Even I cannot find a property with my partner.
On Borg's published €52,000 Leader-of-Opposition salary, BOV's first-time-buyer mortgage calculator returns roughly €397,000 in borrowing capacity — comfortably above the €310,000 median property anchor used by the Foundation for Affordable Housing. He can afford to buy alone.
On Borg's published €52,000 Leader-of-Opposition salary, BOV's first-time-buyer mortgage calculator returns roughly €397,000 in borrowing capacity — comfortably above the €310,000 median property anchor used by the Foundation for Affordable Housing. He can afford to buy alone.
Since the 2025 PN leadership race, Borg has built campaign rhetoric around a personal claim: even he, with his profile and income, can't get on the property ladder. The maths doesn't support it. As Leader of the Opposition since September 2025, Borg earns just under €52,000 — published in Malta's official salaries-of-elected-officials disclosure. He turned 30 on 10 July 1995 and at the time of the Pieta rally was 30 years old. Bank of Valletta's first-time-buyer home loan calculator returns approximately €397,000 in maximum borrowing for a 30-year-old single applicant on a €52,000 salary under the bank's 40-year first-time-buyer term. That comfortably exceeds the €310,000 median property figure cited by the Foundation for Affordable Housing — and the broader 2026 KPMG/MDA market median of about €317,000. With Borg's partner Sarah Bajada (a TV presenter) added to the application, capacity grows further. Separately, Borg ran a substantial summer-long campaign for the PN leadership in 2025; his digital marketing was the single largest cost, but he declined transparency requests for the specific figure. The general affordability story (covered in our companion piece on young Maltese homeownership) is real. The personal claim about himself is contradicted by his own bank's calculator. False.
Can the Leader of the Opposition really not afford a home
It is now a familiar refrain in Maltese politics. Alex Borg, leaning into a microphone, paraphrasing some version of: even I — me, with my profile and my position — can't afford to buy a home with my partner. The line has been delivered at a campaign launch, in a Lovin Malta clip explicitly headlined 'Even I Can't Afford It', and again from the stage in Pieta on 28 April 2026.
It is a powerful rhetorical move. If he can't afford a home, what hope does an ordinary 25-year-old on the median wage have? But the personal claim — the part that makes the rhetoric land — does not survive contact with the published numbers.
Borg's profile, by the numbers
Three pieces of public information frame the question.
- Age. Alex Borg was born on 10 July 1995. At the time of the Pieta rally on 28 April 2026, he was 30 years old.
- Salary. The Leader of the Opposition is paid 100% of Scale 1 of the civil service. For 2026, that figure is just under €52,000 a year, following a small public-service collective-agreement uplift signed in November 2024. Both the Speaker and the Leader of the Opposition also receive car, fuel, internet, telephone and postage allowances on top of base pay.
- Partner. Borg has been in a public relationship with TV presenter Sarah Bajada since at least early 2024.
He is, in other words, a 30-year-old first-time buyer with a stable above-median salary, in a dual-income partnership.
What that profile borrows in 2026
Bank of Valletta's first-time-buyer home loan terms are publicly published. Under the BOV HomeFirst loan, a buyer can spread repayment over up to 40 years, or up to retirement age, whichever comes first. For a 30-year-old single applicant on a €52,000 salary, BOV's home-loan calculator returns a maximum loan of approximately €397,000.
Set that figure against the price of an actual property:
- The Foundation for Affordable Housing uses €310,000 as its median property anchor.
- The KPMG / MDA Construction Industry and Property Market Report 2025, the standard market reference, puts the 2026 median asking price for a Maltese apartment at approximately €317,000.
- Eurostat and Central Bank of Malta data place house-price-to-income ratios at 10–12x median household income across the country.
On any of those benchmarks, BOV's maximum loan for Borg alone exceeds the median property price by a wide margin. Adding his partner's income to the application increases that capacity again.
Whether he wants to take on a 40-year mortgage at his age, in a particular postcode, with a particular property type, is a different question — one every buyer faces. But that is a different claim from 'I cannot find a property with my partner', which is what he has been saying.
And about the leadership race
There is a related contextual point worth noting. Borg's bid for the PN leadership in summer 2025 was a high-cost, summer-long, digitally-heavy campaign. When pressed by The Shift News for transparency on his spending, Borg declined to provide totals. He acknowledged that digital marketing had been his largest cost and said full figures would only be disclosed after the contest. Subsequent submissions reorganised his earlier replies under different headings without filling in the missing numbers.
Whether the campaign was funded out of his own pocket or by donors is, in the absence of disclosure, simply not knowable from the public record. But a candidate who can mobilise enough resource to win a national leadership race by 44 votes against Adrian Delia is not a candidate who lacks any access to capital. The general public has very little visibility on the relationship between his personal finances, his political finances, and the framing he uses on stage.
What the claim actually does
There is a real housing affordability problem in Malta. Our companion fact-check on whether young Maltese have less opportunity to become homeowners than the previous generation lands at True but lacks context — the affordability ratio has roughly doubled in a generation, even if outright ownership rates have held up via family wealth and government schemes.
Borg's personal-stake framing borrows the emotional weight of that real problem and grafts it onto his own circumstances, where the problem isn't the same. The maths for a 30-year-old Leader of the Opposition on €52,000 with a working partner is not the maths most young Maltese face.
Verdict: False. As stated, the claim is contradicted by his own bank's calculator and his own published salary.