Malta’s Letters to the Editor Ignite Policy U-Turns, Memes and #KarmensToast Movement

Letters to the editor – September 27, 2025
By Hot Malta Staff

Valletta’s 17th-century printing press would have clattered through the night to keep up with the flood of ink-stained opinion that landed on the Times of Malta’s doorstep this week. By Friday morning, editor-in-chief Herman Grech’s team had whittled 312 submissions down to the 23 that now dominate café conversation from Sliema’s seafront to Gozo’s village squares. In a country where the population is smaller than most European football stadiums, the letters page is less a quaint tradition and more the nation’s WhatsApp group—only with better grammar and the permanent public record to keep grudges alive for decades.

This week’s crop carries the scent of late-summer figs and the tension of an island in transition. Top of the pile: a blistering epistle from 82-year-old Ħamrun widow Karmen Bugeja, who calculated that the new €4.50 ferry fare to Sicily equals three hours of her pension. “I survived the 1981 political crisis on toast and tea,” she writes. “Now I can’t even afford the toast.” Her letter has been shared 14,000 times on Facebook, spawning the hashtag #KarmensToast and prompting Economy Minister Clyde Caruana to promise a “silver sailor” discount scheme within 48 hours. When a single sheet of newsprint can shift policy before the ink dries, you understand why Maltese grandparents still clip columns for their wallets.

Bugeja’s cri de coeur is balanced by a cheeky salvo from 19-year-old MCAST student Nathan Pace, who demands that MPs swap their gleaming Toyota Land Cruisers for e-scooters “so they can feel every pothole they’ve promised to fix since Noah moored here.” The juxtaposition—octogenarian austerity meets Gen-Z sarcasm—perfectly captures the Maltese talent for arguing across generations without ever leaving the kitchen table. Pace’s letter ends with a Maltese proverb: “Min ma jaħdimx ma jiekolx, u min ma jiekolx jibgħat ittra lill-gazzetta.” (He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat, and he who doesn’t eat writes to the paper.)

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Maria Azzopardi explains that the islands’ letter-writing addiction predates British colonial rule. “In 1839, Governor Henry Bouverie complained that every Maltese farmer fancied himself a pamphleteer,” she laughs. “The difference now is that the audience is global.” Indeed, this week’s edition ricocheted through diaspora chat groups in Melbourne and Toronto, where expats debate whether the proposed 12-storey Mrieħel tower will finally obscure their childhood view of the Mdina bastions on Google Earth.

Not every contribution is sepia-tinged. A joint letter signed by 43 Gozitan chefs warns that the “rabbit shortage” is no longer a joke; fenek prices have jumped 28 % since Italian tourists discovered the joy of stuffat. The chefs propose a temporary hunting moratorium and a “rabbit futures” market—an idea so Maltese it could only hatch on an island where commodity trading still involves your cousin’s garage freezer.

Perhaps the most moving entry comes from 11-year-old Sliema twins Kaylee and Kyle Micallef, who enclose a crayon drawing of a turtle entangled in a disposable mask. Their class wrote to the editor after finding 127 masks during a single beach clean-up at Għajn Tuffieħa. “Dear Adults,” the letter begins, “if you can remember to charge your phone, you can remember to bin your mask.” The paper printed the drawing in full colour, and by Saturday morning the image was silk-screened onto tote bags selling for €8 outside the Valletta market, proceeds going to Nature Trust. In true Maltese fashion, the vendor is the twins’ Uncle Raymond, who admits margins are slim “but the lecture I get from my sister if I profit off her kids is not worth it.”

Letters pages elsewhere may be withering, but in Malta they remain the archipelago’s original social network—an analog Reddit where everyone knows your nanna and anonymity is impossible because the postman recognises handwriting. As the church bells rang noon over Floriana, pensioners folded the newspaper into the seats of their bicycles and cycled home, already composing tomorrow’s rebuttals in their heads. Somewhere, a new arrival from northern Europe is Googling “How to get published in Malta,” unaware that the only requirement is a strong opinion and the patience to wait for the cockatoos to stop screeching long enough to finish a sentence. On this rock, democracy still begins with a stamp and ends with a pastizz crumb on the editor’s desk.