For months, this election felt emotionally finished before it even began.Labour would win. The PN would survive. Commentators would spend the night arguing about whether the margin was disappointing or catastrophic while everybody pretended the exercise still contained suspense.Then Alex Borg changed the mood.For the first time in years, people have actually been listening to the PN again, even if not yet believing it.Not just the faithful or the permanently outraged Facebook uncles still talking about Eddie Fenech Adami like he’s making a comeback from injury. Normal people were paying attention again. People who had long emotionally checked out of the PN entirely. People who had already accepted this election as another Labour victory months ago.Borg disrupted that atmosphere faster than many expected.He entered the campaign calm, composed and confident. More importantly, he looked comfortable there. Labour had clearly prepared for an election centred around prosperity, redistribution and economic management. The proposals started flying immediately: infrastructure, healthcare, housing, tax measures, investment. Billions here, millions there. The usual campaign arms race dressed up as generosity.And for a while, the PN kept pace.Because once Labour chose to fight this election on managerial competence rather than ideological division, the opposition no longer needed to present some revolutionary new vision for Malta. It merely needed to look plausible within the same framework. Match a proposal here, counter one there, raise the figure where possible. As long as Borg looked like a potential winner, people were willing to go with it.And to its credit, the PN has overperformed this campaign. After years of consistent decline and a steady drift into political irrelevance, the party rediscovered something it had lost: political instinct, energy and conflict. For once, the campaign stopped feeling like an administrative exercise preceding another inevitable Labour term and started feeling politically alive again.But success in politics has a habit of changing the standard very quickly.For most of the last decade, the PN has walked into elections with almost no expectation of winning. There was a real question about whether this one would be different, and in many ways it was. But the moment a victory starts looking even remotely realistic, the question shifts. It stops being whether the party can run a good campaign and starts being whether it can actually govern.Those are very different questions.And that’s why the debates suddenly mattered.The university debate barely counts. It’s a cesspit: a shouting match watched mostly out of tradition and in the hope one of the crackpots on stage says something ridiculous enough to dominate social media for two days. Serious candidates are not there to persuade anybody. They are there to survive.Borg did well there because those conditions suit instinctive politics.The Chamber of SMEs debate was something else entirely.No chanting. No slogans rescuing weak answers. No partisan crowd willing to applaud every rhetorical flourish. Just a room full of businesspeople calmly asking serious questions and expecting serious answers in return.And it didn’t go well.Robert Abela demonstrated a far stronger grasp of the machinery of government, economic detail and technical policy. Borg, by contrast, looked underprepared, struggled with follow-ups and repeatedly fell back on rhetorical answers that sounded less convincing the more they were pressed.More damagingly, his performance gave credence to a claim Labour has been making throughout the campaign — and which is, to some degree, correct. That the PN’s manifesto was built quickly, and in many cases designed simply to equal or surpass whatever Labour announced. When money is no problem, every proposal sounds credible. The Chamber of SMEs was the first room that actually tested whether the numbers added up to a plan, and the answer wasn’t reassuring.It felt like the moment the coyote finally looked down and realised he had already run past the cliff edge.To his credit, Borg took it in his stride. He was back on stage the next day for the Xtra debate, and while he still didn’t shine — Abela arguably edged it again — the improvement was visible. He was no longer being outclassed.The Chamber of Commerce debate was a different story altogether. The questions directed at Borg were arguably a touch gentler than those put to Abela — fair enough, given Abela is the sitting Prime Minister — but Borg looked noticeably better prepared, more composed and far more capable of turning difficult questions back onto Labour’s own record. He managed to redirect discussions toward the consequences of Malta’s economic model, the pressures created by rapid growth and the visible frustrations many people feel about the direction the country has taken.Later that evening Borg also showed up to the Times of Malta and Każin debate, which Abela skipped. More debate is generally better than less, and Abela attending would have been the ideal outcome. Strategically, his decision not to go is understandable. For Borg, the calculation was a wash — another evening of tough questions he could have done without, but points scored for being the one willing to turn up.None of this is entirely Borg’s fault. He has been thrust into an election extraordinarily quickly, which was almost certainly Labour’s plan from the outset. Calling a snap election doesn’t just catch the opposition off balance procedurally — it forces them to build a campaign, a manifesto and a leadership narrative simultaneously, on a timeline of weeks rather than months. Labour, by contrast, isn’t improvising anymore. It operates like an incumbency machine with over a decade of development, projects and political positioning already lined up.And whether you like that machine or not, it is a machine. It has plans. It has detail. It has people who have spent years inside the files. That showed in every debate this campaign, and particularly in the ones where the questions got technical.It is lazy to explain Labour’s dominance purely through tribalism, corruption or dependency. The reality is more complicated than that. Many people genuinely feel they benefited from the Labour era — through business opportunities, wage growth, property appreciation, or simply through stability. And crucially, many do not believe another party would have fundamentally changed Malta’s trajectory anyway.That’s why Labour’s greatest advantage today is not excitement. It’s familiarity.People know what Labour governance looks like. They know the trade-offs. They know the frustrations. But they also know the system has broadly functioned economically under it. Vince Marmara noted on Lovin Daily last week that there are still 2022 PN voters telling pollsters they will vote Labour this time. In 2013, when Labour was still in opposition, virtually nobody was moving the other way. That is a significant inversion, and it reflects something the surveys keep showing: Labour is no longer the insurgent success story. It has become the default governing force in the minds of many voters.And by all accounts, Labour seems to be heading for a comfortable victory. The surveys currently put the gap somewhere between six and ten points. Marmara’s is the highest at ten, and is considered by many to be the most reliable given his track record at predicting general election results.That said, he got the last MEP elections wrong, undecideds appear to be running slightly higher than usual, and turnout remains a real question mark. Enough room, in other words, that Borg pulling off a good result isn’t off the table.Whatever the result looks like, the next legislature might finally be interesting again.•