Labour Wins Election: The Memorial Disappeared
Someone filmed a man clearing Daphne Caruana Galizia's makeshift memorial in broad daylight on Monday, hours after Labour supporters filled Republic Street with celebration.
Labour Wins Election: The Memorial Disappeared
Someone filmed a man clearing Daphne Caruana Galizia's makeshift memorial in broad daylight on Monday, hours after Labour supporters filled Republic Street with celebration. The activists who maintain the shrine said they expected this. They always do.
The timing tells you everything about power in Malta. Robert Abela had just delivered his televised address promising to write "the next chapter of Malta" — ambitious programmes, economic reform, the full rhetorical package that winners deploy. Meanwhile, someone was already erasing the most inconvenient chapter of the previous one. The flowers and candles that accumulate near the Great Siege monument have been cleared before, but never quite this brazenly, never quite this soon after an election result.
This is how transitions work here. The new government talks about moving forward while someone else handles the awkward business of moving backward. No minister ordered this cleanup — they never do. It simply happens, the way certain things simply happen when power changes hands and everyone understands the new rules without being told.
The memorial clearance wasn't the only institutional adjustment playing out this week. Alex Borg discovered that winning the Nationalist Party leadership means losing his Gozo seat — party statutes bind him to choose, and nobody becomes opposition leader by keeping their district comfortable. Charles Azzopardi, meanwhile, left intensive care after collapsing on election night, another reminder that politics here extracts its physical toll along with everything else.
The real victor in Sunday's election might be Adrian Delia, who topped the vote count after the party leaders despite losing his leadership challenge to Borg months ago. The former PN leader dominated districts seven and eight, proving that in Malta, political death is rarely permanent and resurrection often comes through the ballot box rather than party conference.
But the week's strangest casualty was neither political nor personal — it was equine. Four racehorses suffered "massive trauma" when the Salini fireworks factory exploded, their owner and his son taking shelter under a van as debris rained down like stones. The horses survived, unlike the factory, but they're still recovering. So is everyone else, in their own way.
The memorial will be rebuilt tomorrow, or the day after. It always is. Someone will place new flowers, light fresh candles, and the cycle will continue until the next election, the next celebration, the next quiet morning when someone decides the past has lingered long enough.
The only question now is how long Abela's ambitious programme takes to write, and whether anyone will be allowed to read the footnotes.
