Alex Borg’s Shadow Cabinet Shake-Up: Meet the Young Guns Battling Labour’s ‘Locomotive’

Alex Borg begins shadow cabinet reshuffle
By Hot Malta Newsroom | 09:42 • 24 June 2025

Valletta’s early-summer haze had barely lifted on Monday when Alex Borg, the Nationalist Party’s freshly re-elected leader, strode out of the doors of the Auberge d’Aragon and announced the first shake-up of his shadow cabinet. In a seven-minute press conference delivered in Maltese, English and a splash of Italian—for the benefit of the cruise-liner crowd snapping selfies nearby—Borg signalled that the opposition is done playing gentle catch-up with Labour’s “locomotive”, as he colourfully described Robert Abela’s administration.

The headline moves are bold, unmistakably Maltese and already fuelling café debate from Birkirkara’s village core to the fishing boats of Marsaxlokk. Ivan Castillo, the 34-year-old lawyer who shot to TikTok fame during the European election campaign, leaps from tourism spokesman to shadow minister for finance and “the digital economy”—a new portfolio that folds blockchain, AI and remote gaming into one brief. Meanwhile, long-standing MP Claudette Buttigieg swaps the health brief for a beefed-up family and social solidarity role, a nod to the greying electorate that still decides elections over Sunday lunch.

Borg’s calculation is as cultural as it is political. Malta may be the EU’s smallest state, but family networks run deeper than the Blue Lagoon. By placing children’s rights, carers’ pensions and the cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) under one experienced communicator, Borg is betting that kitchen-table economics will matter more than the fireworks of Panama-papers retrospectives.

Still, the most gossip-generating appointment is arguably that of Rebecca Buttigieg (no relation to Claudette), the 29-year-old Sliema councillor who becomes shadow minister for transport, infrastructure and—wait for it—“road decorum”. The phrase drew titters from the press pack, yet it speaks to a very Maltese frustration: 425,000 vehicles on 316 square kilometres of rock. After last week’s viral clip of a delivery van wedged in a narrow Valletta street, Borg knows that gridlock is emotional, not just logistical. Rebecca’s brief will include pushing government to fast-track the long-promised metro feasibility study and to trial a ferry link between Grand Harbour and St Paul’s Bay—an idea that transport NGOs have floated for decades.

Labour was quick to dismiss the overhaul as “musical chairs with a Spotify playlist”, but the social-media reaction has been less flippant. Within two hours, #ĦolmaĠdida (New Dream) was trending locally, propelled by PN activists sharing pastel-coloured graphics of the new team. Even influencers who normally reserve their Stories for ftira rankings weighed in. “Finally seeing faces born after 1985,” commented popular fashion blogger @maltachic, summing up a generation that has only ever known Joseph-Muscat-style politics.

Yet the reshuffle is not without risk. By sidelining veteran Toni Bezzina—who retains only the rural affairs portfolio—Borg risks alienating the party’s traditionalist core in Żejtun and Rabat. One party councillor told Hot Malta, off the record, that “Toni knows where the skeletons are buried; you don’t bench him without consequences.” The PN’s internal statute also requires gender balance, and with only three women in a 14-member shadow cabinet, Borg may face pressure to co-opt more before Parliament reconvenes in October.

On the streets, the mood is wait-and-see. At Is-Serkin, the legendary Rabta pastizzeria, pensioner Ċensu Zahra shrugged between bites of ricotta cake: “I don’t care who’s shadowing whom; I care about my €40-a-week medicines bill.” His friend, 24-year-old gamer Naomi Vella, countered that “if the metro happens, I might finally move out of my parents’ place in Qormi.” Two generations, one island, both demanding tangible results.

Borg has given his new line-up 100 days to publish policy papers and six months to tour every local council—no small feat in a country that has 68 of them. The first test comes next week when Castillo presents an alternative budget in a public forum at the Valletta Campus Theatre. Entrance is free, but reservations—inevitably—are already being scalped on Facebook Marketplace.

For a nation that loves theatre, whether in village festa pageants or heated political debates, the second act of Borg’s leadership has begun. Curtain up, lights on, audience restless. The reviews will be written not in newspaper columns but in ballots, still a couple of years away yet already casting their shadow.