Alex Borg unveils new CEO and carnival-savvy campaign manager in bold Maltese political shake-up

Alex Borg announces new party CEO, campaign manager amid key appointments
by Hot Malta Newsroom | 09 June 2025, 07:30

Valletta – In a sun-drenched courtyard just off Strait Street, Alex Borg, the 41-year-old leader of Malta’s newest political movement, Żewġ Qalbna (Two Hearts), unveiled the team he says will “re-wire” the island’s politics before the next general election. Flanked by a vintage Maltese balcony dripping with bougainvillea, Borg introduced lawyer-turned-tech-entrepreneur Ramona Zahra as CEO and veteran carnival organiser Steve ‘Il-Bibi’ Camilleri as national campaign manager. The appointments—broadcast live on TikTok to 14,000 simultaneous viewers—signal a deliberate shift away from traditional party hierarchies toward a grassroots, festival-style mobilisation that borrows as much from village festa logistics as it does from Silicon Valley playbooks.

Zahra, 36, who cut her teeth negotiating AI-compliance contracts in Berlin, becomes the first woman to helm a Maltese party’s back-office operations. “I left a seven-figure salary because I was tired of explaining Malta to foreigners who still think we’re a tax-haven meme,” she told Hot Malta, moments after Borg draped a ħamallu-style beaded necklace over her blazer—a tongue-in-cheek nod to critics who deride the movement as “too working-class for Brussels.” Her brief: build a digital-first infrastructure that can register voters at beach kiosks and parish-hall bingo nights alike, mirroring the hybrid online-offline commerce that Maltese small businesses perfected during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Camilleri, 58, is meanwhile tasked with translating the explosive energy of the Nadur carnival—where he once engineered a 14-metre papier-mâché Jeff Bezos riding a drone—into door-to-door traction. “Every Maltese festa has a ġostra, a greasy pole over water,” he grinned, waving a colour-coded map of electoral districts painted like village feast banners. “We’re turning the campaign trail into one big ġostra: slippery, public, impossible to ignore.” Insiders say Camilleri has already recruited 200 ‘kazin captains’, each responsible for a single band club, to host policy sing-alongs over ftira and Cisk, reviving the 1970s Labour-Club model but swapping ideological hymns for Spotify playlists that remix Maltese folk with trap.

The appointments come at a pivotal moment. With Robert Abela’s Labour riding high in the polls but bruised by inflation headlines, and Bernard Grech’s Nationalists still wrestling with internal factions, Żewġ Qalbna has crept to 18% in a June MaltaToday survey—double its score in January. Borg insists he is not merely fishing protest votes. “We’re the first party founded after the pandemic, by people who queued for vaccines and Deliveroo at the same time,” he said, gesturing to a crowd that included Gozitan cheesemakers, Esports influencers and an 82-year-old former dockyard welder wearing a Żewġ Qalbna trucker cap. The demographic cocktail is deliberate: Malta’s median age is 42, but its Parliament still averages 58. Borg wants to close that gap without alienating pensioners who remember Mintoff’s rent laws.

Local analysts see cultural significance beyond numbers. “Appointing a carnival strategist is pure Maltese semiotics,” says Dr Maria Pace, anthropologist at the University of Malta. “We resolve conflict through pageantry—whether it’s saint statues or political banners. Camilleri understands that collective memory lives in the street, not on Facebook.” Others warn the festive model risks trivialising policy. “Climate adaptation isn’t a confetti cannon,” cautioned blogger Mark Ciangura, himself a former PN activist. Yet even critics concede the move reframes citizenship as spectacle, a tradition that dates back to the Knights’ victory regattas.

In the crowd, 19-year-old Sliema student Kayleigh Saliba clutched a biodegradable placard reading “My first vote, my first festa.” She told Hot Malta she had never attended a political event before Borg’s team invited her via a Discord server dedicated to Maltese indie music. “They promised zero plastic confetti and a QR code that plants a tree every time you share their manifesto,” she laughed. Whether digital trees translate into ballots remains to be seen, but the symbolism is potent: a generation raised on Lovin Malta memes is now rewriting the rulebook, one carnival float at a time.

As the press conference ended, Borg led supporters in a spontaneous kumittiva, the traditional Maltese circle dance, outside the old Stock Exchange. Police halted traffic for five minutes while tourists filmed the scene, perhaps unaware they were witnessing the rehearsal of a campaign that could reshape Europe’s smallest member state. In Malta, politics has always been a performance; Borg’s gamble is that the next act will be streamed, shared and danced to a beat no party has quite mastered—yet.