg and the PN have doubled down on bunker politics..

Malta’s political discourse has descended into a farce where even the party’s mouthpieces must now speak through layers of internal censorship.

Alex Borg’s response? He swallowed the party line whole, backing the blackout with the enthusiasm of a man desperate not to rock the boat — or perhaps terrified he might fall out of it.

Borg justified the clampdown by insisting this is an “internal election” — as though that excuses insulating leadership hopefuls from public scrutiny. The man who aspires to lead Malta’s opposition cannot even lead himself to a microphone without permission.

He parroted the party line with all the spine of a damp pamphlet. Yes, this is an internal campaign. But if you’re vying for national leadership, perhaps the public deserves a peek at your ideas — assuming you have any.

Borg’s rival, Adrian Delia, showed a flicker of principle, defending the right of journalists — even those from ONE — to report freely. But predictably, even he fell into line once the party machinery ground into gear. Having said that, he still spoke to ONE when doorstepped outside Parliament after the PN’s decision.

This isn’t just a question of media policy. It’s a window into a party that has turned in on itself so completely it cannot see the national interest beyond its own internal politics.

The PN’s leadership race has become a closed shop, a stage-managed performance for insiders, sealed off from the electorate whose trust they desperately need to rebuild.

And Alex Borg? For all his social media bluster and populist slogans, he’s revealed himself as the latest in a line of PN figures who confuse pandering to the base with principled leadership.

Rather than challenge the party’s suffocating paranoia, he has embraced it. Rather than call for a grown-up conversation about Malta’s broken media ecosystem, he’s chosen to parrot the same tired lines.

Malta deserves an opposition with a spine, not a party hiding behind press bans and petty feuds. If this is the PN’s idea of leadership, it’s no wonder they’ve been losing — and it’s no wonder they’ll keep losing.

Until they stop policing interviews and start confronting ideas, they’re not challenging Labour. They’re handing them victory on a plate.