Alex Borg’s 11-Month Gamble: Can a TikTok Garage Campaign Smash Malta’s Two-Party Wall?

Watch: Alex Borg confident he can win election in less than a year
By Hot Malta Staff | 7 min read

“Give me eleven months, a rented Qormi garage and a WhatsApp group that never sleeps, and I’ll give you a seat in Parliament.”
That’s the swaggering promise Alex Borg served up last night in a 90-second TikTok that has already racked up 87 000 views, 4 200 shares and one delighted nonna waving a pastizz in the background.

For anyone who blinked and missed the rise of Malta’s most unconventional candidate, Borg is the 29-year-old Żabbar-born mechanical engineer who traded a cushy job in aviation maintenance for a second-hand Škoda and a pocket-full of flyers. No party colours. No media-buy budget. Just a GoPro, a ring-light and a catch-phrase that sounds like it was stolen from a 1987 Labour youth rally: “Mhux se jkollna dar-ġdida politics, se jkollna politics dar-ġdida.” (We won’t just get new politics; we’ll get politics a new home.)

The clip, filmed on the Gżira seafront at golden hour, shows Borg jogging backwards while camera-steady, listing the things he says “real people” care about: mushrooming rents, pavements you can push a pram on, buses that turn up before you’ve memorised the entire Spotify top 50. Then the kicker: “If we hit 4 000 signatures in every district before next Easter, I guarantee we take two seats. Not one. Two.”

Malta has heard brash before. But Borg’s timing is exquisite. The country is still dizzy from the latest revolving-door scandal, a cost-of-living tsunami, and Eurostat figures that show we work longer hours than Germans but earn 40 % less. In cafés from Marsa to Mellieħa, the same sentence keeps cropping up: “I’m not apathetic; I’m exhausted.” That exhaustion is Borg’s rocket fuel.

“He speaks like us, not above us,” says 63-year-old Ġorġina Farrugia, who runs a kiosk in Valletta and has never voted anything but PN. “I watched the video on my grandson’s phone. By the end I was clapping like we’d won the Eurovision.”

What makes the insurgency deliciously Maltese is the cultural scaffolding. Borg’s campaign HQ is literally a converted rabbit-warren garage—complete with the obligatory shrine to the Virgin and a fridge that only stocks Kinnie and ħobż biż-żejt. Volunteers sign up through a Facebook group called “Borg ta’ Malta, mhux Borg ta’ Brussels”. On weekends they hand out imqaret at bus stops and ask for feedback, not votes. The choreography is part Festa fireworks, part parish bingo night, and it is working.

University psephologist Dr. Maria Camilleri points out that Malta’s 65-seat legislature has never seen an independent elected under the age of 40. “The electoral system is engineered for duopoly,” she explains. “But the maths buckles if turnout in the 18-34 bracket jumps by just 7 %. Borg’s digital micro-targeting is doing what AD did with megaphones in 1989—only faster, cheaper and with better memes.”

Not everyone is cheering. Labour’s deputy leader for strategy, asked for comment, laughed off the “Instagram revolution” as “a summer fling that will melt faster than a king’s ring in August”. The PN’s spokesperson was harsher, warning that “vote-splitting risks handing districts to the status quo”. Yet even veteran canvassers admit the ground is shifting. In the last week, 1 300 voters—half of them women under 35—have requested the form that lets them switch districts, a bureaucratic wink that insiders read as tactical repositioning for Borg.

The social ripple is impossible to ignore. At a time when village band clubs debate whether to stream marches on Twitch, Borg’s livestreams feel like the natural evolution of the Maltese talent for talking. His comment sections are raw, multilingual town-halls: English policy nerds, Maltese grandmothers, Somali delivery riders comparing petrol prices. One user posts a photo of a pothole; within 24 hours someone has asphalted it and stuck a QR code linking to the electoral commission. Call it DIY politics, Maltese-style.

Whether the bravado translates into ballots will depend on winter, when carnival enthusiasm fades and party machines wheel out the free wine festivals. But something irreversible has already happened: a generation that grew up watching Joseph Muscat’s resignation on TikTok now believes Parliament is a place you can walk into without a sponsorship deal.

As the video ends, Borg leans into the lens, waves a miniature Maltese flag no bigger than a cigarette packet and whispers, “Don’t vote for me because I’m perfect. Vote because you’re bored of being disappointed.”
In a country where politics has long felt like a festa firework—loud, colourful, ultimately someone else’s mess—the idea that boredom itself could be a ballot box revolution might just be the most Maltese thing to happen since someone first put peas in a ricotta pastizz. And if eleven months from now Alex Borg is sworn in on a copy of the Constitution clutched in a garage-loaned glove, don’t say he didn’t warn you. He already told the internet: “Il-garaxx sejjer jirbaħ.” The garage is going to win.