Editorial: The party never leaves the building

A senior civil servant has been listed as the advertiser behind 292 Labour Party ‘Int Malta’ YouTube adverts published in the days leading up to the 2026 general election, in breach of the public administration’s rules on political impartiality.

Clive Farrugia is head of secretariat at the office of the principal permanent secretary, Tony Sultana, who as the country’s top civil servant is himself responsible for the guidelines for the conduct of public officials across the country.

As a civil servant, Farrugia’s role in publishing the adverts are in breach of his function as a public official, given that civil service rules warn against any activity that put the public administration’s impartiality in doubt. Indeed in 2015, these guidelines further restricted officials in managerial posts, like Farrugia, from engaging in any political activity.

The incident is once again an example of the cavalier manner with which the Maltese government has treated the separation of party politics from the functioning of the civil service. In 2020, the commissioner for standards in public life found that four Labour ministers had used public monies to publish Facebook content created specifically for their personal channels.

The investigation arrived only years after which government ministers had been systematically funding personal Facebook pages with taxpayers’ money; specifically, messaging that should have contained impartial information about the functioning of the government had been channelled exclusively through private Facebook pages owned by the ministers.

That investigation gave rise to the creation of specific government-owned Facebook pages representing the individual ministries, irrespective of the holder of the officer, such that there is now a clear separation between ministry pages – which can be publicly-funded – and the office-holder’s political social media account, which can only be funded through personal resources.

But that evolution came late in the day for a party that was itself an early adopter of social media advertising since its election to power in 2013. The wilfulness with which it directed public cash into personal social media power was redolent of the way the Labour administration has been treating the separation between state and party.

For decades, the Maltese political machine has operated on the tacit agreement that party activists can be wilfully transposed into ministers’ personal secretariats; many other party supporters land person-of-trust appointments, often placed in managerial or headship positions; standing party executives get to manage politically sensitive regulators or receive lucrative government contracts. The line between ministerial office and political operation has been treated permeable by convention, an ‘impunity’ that is considered only too normal by the electorate.

What makes the Farrugia case distinctive is the fact that Google’s advertising transparency tools produced a paper trail showing the adverts were not even correctly tagged as political content, appearing instead under the categories of travel, tourism, or education – that detail suggests a deliberate evasion of EU political advertising rules.

And it therefore exposes the principal permanent secretary to a serious question of accountability: in an administration that has spent 13 years treating the boundary between party and state as a mere suggestion, who exactly is responsible for enforcing this separation?

There is no question that Sultana is expected to actively prop up the functions of the state and steer the civil service’s machinery into the political direction that delivers on the ruling government’s political manifesto. But that responsibility can only be credible when the standards and the rules the civil service expects of its employees are upheld.

This impartiality is not some mere courtesy. It is the structural condition of democratic governance.

If Sultana’s own underlings are treating it contemptuously by wantonly freelancing at the service of the party, the top civil servant himself owes the public not just an explanation, but real sanctions that safeguard this impartiality.