Borg & Business: New PN Leader Cooks Up ‘Malta Compact’ With Chamber in Pastry-Powered Peace Talk

Alex Borg finds common ground with Malta Chamber in first meeting as PN leader
By Hot Malta Newsroom | 09:45 • 18 June 2025

Floriana’s historic Palazzo Ferreria was buzzing long before 8 a.m. yesterday, as Pastizzi Express scooters lined the pavement and suited CEOs queued alongside shop-floor stewards. They were all there for the same reason: to witness newly-minted Nationalist leader Alex Borg break political bread with the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry—an institution older than self-rule itself and still the unofficial gatekeeper of Malta’s economic pulse.

Inside the gilded council chamber, where British governors once rubber-stamped wartime rations, Borg swapped the partisan megaphone for a policy dossier. “Today we speak as Maltese first, politicians second,” he told Chamber President Marisa Xuereb, earning the first of several spontaneous applause breaks. It was a line crafted for the moment, but also a nod to a cultural truth every islander understands: when the sea is rising and the cranes are still swinging, ideology takes second place to survival.

Xuereb, blunt as ever, opened with a three-point ultimatum: slash electricity tariffs for SMEs, fix the skills drain that is bleeding Gozitan industry, and “for heaven’s sake give us a planning regime that doesn’t change with the direction of the wind.” Borg, whose leadership pitch hinged on “competence over conflict,” responded with what he called a “Malta Compact”—a 180-day roadmap co-written with the Chamber’s policy unit. Key pledges include a €50 million micro-innovation fund modelled on Singapore’s SME Go-Digital scheme, a fast-track visa for third-country technicians, and—cheered loudest by the balcony packed with family-business scions—an independent regulatory tribunal for planning appeals, insulated from ministerial phone calls.

The symbolism wasn’t lost on observers. Since 1887 the Chamber has acted as the archipelago’s economic compass, steering policy from the dockyard strikes of the 1950s to the igaming gold-rush of the 2010s. For a PN leader, whose party still carries the baggage of 2013’s divorce from big-business trust, yesterday’s meeting was less photo-op than pilgrimage. “Borg knows he must re-weld the link between Sliema tech founders and the party of Fenech Adami if he ever hopes to dent Labour’s 40,000-vote armour,” remarked University of Malta political sociologist Dr. Ritienne Aquilina.

Yet the real winners may be the villages whose bakeries and aluminium workshops rarely make the headlines. Take Pierre Cassar from Qormi, third-generation owner of Cassar Engineering. “We pay the same industrial tariff as the massive Italian-owned pharma plant down the road,” he fumed. “If Borg and Xuereb can level that playing field, my electricity bill drops by €14,000 a year—enough to hire two apprentices from the MCAST course my son just finished.” Stories like Cassar’s explain why the Chamber livestream crashed twice: 12,000 simultaneous viewers, a record for a weekday policy breakfast.

Still, scepticism lingers. Labour’s shadow economy spokesperson, Clyde Caruana, was quick to tweet a 2019 video of Borg voting against a Chamber-backed renewable-energy rebate, labelling the encounter “a summer fling, not a marriage”. Green NGO Friends of the Earth warned that any SME fund must exclude “hotel expansions masquerading as innovation”. And the GWU, whose members weld the ships and serve the coffees that keep GDP humming, demanded a seat at the next roundtable. “Common ground can’t be confined to air-conditioned palaces,” union leader Josef Bugeja cautioned.

For now, though, the vibe is cautiously Maltese—equal parts pragmatism and pastizzi. As delegates spilled onto Republic Street, Borg and Xuereb shared a takeaway tray of ricotta parcels from a nearby kiosk, a choreographed but effective olive branch to the small vendors both sides claim to champion. Whether the compact survives September’s budget vote remains to be seen, but the imagery is already seared into the national narrative: the new opposition leader breaking pastry, not promises, with the custodians of Malta’s commercial soul.

Conclusion: In a country where politics often feels like a festa firework—loud, colourful and quickly forgotten—yesterday’s meeting offered something rarer: the scent of policy bread actually rising. If the Malta Compact delivers even half its vows, Borg will have turned a breakfast handshake into a blueprint for post-partisan prosperity. For the rest of us, it’s a reminder that when the stakes are measured in kilowatt hours and apprentice wages, the most Maltese thing of all is to find common ground before the coffee gets cold.