The cheque came before the vote. The bill comes after.

On 27 April Robert Abela called a general election more than a year early. The reason he gave was geopolitical instability. Uncertain times, the argument went, called for a fresh mandate and a steady hand.

Here is what the steady hand was doing with the public purse in the months before it asked for that mandate.

The numbers

• In the first quarter of 2026, government spending rose 14.5% on a year earlier, to €2.34 billion.
• The budget planned for spending to grow by €345.5 million across the whole of 2026. By the end of March, €296.3 million of that — 86% — had already gone.
• By June, cash spending for the half-year was up 17.5%.
• Between April 2025 and April 2026, the public-sector workforce grew from 54,065 to 56,318: 2,253 more people, or about 188 a month, in the year that ended weeks before polling day. Those are net figures from the National Statistics Office; actual recruitment was higher.

The Malta Fiscal Advisory Council, which exists precisely to say inconvenient things about the budget, did its job. To hit the deficit target, it calculated, spending growth would have to slow to 0.7% for the remaining nine months of the year. It warned that the risks were tilted towards a bigger deficit than the government was forecasting, and that leaving the EU’s excessive deficit procedure was not a licence to spend permanently more.

Then the election was won. And in September, according to reports from inside the Finance Ministry, Clyde Caruana ordered every government agency to freeze spending until at least the end of the year, hand back uncommitted funds, and stop recruiting except in emergencies.

First the cheques, then the vote, then the freeze. The order is not an accident.

Who pays for a spending spree

A spending freeze in September sounds prudent. Look at what it actually freezes. Not the posts already filled; those people are on the payroll now, and rightly nobody is going to fire them. Not the social transfers, which rose 12.2% in the first quarter alone; that money is spent. What gets frozen is everything that could wait: maintenance, projects, the recruitment of the nurse or the inspector who was not hired in time for the campaign. The things that were never going to win a vote are the things that pay for the ones that did.

This is not unique to Labour, and it is not unique to Malta. Governments everywhere spend before elections. The difference is scale and brazenness. When 86% of a year’s planned spending growth disappears in a single quarter — the quarter before a snap election called in the name of prudence — it is not an overrun. It is a strategy.

What to watch

The next budget will tell us whether the government intends to pay for 2026 honestly — or to push this year’s bill into next year’s projects and call it restraint. Three questions for the Finance Minister, none of which needs a leak to answer:

1. Which projects were postponed by the freeze, and by how much?
2. How many public-sector recruits between January and May were in posts that had been approved before the election was called?
3. Will the 2026 deficit target be met — yes or no — and if not, what will Malta tell the European Commission?

Clyde Caruana is, by reputation, the grown-up in the cabinet: the minister who talks about productivity and demographics while his colleagues cut ribbons. That reputation is worth something. This year he signed off on the spree and is now sending the invoice to the civil service. He should at least show us the receipt.