Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1544871
13 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 10 MAY 2026 FEATURE ELECTION 2026 The young refusing to vote electioneering is targeting young voters. Eva Brannon unravels the mind of fellow Gen Z voters people's faith lies. Not the pol- iticians, or the NGOs, or even their own voice. My generation has founded its own silent re- bellion, and our leaders are anyone who says something by saying absolutely nothing. I spoke to a friend of mine, a 22-year-old and another MCAST student, who I knew had no interest in voting, and who I also knew plans to tell his loyalist parents he's voting PL to avoid the trouble. "I don't know anything about this stuff," he admitted. "They're always lying to us so I never know where to start. I'd rather just not think about it." People my age have this unique sensitivity to bullshit. We were trained for it. Our In- stagram feeds try to convince us that cows were found on the moon and that those pho- tos from the Epstein files were AI. GenZ has been trained to constantly scan the world for deceit. "Before you had Labour is Labour, PN is PN, now you're either gonna address the real- ity or you're a bullshitter and you're establishment," anoth- er young person, aged 20 and a musician, told me. He would vote, if he hadn't left the coun- try. Giving out bonuses to com- pensate for the minimum wage, but never raising it. Issuing subsidies to address the hous- ing crisis, but never regulating developers. But who cares, take €1,000 as you pass GO if you vote for a Labour government! As an unlikely voter, I was ex- cited to find out last year that the PN had chosen a young per- son as their leader. "How excit- ing!" I thought to myself. Sadly, Borg quickly killed my interest when I found out that the man cannot seem to wrap his head around the impact the US-Iran war will have on Malta, and that smartwatch thing too. On the other side of the du- opoly, Robert Abela lacks an- ything remotely resembling a personality. With nothing new to say and nothing real to stand for, he will most likely be re-elected prime minister, ush- ering in another five years of nothing. How exciting! Then, once this month-long drunken bar fight is finally over, the tendency is for a party to hold a tight grip on their regime for over a decade, before they loop back around in some sort of pseudo-democratic game of musical chairs. And even then, the leaves change and the roots stay the same, so why not just lie back and live with it? By the time June rolls around the dirt is dry like sand, and not much seems to grow anyway. The problem is, young people in the 21st century are too busy trying to cope with the seeming fact that the entire human race is poisoned beyond repair, and that's a pretty daunting place to find yourself at the age of 17. So, we retreat into our online lives, and our drugs, our thriving techno-scene, and pretend that someday we won't be 30-some- thing living in a world moulded by whatever's happening on this island. The conclusion I'm coming to is that the only thing you can get my generation to agree on is that there's nothing left to de- bate. Opposing everything and adding nothing, we have failed to find anything good worth fighting for. It's a mutation of democracy, and it was built on hopelessness. "When someone represents us, we show up," someone told me, referencing Mam- dani's campaign in New York. "There's a lot of hopelessness, but when someone decides to be honest, we show up. You need to give young people some hope because there's none of it, man." But when there's no one do- ing that, then what?