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PROMO: Does Malta have a shot at clean politics?
By Julian Delia（https://cap.mt/author/julian/） August 19, 2025 September 27th, 2025 One Comment（https://cap.mt/2025/08/19/does-malta-have-a-shot-at-clean-politics/#comments） 5 min read
Home（https://cap.mt/） » News（https://cap.mt/news/） » PROMO: Does Malta have a shot at clean politics?
I’ve been promising I’ll get around to addressing this pressing issue for a while now.
It’s finally happening.
For years（https://cap.mt/2023/12/11/entering-the-twilight-years/） , it’s been amply clear that a third of the electorate feels politically orphaned. The duopoly（https://cap.mt/2025/06/16/when-the-duopoly-cracked/） groans beneath the weight of the contradictions that held it together for so many years.
On one hand, we have the governing Labour Party, a monstrous criminal syndicate that turned Malta into a mafia state. Their latest gambit（https://cap.mt/2025/07/28/a-classic-government-tradition-flipping-everyone-off-before-summer-recess/） to bring every rogue developer in Malta onside serves as yet another example of how corrupt they all are.
On the other, we have the Nationalist Party, the one that managed to kill itself（https://cap.mt/2025/06/30/how-the-nationalist-party-killed-itself/） in front of the entire electorate. Their ongoing leadership election, castrated by the party’s own electoral commission, inspires as much hope as a broken lighthouse.
Judging from the government’s predictable roll out of feelgood propaganda（https://cap.mt/2025/07/21/rumblings-of-unhappy-elections/） , general elections are close at hand.
Given this dire context, I promised my readers I would sit down with representatives from ADPD and Partit Momentum, two political parties who are vying to make it to Parliament.
As far as breaking the duopoly goes, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
ADPD has been the perennial underdog of Maltese politics since its inception, providing the only stroke of green politics in a landscape dominated by red and blue colours.
Partit Momentum, born out of the independent support garnered by former AD chairman Arnold Cassola during his last run for European Parliament, promises to be an additional grassroots alternative.
Should any one of their candidates be elected, it would be the first time anyone’s ever managed to get elected to Parliament on a ticket that is independent of both major parties.
On Monday, I sat down with Momentum’s secretary-general Mark Camilleri Gambin and ADPD’s chairperson Sandra Gauci.
A photo of ADPD chairperson Sandra Gauci. Photo credit: Mariah Ivié Cutajar
A candid photo snapped before the interview with Sandra Gauci. Photo credit: Mariah Ivié Cutajar
A photo of Partit Momentum secretary-general Mark Camilleri Gambin. Photo credit: Mariah Ivié Cutajar
A photo of a post-interview chat with Mark Camilleri Gambin. Photo credit: Mariah Ivié Cutajar
My goal was to understand whether these two parties can seriously offer the elusive alternative that so many people are desperately searching for.
I’ll be upfront about it – I wasn’t expecting much.
Besides the electoral system’s structural bias（https://timesofmalta.com/article/adpd-appeal-court-dismisses-challenge-parliamentary-seat-allocations.1102532） against pluralism in parliament, both parties face enormous challenges on every front: the general public’s failure to consider them as a serious option, their collective lack of experience in government, and the massive disparity in financing and electoral firepower when compared to the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party, to name a few.