Borg & Delia’s Café Cordina Truce: Can This Handshake Heal the PN?

Borg, Delia hold first meeting after PN election: a coffee, a handshake, and the ghost of 2017

Valletta’s Café Cordina was still perfumed with pastizzi steam yesterday morning when Bernard Grech’s two erstwhile rivals met for the first time since Saturday’s bruising Nationalist Party leadership contest. Adrian Delia, the ousted leader who refuses to leave Parliament, arrived first, collar open, sunglasses still on. Alex Borg, the dentist-turned-MP who came second with 46 % of the delegate vote, walked in ten minutes later, greeted by a ripple of applause from a table of elderly men playing briscola.

They shook hands—twice, Maltese style—then ordered two coffees and a bottle of Kinnie to share. Within minutes, the photos were on Facebook: two men who had spent months calling each other “clueless” and “divisive” now leaning across a small marble table like old university friends. The caption, posted simultaneously on both accounts, read: “National interest comes before personal ambition. #GħaqdaNazzjonali.”

For PN lifers, the image was both comforting and surreal. The party’s headquarters, a stone’s throw away on Triq Herbert Ganado, has been a battlefield since 2017; activists still speak of “the night the counting hall cried” when Delia scraped through the first confidence vote only to be toppled three years later. Yesterday’s cordiality, therefore, felt like a cultural reset—less Game of Thrones, more festa committee truce.

Yet beneath the surface, the stakes are high. With local council and European Parliament elections looming, the PN cannot afford another fratricidal summer. Labour’s lead in the polls may have narrowed to eight points, but Robert Abela is already campaigning on stability: “While they argue, we deliver,” he told supporters in Żejtun on Sunday. Borg and Delia know that every split-screen headline risks pushing floaters back to the Labour fold.

Inside the PN, district clubs are watching for signals. In the traditionalist strongholds of Mosta and Rabat, Delia’s rustic, Battistino-inflected rhetoric still resonates; in the coastal, professional belt stretching from Sliema to Swieqi, Borg’s technocratic pitch plays better. One senior official admitted: “We need both tribes. Without Delia’s South, we lose three seats. Without Borg’s North, we lose the media war.”

The meeting, described by insiders as “cordial but blunt,” lasted 42 minutes. Delia reportedly offered to campaign in the South—his native Żurrieq included—provided Borg’s team stops briefing against him in the press. Borg, in turn, asked Delia to rein in Facebook commentators who label him “Grech’s puppet.” They parted with a selfie outside the Grandmaster’s Palace, the black-and-white PN flag fluttering above them like a referee’s final whistle.

Culturally, the rapprochement taps into Malta’s deep festa instinct: when the band marches, rival każini shelve their grievances and carry the saint together. Older voters recall how Eddie Fenech Adami and Guido de Marco buried the hatchet in 1987, sealing it with a public mass at Floriana parish. Younger activists, weaned on TikTok, want the same narrative speed: forgive, forget, forward.

Community impact is already visible. In Qormi, the PN youth section cancelled a planned “Truth about Delia” podcast; in Gozo, Victoria’s club circulated a joint statement praising “maturity.” Even the party’s cantankerous Facebook group “PN Supporters” went quiet for three whole hours—an island record.

Still, sceptics warn that a single coffee cannot erase years of toxic WhatsApp leaks. “We’ve seen this movie before,” one PN councillor told Hot Malta. “They smile today, they leak tomorrow.” The real test will come when candidate lists are published: will Delia’s loyalists accept Borg’s chosen coordinators? Will Borg’s reformers stomach Delia’s populist sound-bites?

For now, Valletta’s pigeons have settled back on the Triton Fountain, undisturbed by political earthquakes. Borg headed to Parliament for a health committee; Delia drove to his Birkirkara law office, waving at tourists who recognised him from Netflix’s “The Malta Files.” Both men know the next election is 18 months away—plenty of time for another pastizz to crumble.

But if yesterday’s handshake holds, Malta’s opposition might just trade introspection for inspiration. In a country where politics is the national sport, the greatest victory is sometimes a draw.