Voting began in Malta’s snap parliamentary election on Saturday, opening a contest that will decide who governs the island nation for the next five years. Polling stations opened across the country as Robert Abela’s Labour Party and the centrist Nationalist Party moved into the final stretch of a race that could hand Labour a record fourth consecutive term.
The vote is being watched closely because opinion polls suggest Labour is still on course to win, even as Alex Borg tries to break that script. Borg, the new Nationalist leader, is 30 and hopes to unseat Labour and become Malta’s youngest-ever prime minister, giving the opposition a rare chance to reverse a decade of Labour dominance. The result is expected to be announced at about midday on Sunday.
Abela called the election a year ahead of schedule, a move that put his government’s record and its worries about the campaign squarely on the line. He is reported to fear that rising energy prices and inflation could weaken Labour’s bid for another term, while voters are also weighing rents, ailing infrastructure and a public health service under pressure in the European Union’s smallest and most densely populated country.
The election is also taking place under the shadow of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist killed by a car bomb in 2017 after exposing corruption concerns at the heart of Maltese politics. A public inquiry later concluded that the government was responsible for her death, while finding no evidence of direct involvement; it said officials had created an atmosphere of impunity. In June 2025, two men were sentenced to life imprisonment for supplying the bomb that killed her.
That history still hangs over the campaign, and it gives Sunday’s result a sharper edge than a routine vote. Labour has dominated Malta’s political landscape for most of the past decade, but if the polls hold, the more important question may be by how much Abela wins rather than whether Borg can pull off the upset he is chasing.
