Fact-check Malta: Has the government implemented 82% of its manifesto?

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Claim: The government has implemented 82% of its electoral manifesto.

Verdict: The government’s online tracker, used to track progress on each electoral promise, shows this to be the case. But this does not mean that 82% of its proposals have been completed. Instead, the system tallies progress on different milestones set for each electoral pledge.

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In a press conference to mark the government’s fourth year of the legislature on March 26, Prime Minister Robert Abela claimed his government had implemented 82% of its manifesto.

The claim was instantly met with scepticism. Journalists at the press conference pressed him on several of the manifesto’s key promises that failed to materialise, from the pedestrianisation of Floriana’s St Anne’s Street to that of San Ġwann’s main thoroughfare.

Similarly, many on social media poked fun at the claim, saying the 82% figure beggared belief.

This is not the first time Abela, or other government officials, have made such claims.

In June 2025, Abela said 70% of the government’s manifesto had been implemented. Likewise, in the summer of 2020, then-Minister Carmelo Abela had said the government’s implementation rate was at 76%.

Times of Malta reached out to the Prime Minister’s office (OPM) to ask how they reached these figures and what they mean.

A bumper manifesto

Labour was re-elected in 2022 on the back of a mammoth 288-page manifesto, over 100 pages longer than the one it had presented ahead of the previous election in 2017.

The manifesto featured a range of electoral promises across all the areas one would typically expect in the run-up to an election, from education to the economy, social measures and the environment.

Ultimately, the manifesto promised a neat 1,000 measures in total.

So if 82% was implemented, that means 820 proposals are ready, right?

Not quite.

OPM officials say the 82% figure doesn’t refer to the number of proposals successfully ticked off the list.

Rather, this figure tallies up the current state of all 1,000 proposals through an online system devised specifically by the government’s IT authority, MITA, to track the progress of each ministry as time goes by.

So while this covers proposals that are fully implemented, it also includes others that are part-way there, as well as those that have barely gotten off the ground.

In the government’s previous two legislatures, this figure hovered around the 90% mark when the term was up, they say.

How do they quantify this?

Officials say each of the 1,000 proposals is divided into several deliverables, each of them allocated a specific weighting depending on how crucial they are and how much work they involve.

For instance, a promise to build a park would be split across several deliverables. The first deliverable could be identifying a site for the park, followed by others related to obtaining permits for works, issuing tenders to engage workers and, finally, actually carrying out the works.

Whenever one deliverable is completed, the proposal’s implementation rate (and, consequently, that of the manifesto as a whole) rises accordingly.

OPM officials say they keep tabs on the progress of each electoral promise through receiving monthly updates from each ministry or government entity.

So how many proposals are actually ready?

According to OPM officials, 802 of the 1,000 electoral promises have been fully completed, not far short of the 82% figure cited by Abela.

When tallied up with those that are still in the works, the 82% figure emerges, they say.

The online system, seen by Times of Malta, would appear to confirm this to be the case.

Government officials say none of the 1,000 proposals in the manifesto have been abandoned, although some may be lagging behind schedule.

They also say the count of manifesto proposals implemented does not include other promises that have cropped up throughout the legislature but were not initially in the manifesto, such as the swathe of recent promises for new parks at Manoel Island, White Rocks and Fort Campbell, among others.

Forget the new parks, what about the old ones?

As many pointed out, several of the flagship environmental projects trumpeted in the run-up to the 2022 election have yet to see any tangible progress.

Promises to pedestrianise large areas in the towns of Floriana, San Ġwann and Santa Venera have all seemingly remained on paper, yet to see the light of day.

OPM officials argue that these projects were always intended to take place over multiple legislatures, so their full implementation during this government’s term would not necessarily mean the gardens being up and running but, instead, would involve hitting other planning and administrative milestones.

Regardless, the party’s 2022 electoral manifesto makes no mention of any of these projects spanning beyond an initial five-year term.

On the contrary, the manifesto pledges that the “dream” of St Anne’s Street pedestrianisation “would become reality”. Meanwhile, works on roofing the area around the Santa Venera tunnels would “begin,” and San Ġwann’s pedestrianisation works would be “extended to create a square and new open space in the locality”.

Vague pledges

A browse through the 2022 manifesto suggests that several of its key promises were particularly vague in nature, making it tricky to judge whether they have been met.

Land reclamation will “go ahead,” it promises, without naming any specific sites or projects to be carried out. While some land reclamation has taken place at the Freeport, with authorities reportedly identifying other potential sites, the pledge itself has found itself reclaimed by another much-vaunted policy document: Vision 2050.

Meanwhile, the manifesto pledged that the long-promised metro project would be subject to “lively discussion” and further studies throughout the legislature. Four years on, the lively discussion remains, but the public has yet to see the studies.

Others, such as works on the second interconnector between Malta and Sicily, initially slated for completion by 2025, are clearly running behind schedule.

Some, like a promise to increase research spending to 2% of GDP cannot be reliably gauged because recent data is scarce, but early indications are not promising. At the time of the pledge, in 2022, Malta spent 0.6% of its GDP on research. By the following year, the needle had not budged.

However, several other pledges, including many that broadened the access to previously introduced measures, were implemented, some going beyond the manifesto’s promise.

These include income tax cuts, initially slated to cost €66 million but ultimately tallying up to €140 million, together with several other fiscal benefits, such as increases in pensions and children’s allowance. Meanwhile, access to free IVF services was widened and promised legal amendments to allow under-18s to serve as mayor were introduced in recent years.