2026 general elections: A post mortem attempt

The snap election of 30 May has now passed into history. Robert Abela made the shrewd calculation that allowing the legislature to run its full five-year term would have been a risk worth avoiding.

He could already sense that the appointment of Alex Borg as Nationalist Party Leader last September had the potential to reunite the PN’s various factions and breathe new life into a party that had appeared exhausted and lacking direction.

Abela’s Machiavellian gamble paid off. The Labour Party secured a fourth consecutive term in government, an unprecedented achievement in Malta’s political history. Yet the victory was not without warning signs.

Labour’s popular majority was cut roughly in half compared to the previous general elections, a reminder of the cyclical nature of politics and an indication that this victory may well mark the beginning of the end of a long political cycle.

The government now faces a formidable challenge. It must navigate increasingly precarious public finances while attempting to fulfil a raft of expensive electoral promises, many of which are costly to implement, difficult to sustain, and questionable in terms of long-term fairness.

Under other circumstances, one might feel sympathy for Finance Minister Clyde Caruana. Yet such sympathy would be misplaced. He willingly embraced the politics of panem et circenses, promising something to everyone in pursuit of electoral advantage.

Caruana is arguably the most intellectually capable member of the Cabinet and should have exercised greater restraint and statesmanship. Instead, he now faces, and indeed all taxpayers face, the consequences of a national debt approaching €12 billion, more than double the level inherited when Robert Abela became Prime Minister in 2020.

More troubling still is how little of this debt appears to have been invested in transformative infrastructure or long-term economic development.

Much of this borrowing has financed short-term populist spending aimed at securing electoral loyalty and preserving a political system in which numerous individuals implicated in scandals remain shielded from effective law enforcement and judicial scrutiny. The bill for this strategy will eventually arrive.

But enough about Labour.

The more pressing question is why the PN failed once again.

There is no doubt that Borg has achieved remarkable progress in just a few months as the party’s leader. Yet that period was simply too short to reverse years of decline. Moreover, mistakes were made along the way.

The most significant strategic error, in my view, was the leadership’s decision to avoid making governance and corruption central themes of the campaign.

The reasoning was understandable: previous campaigns in 2017 and 2022 had focused heavily on these issues and had ended in defeat. Party strategists concluded that a large segment of the electorate had become indifferent to corruption, nepotism, and a lack of transparency, provided that living standards continued to improve.

This conclusion was fundamentally mistaken.

Holding a government accountable for poor governance is not merely an electoral tactic; it is a moral duty. For many decent and conscientious citizens, the deterioration of public standards remains the primary reason for seeking political change. This is especially true for a party that presents itself as rooted in Christian Democratic principles.

Instead, the PN embraced what it called a “positive” campaign. In practice, this often meant joining Labour in a competition to promise ever more benefits and subsidies, many of them of questionable sustainability. It was a race the PN could never win against a governing party willing to exploit the full advantages of incumbency.

The electorate was effectively invited to vote on a “what’s in it for me?” basis rather than on the basis of larger ideals, principles, and aspirations for the common good, the very values that inspired the PNs’ most successful campaigns in the past.

With himself and many of his colleagues effectively spared serious scrutiny, it is little wonder that Abela publicly praised the Nationalist campaign as “respectful” in contrast to previous “odious” campaigns. It must have been satisfying to face such a courteous opponent.

Perhaps the most enduring consequence of the 2026 campaign is the further entrenchment of a troubling social mentality: a form of amoral familialism characterised by collective selfishness and economic short-sightedness. Under this view, the immediate material welfare of one’s family takes precedence over broader concerns of public morality, justice, institutional integrity, and the common good.

As long as one’s personal circumstances improve, everything else becomes secondary.

If the late sociologist Jeremy Boissevain were still with us, he would undoubtedly have found rich material for analysing this ethical malaise. His observations would extend far beyond the themes explored in ‘Saints and Fireworks’.

Likewise, were Edward Banfield alive today, he might recognise in contemporary Malta many of the characteristics he identified in the post-war southern Italian community he called “Montegrano“: a society shaped by deeply ingrained amoral familialism and a limited conception of collective responsibility.

The PN also chose to steer clear of another issue of growing public concern: overdevelopment. Rather than take a principled stand in defence of Malta’s diminishing environmental and architectural heritage, it largely avoided the subject.

Similarly, its attempts at rapprochement with hunters and trappers were both morally questionable and tactically misguided. While the strategy may have softened hostility among some hunting constituencies, it alienated a much larger number of environmentally conscious voters who were already uncertain whether to support the PN or instead vote for Momentum or ADPD.

A more intelligent strategy would have been to explore some form of electoral cooperation with these smaller parties, presenting a broader reformist coalition under a common banner.

Now that the elections are over, the PN faces a critical choice.

It cannot continue to campaign on the basis of its thousand-odd electoral pledges. Those promises have served their purpose and are now largely irrelevant. The party’s future effectiveness will depend on whether it is prepared to resume the difficult but necessary task of exposing the scandals, abuses, and governance failures that continue to characterise this administration.

If it fails to do so, that responsibility will once again fall primarily upon independent media organisations, such as The Shift, and public-interest NGOs. Too often in recent years, the PN has left its opposition duties and role to others unconnected to it. Because there must be opposition in a democracy, but the PN has chosen to let independent organisations and activists take the fall-out while it led a “positive” campaign.

The notable exception remains Adrian Delia’s relentless pursuit of the Vitals-Steward hospitals scandal, which exposed one of the largest misappropriations of public funds in Malta’s history.

The PN must decide whether it wishes to be merely an alternative government-in-waiting or a genuine opposition willing to confront uncomfortable truths. If it chooses the former, Labour’s fourth term may not be the beginning of the end of a political cycle after all.

Paul Bonello is a financial consultant.