Like any other politician or journalist, I have been following Alex Borg and Adrian Delia over the past few days to understand what they plan to do if elected leader of the Nationalist Party. Some polls state that Alex Borg is the likely candidate to win the leadership bid. This prospect should put him under a lot of scrutiny.
I tried to forget everything that Alex Borg did and say before his leadership in order to grasp a more objective and clear perspective of him although he kept doubling-down on his previous statements and positions.
What is particularly very striking of Alex Borg is that he has formed all of his political beliefs and convictions on local politics in total detachment to the political crisis of 2019. Alex Borg’s political beliefs have been molded exclusively from his Gozitan political base. This is how fundamentally Alex Borg is consolidating Labour’s position and the normative state it tried to impose after the 2019 political crisis. Alex Borg is doing politics as if 2019 didn’t happen and that we have to move on from the crisis by ignoring it altogether. In fact, Alex Borg’s first foray into political controversy was his clash with Repubblika. We just need to listen to what he says in order to understand him.
Alex Borg admires Donald Trump and dislikes “woke” and is aligning himself with the latest trend of far-right politics. His disregard for the rule of law is both genuine and ideological: he doesn’t need to be paid by contractors to believe the things he says. Yet this makes no real difference, because in his world there is nothing wrong with advocating, even deceptively, for the largest private lobbies in politics, which wield significant influence over government policy. In Alex Borg’s world, might is right, and the construction lobby’s sway over government through donations is fair game. He not only believes in this system but actively supports the same projects that this system delivers under a Labour government.
Alex Borg is genuinely aligned with Labour’s vision of Malta and politics. Yet, if he doesn’t offer anything radically distinct from Labour what’s the point of supporting him? In stark difference to the current line of politicians running the country he’s surely much less inexperienced having managed nothing in his life, yet he wants to candidate himself to govern the whole country. At least Adrian Delia had the privilege to be able to say that he managed a football club during the first time he put his leadership bid for the Nationalist Party.
Really, Alex Borg is offering nothing new, and he gives very little incentive to non-PN voters who want to see a change in government. At this stage, even Eve Borg Bonello would have been a much better prospective candidate, as she is not much different from him, with the key distinction that she was actually part of the 2019 protest movements and had her views shaped by those experiences.
On the other hand, Adrian Delia does offer some incentives to vote for the PN under his prospective leadership. His reconciliation with Jason Azzopardi, together with his increasingly contrarian positions against the Labour government, has helped him successfully project himself as a credible alternative and opposition politician. This means that potentially, Adrian Delia is projecting himself as an ideal candidate to those who want to vote against the Labour government.
I have no doubt that Alex Borg will think of this article as another “attack against him”. He has consistently displayed a strong aversion to criticism, often portraying it as a personal attack: this is mostly not true. This tendency of him likely stems from immaturity and inexperience, and it underscores the obvious reality that he is not suited to govern an entire country. Ultimately, his immaturity is also why he has the arrogance and naivety to walk into politics and present a political vision for the country as if 2019 was just a figment of our imagination. Instead of ruminating about complex crisis we are to patch up our problems with Labour like tax-incentives for property purchases. The alienation from reality is glaring and probably dangerous.
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