A 44-vote margin isn’t much to build a political future on, but it’s enough to crown Alex Borg the new leader of the Nationalist Party. For weeks the contest had seemed to boil down to a simple dilemma: stick with Adrian Delia, the battle-scarred veteran promising resilience and continuity, or gamble on Borg, the ambitious newcomer offering change and reinvention. Sunday’s result answered the question of who won, but the bigger question now is what that victory really means.

The starting landscape was clear enough. Adrian Delia looked like the favourite among paid-up members, while Alex Borg consistently polled better nationally. Surveys throughout the campaign told the story: Delia commanded loyalty inside the party, but Borg inspired curiosity outside it. There were, as always, the undecideds — a large pool in a relatively long campaign.

It feels intuitive that undecided voters in a race like this would lean towards the newer candidate, the one who seems to represent possibility rather than continuity. And this campaign unfolded over a Maltese summer — festas, family barbecues, endless conversations about politics. If you’re an undecided Nationalist, there are only so many times you can hear floaters or even Labour supporters say they prefer Borg before you start to lean that way yourself.

That, plus a few unforced errors from Delia himself — like confidently declaring Malta’s population shoots up to 800,000 in summer, when the actual figure is more like 574,000. It was a throwback to his first stint as leader, when he had a tendency to shoot from the hip and let facts catch up later. Members who wanted a safe pair of hands may have had second thoughts.

But beyond numbers and slip-ups, impressions mattered. Since 2013, the party has been defined less by ideas than by factions. Power used to be the glue that held everyone together. Once that was gone, the glue dissolved. By the time Simon Busuttil’s crusade against corruption imploded in 2017, the PN looked less like a government-in-waiting and more like a self-help group for angry lawyers. Labour, meanwhile, was bending over backwards to accommodate former PN voters, sometimes even at its own base’s expense. Pragmatism beat moral outrage.

Adrian Delia stormed onto the scene in 2017 promising to smash the establishment, drain the swamp, and take on the old guard. He sold himself as Malta’s anti-elite outsider, and the delegates bought it. When he was eventually ousted, he didn’t throw a tantrum. He stayed, kept his head down, backed Bernard Grech, and built his reputation as the man who wouldn’t abandon the party when power slipped away. That patience paid off: Delia emerged from exile with stronger roots both in his district and among members who admired his stubbornness.

The PN under Grech wasn’t exactly bursting with policy. If anything, it was too bland to offend anyone, which meant the various factions could coexist under one roof without killing each other. But the tensions never disappeared.

As Alex Borg rose in visibility, he and Adrian Delia worked closely together and were generally seen as aligned. Like Delia, Borg was accused of being a Labour plant. Like Delia, he talked about opening the doors to Labour voters rather than slamming them shut. It was only when Borg made his move for the leadership that the tension surfaced. Delia may have expected the young pretender to wait his turn. Borg clearly had other ideas.

Something curious happened as the campaign unfolded. Adrian Delia had originally built his support on being the outsider who challenged the party’s inner circles, often at great personal cost. Yet this time around, a number of figures who had once opposed him began to signal their support. That shift created a strange dynamic: the man once cast out by the party’s elite was now being embraced by parts of it. For some members, that may have been reassuring; for others, it likely blurred the very identity that had defined Delia’s appeal. The irony is that many of those who had worked tirelessly for him in past campaigns were, in this contest, working for Borg instead.

Which brings us to the PN’s Plan A, Roberta Metsola. After Bernard Grech bailed and she opted out, the succession plan collapsed. But what Metsola decided to do next still matters. Did she quietly nudge her allies towards Borg? Did she back Delia as the safer option? Or has she truly given up any ambitions of leading the PN and washed her hands of the whole mess?

As for the result, it was in many ways the worst possible one. A 44-vote margin is no mandate. Within hours of the announcement, Delia’s camp was questioning the validity of more than a hundred ballots. That raised the spectre of the PN plunging straight back into civil war. To his credit, Delia quickly posted on Facebook that he would not be contesting the result, and he has since appeared arm-in-arm with Borg. If that truce holds, the PN might even stumble into a period of momentum.

The other big question is what happens on the Labour side. Robert Abela had floated the idea of calling an early election if Grech resigned, and for a moment it looked like he might pounce. But Borg’s narrow victory might complicate things. Labour might decide there’s no rush. Why gift the PN a baptism of fire when the party looks divided and on the brink of another feud? If anything, going too hard at Borg too early could even risk making Abela look afraid of him. Better to sit back and hope the PN hangs itself again.

And besides, the lines of attack are clearer when it comes to Delia. Labour has a whole arsenal from his first stint as leader, ready to be dusted off and recycled. With Borg, the playbook is less obvious. He’s younger, less defined, and harder to pin down. More likely, Labour will wait until Borg starts to look like a genuine threat before unleashing the machine. The next national survey will show whether that moment is anywhere close.

So where does that leave the PN? With a leader elected by 44 votes, a predecessor signalling goodwill, and a party membership still weighing what this all means. It isn’t the easiest of starts, but it isn’t disastrous either. Borg has space to show that being the candidate who just managed to unite enough people can also give him the chance to shape his own identity before Labour does it for him.

In many senses, the real question in this election was never just who would be leader, but whether both sides could accept the result and work together. Borg is young and clearly ambitious. If he’s smart enough to welcome and listen to everyone, but confident enough to assert his authority inside the party and present a bold, coherent position on issues that matter outside it, then the PN can start to make inroads.

The truth is the party is already late. By now, Malta would have voted Labour out if there had been a viable alternative. Instead, the PN allowed the situation to drift to the point where people are open to trusting Labour again. Borg has the potential to stop that slide. Whether he does will depend on the people he surrounds himself with, and whether the party can get behind him fully.