Gozo Deserves Better: Malta’s Sister Island Needs Leaders Beyond Political Convenience
**Gozo Deserves Leaders Who Act Not Out of Political Convenience**
Gozo, Malta’s sister island, has long carried the quiet dignity of being the nation’s rural soul. While Malta races ahead with high-rise towers and sprawling developments, Gozo remains tethered to its terraced fields, baroque churches, and a rhythm of life that moves with the seasons rather than the stock market. Yet this identity—cherished by Gozitans and envied by Maltese weekenders—is being quietly eroded by decisions that feel less like stewardship and more like political expediency.
The latest flashpoint is the proposed expansion of the Ċirkewwa ferry terminal, a project that would see more concrete poured into the channel that separates the islands, ostensibly to ease congestion during peak season. On paper, it’s infrastructure. In practice, it’s a metaphor: a widening gulf between Gozo’s needs and the mainland’s appetite for quick fixes. Gozitan mayors, who learned of the plan through a leaked environmental impact assessment, have called it “another ambush,” echoing the anger that greeted the 2021 db Group high-rise proposal in Marsalforn. That project, too, was rammed through with minimal consultation, only to be shelved after a storm of protest. The pattern is exhausting: headline, outrage, shrug, repeat.
What stings most is the condescension. Gozo is routinely treated as a political toy, useful for photo-ops during village festas and disposable when the cameras leave. During the last election campaign, both major parties promised a “permanent link” to Malta—either bridge or tunnel—without explaining how either would preserve Gozo’s character or economy. The proposals vanished from manifestos the morning after the vote, like confetti swept from the church steps. Meanwhile, the island’s only public hospital remains half-built, its unfinished wards a daily reminder that promises here have a half-life shorter than a qassata on a school outing.
The cultural cost is measurable. Young Gozitans leave at twice the national average, lured by Malta’s wider job market and repelled by an island where rental prices have spiked 40 % since 2018, driven by Airbnb conversions subsidised with public grants. In Xlendi, once a fishing hamlet where elders played cards under tamarisk trees, souvenir shops now sell inflatable unicorns to day-trippers who never spend the night. The village’s patron saint, celebrated in a week-long festa that used to bankroll the parish choir, has been sponsored for the last three years by a Paceville casino chain. The band still marches, but the trumpet valves are rented.
Gozitans are not naïve; they understand tourism keeps the lights on. What they reject is the false choice presented by consecutive governments: either you accept over-development or you accept decline. There is a third way, and it starts with listening. When the Ministry for Gozo—an institution whose very name sounds like an afterthought—consulted farmers about abandoned agricultural land, it discovered 200 hectares that could be revived with modest irrigation upgrades and co-op marketing. The pilot scheme, quietly launched in 2022, has already created 60 full-time jobs supplying vegetables to Malta’s farm-to-table restaurants. None of the farmers were invited to the press conference; the minister posed instead with a celebrity chef who had never set foot in Gozo before the shoot.
Leadership, real leadership, would champion such initiatives without needing a camera. It would recognise that Gozo’s competitive advantage is precisely what cannot be replicated: silence, darkness, stone that has weathered sieges and survived empires. It would protect that advantage with the same zeal Malta shows for attracting blockchain pirates. Instead, we get tactical silence when cruise ships anchor unannounced in the Mgarr harbour, their engines idling through the night, or when planning permits are issued in clusters just before administrative boards dissolve for summer recess.
The upcoming local council elections offer a rare chance to interrupt the cycle. A new crop of independents—teachers, farmers, and dive-shop owners—is collecting signatures to contest every Gozitan locality. Their manifestos read like love letters: pedestrian zones in Rabat’s narrow lanes, night-time ferry services for shift workers, a moratorium on new hotel beds until occupancy rates top 80 %. They lack party machinery but possess something stronger: credibility earned in village committees and football clubs, the invisible mortar of Gozitan life.
Mainland political kingpins dismiss them as “single-issue,” a label that reveals more about the speaker than the spoken of. Gozo is not a single issue; it is a living community whose survival enriches the entire nation. When Gozitans thrive, Malta inherits an open-air classroom where children learn that prosperity need not equal concrete. Lose that, and we are all poorer, whatever the GDP graphs claim.
The choice, ultimately, is not Gozo’s alone. Every Maltese voter who packs a car for a weekend ramble, every student who scribbles essays overlooking the Citadel, every family that still prefers Nadur strawberries to imported blueberries has a stake in demanding leaders who treat Gozo as a homeland, not a hashtag. Political convenience is a short road; the view never changes. Gozo deserves better—and so do we.
