Note: This article was published as an edited opinion piece on Times of Malta.
Watching the recent Times Talk Campaign Watch debate ahead of Malta’s 30 May general election, political analysts Lou Bondì and Michelle Attard Tonna reflected on the current state of Maltese politics as revealed through the electoral campaign itself. Central to their reading was a question that increasingly appears to define modern political culture in Malta: “What’s in it for me?”. That observation captured a deeper transformation that has gradually reshaped Maltese political culture itself.
Campaigns once attempted to present competing visions of society. Today, they resemble exercises in crowd choreography and expectation management. Political promises are distributed like commodities. Many citizens have grown accustomed to the familiar pre-election phone call asking if they “need anything” before casting their ballot, the ultimate transactional call. Voters are no longer encouraged to ask who can govern the country best, but who can best improve their personal position within the system.
I have personally known individuals who spent years condemning the direction the country was taking because their businesses were suffering, only to later abandon those same businesses once they were offered more comfortable and equally, if not more lucrative, roles within public entities. I have heard businessmen privately admit their discomfort while justifying their partisan loyalty because, in their own words, “they have the money and they are throwing work at me.” In another instance, an elderly man refused to criticise the government because promises of medical assistance for his disabled nephew had to be safeguarded at all costs.
These are not isolated contradictions of character but symptoms of a wider system in which political proximity increasingly outvalues human capacity. The state has become the principal guarantor of opportunity, and loyalty has acquired a literal economic value. On closer inspection, this system actively benefits from keeping sections of the population politically dependent. Modest allowances and benefits, small in macroeconomic terms, but deeply significant to a household, are used to cultivate a loyalty rooted in gratitude and fear of loss. Why struggle to build genuine expertise when political alignment is the fastest route to contracts, appointments, or institutional advancement? Political swings in Malta are therefore rarely about conviction; they are about convenience.
One begins to wonder whether the Nationalist Party’s most radical contribution to Maltese democracy would be to temporarily withdraw from the political stage altogether, not as surrender, but as disruption.
This is why another defeat for the Nationalist Party would carry significance far beyond the immediate electoral result. As Bondì observed, it would extend more than a decade of electoral failure despite successive leadership changes. But at this stage, the opposition does not require another leadership replacement. It demands a direct confrontation with the hypnotic allure of transactional politics itself. The swinging carrot must stop.
One begins to wonder whether the Nationalist Party’s most radical contribution to Maltese democracy would be to temporarily withdraw from the political stage altogether, not as surrender, but as disruption. Malta may need to confront a reality it has avoided for decades: what happens when a nation begins believing that no genuine alternative is necessary?
By removing one side of our rigid, culturally inherited two-party structure, we might finally create the space that Maltese politics desperately lacks: a space for genuine civic activism of the masses, ideological renewal, and movements built around coherent philosophies rather than electoral mechanics.
There was once a period when political parties cultivated intellectual figures who contributed to broader visions of society beyond electoral strategy. Thinkers such as Peter Serracino Inglott and Oliver Friggieri represented an era in which politics were guided with questions of ethics, language, identity and national purpose. Over time, however, that intellectual dimension faded beneath a broader culture shaped increasingly by consumerism. The prosperity our post-war grandparents longed for has, ironically, become our curse.
Today, the two dominant parties resemble rival corporate brands. Campaigns are staged as spectacles of visibility, designed to capture attention rather than shape civic consciousness. Aspiration and access are sold as products, while policy becomes little more than the wrapping paper.
This mentality has inevitably seeped into public institutions and media. Political journalism increasingly frames debate as a ledger of entitlements: Can you guarantee this allowance? How much cash will you provide? Polling, projections, and statistical forecasting dominate coverage, transforming democratic discourse into a marketplace driven by the best paid strategic alienation.
This culture did not emerge overnight but intensified during the political era shaped by Joseph Muscat, when economic growth was elevated into the supreme moral justification of governance itself. Prosperity became not merely a policy objective, but the principal defence against criticism.
… slogans like l-aqwa żmien, l-aqwa fl-Ewropa, best in class, inflate egos of the islanders while quietly widening social gaps.
Within that framework, foreign labour increasingly came to be discussed almost exclusively through the language of utility and economic convenience. Muscat himself famously argued that Malta had effectively reversed its historical colonial dynamic: whereas Maltese people once served their colonisers, today foreigners “iseftrulna” (serve us), carrying out tasks locals no longer wish to perform.
The issue is not migration itself, but the hierarchy of values around the economic model, a system where constant expansion, spectacle, and slogans like l-aqwa żmien, l-aqwa fl-Ewropa, best in class, inflate egos of the islanders while quietly widening social gaps. Even political reconciliation is now framed transactionally. Prime Minister Robert Abela’s recent invitation for those who felt hurt by the government to “reach out” unintentionally revealed how politics is currently understood: as a negotiable relationship between grievance, compensation, and a vote.
When politics is reduced to exchange, citizenship itself degrades. Voters seek advantage rather than representation, loyalty becomes entirely conditional, and democracy devolves into a sophisticated exercise in perception management.
This is why ideas like limiting governments to a strict ten-year maximum are gaining plausibility. Not because they are perfect solutions, but because prolonged continuity risks turning patronage into normality and governance into permanent electoral management.
If Malta is to honour the spirit of its independence, it urgently needs a revival of political imagination: fewer spectacles and transactional promises, and more intellectual courage, civic seriousness and long-term vision. Parties should be judged on the coherence of their ideas not the scale of their giveaways.
Elections should be moments of national reckoning, not marketplaces of expectation or political pop concerts. Democracy is not The X Factor. If Malta is to rediscover what kind of country it wishes to become, it must first disrupt the comfort of transactional politics and confront the stagnation created by entrenched monopolies.
