Why I Stand with Alex Borg: The Maltese Activist Reuniting Villages, Band Clubs and a Nation

Why I stand with Alex Borg
By A Malta-based correspondent for Hot Malta

The first time I met Alex Borg was not in the glossy lobby of some Valletta co-working hub, but under the flickering yellow bulb of a traditional Maltese kiosk in Birkirkara, where the smell of ftira and kinnie mingled with the late-summer dust. He was handing out flyers that read “Kull vuci għandha valur” – every voice has value – a slogan that has since become shorthand for a grassroots movement shaking Malta’s political and social bedrock. Three years on, as the island wrestles with rapid construction, widening wealth gaps, and a citizenship-for-cash debate that refuses to die, I stand with Alex Borg not because he is flawless, but because he is the first public figure in a generation to speak directly to the Maltese soul without slipping into the partisan barbed wire that usually divides us.

Local context: a nation at the crossroads
Malta’s skyline has changed faster than our dialects. Tower cranes hover over Sliema like migratory storks, and every second WhatsApp group is a referendum on whether Paceville should be razed or rebranded. Into this maelstrom stepped Alex Borg, a 34-year-old former band club president turned community activist, who noticed that while our GDP was ballooning, so were the queues at Caritas food banks. His campaign began modestly: open-air town-hall meetings in village squares where elderly fishermen sat next to Erasmus students, debating everything from green roofs to overpriced rents. The format was revolutionary precisely because it was old-school – a throwback to the kazini debates our grandparents held beneath photos of Christ the Worker and Dun Ġorġ Preca.

Cultural significance: more than a hashtag
What makes Alex resonate is his fluency in Maltese nuance. He quotes Dun Karm as effortlessly as he cites EU directives, and he can segue from a discussion on affordable housing to the symbolism of the Maltese cross without sounding rehearsed. When he speaks, you hear the brass bands of village festi and the distant echo of 1987’s Independence rock concerts. His message – that prosperity must be measured in dignity, not just euros – taps into a cultural memory of shared scarcity: the post-war ration books, the 1950s emigration ships, the 1980s political violence. By framing present challenges as a collective moral test, he has turned policy debates into campfire stories of who we want to be.

Community impact: from pixels to parish
The tangible results are impossible to ignore. After Alex’s petition against the proposed Gżira yacht marina garnered 18,000 signatures in four days, the Planning Authority was forced back to the drawing board. In Qormi, residents used his “crowd-mapping” toolkit to document illegal dumping sites; within weeks, the local council installed CCTV and saw fly-tipping drop by 42%. Even the band clubs – those fiercely competitive hubs of Maltese identity – have found common cause: Marsa’s St Joseph’s and Ħamrun’s St Cajetan’s, historic rivals, co-hosted a benefit concert to fund Alex’s rent-relief fund for evicted tenants. The ripple effects are social as well as civic; for the first time in years, my teenage cousin in Żejtun knows the names of her neighbours and is learning guitar chords from a retired dockworker twice her age.

The personal is political
Critics dismiss Alex as “naïve” or “too online”, but that misses the point. His genius lies in merging Malta’s analogue heart with digital muscle. Yes, his Instagram is slick, but the captions are in Maltese, English, and, increasingly, Arabic, reflecting the new multicultural reality of St Paul’s Bay. When trolls accused him of being a “foreign-funded socialist”, he live-streamed from his nanna’s kitchen in Siġġiewi, frying qassatat while explaining EU cohesion funds in the same breath he used to thank his grandmother for teaching him resilience. That authenticity is kryptonite to cynics.

Conclusion: a future we can hum along to
Standing with Alex Borg is not about joining a cult of personality; it is about choosing the Malta that still sings in the dark on village feast nights, that still shares bread when the power cuts out, that still believes the sea is wide enough for all our boats. In an age of performative outrage and algorithmic anger, he offers an older recipe: listen first, argue second, leave no one behind. As the bells of St John’s Co-Cathedral tolled midnight last Friday, I walked past Republic Street’s new boutiques and overheard two elderly men arguing, loudly and laughingly, about Alex’s latest rent-cap proposal. One of them ended the debate with a line I’ll never forget: “Mela, if we lose our neighbours, we lose our stories. And what’s a village without stories?” Exactly. That is why I stand with Alex Borg – because he is helping us write a story worth passing on.