One year ago, Students For Liberty didn’t exist in Malta. Today, they are a finalist for organisation of the year in a national contest, with the highest number of jury votes of any nominee in the running. SFL Malta’s story is that of a small, determined team and what they can build in a country where the ideas of classical liberalism were absent from public life.
Last year, European Students For Liberty established new groups in 12 new countries, creating chapters from scratch. When David Briguglio Brown and his friends launched a team in Malta, they had no institutional track record, no alumni network to lean on, no established following. On an island of this size, everything you do is visible, which is both a blessing and a curse. Every initiative gets scrutinised without the cover of a large movement behind you, but SFL Malta decided to be bold and to act regardless.
Rather than wait for the right conversations to come to them, they built the spaces where those conversations would happen. Their project “Politics Made Simple” turned complex policy debates into easily understandable explainers. An audience can request the topics they want to be broken down.
And they took the same approach offline. During the national election, the team ran “In the Spotlight”, an electoral fishbowl debate that put candidates in the room with students and questions on the table. With this, SFL Malta established itself as a young organisation serious about civic activism.
Beyond just explaining politics, SFL Malta also started stepping into it. The team helped carry the Europe-wide Chat Control fight onto the islands, taking a dense EU surveillance proposal and communicating the urgency to act against it to a domestic audience with little prior exposure to digital rights. Their petition against Chat Control gathered over 1,500 signatures and the campaign opened doors to the meetings with MEPs and the Prime Minister.
Additionally, when the Maltese Government floated a blanket social media ban for minors, SFL Malta acted fast again, submitting a formal, evidence-based consultation to the National Youth Council and the Government, offering policymakers an alternative rooted in the EU’s existing DSA framework. When the Government began weighing whether to join the so-called “Board of Peace”, the team’s principled opposition was picked up by Times of Malta, ensuring the skeptical student perspective made it into a national outlet’s coverage of the debate.
All of this happened in under a year and it did not go unnoticed. At the FreeHour Youth Awards, run by the largest social media youth platform in the country, SFL Malta was nominated for Student Organisation of the year, while its National Coordinator, David Briguglio Brown, picked up a personal nomination for Student Achievement of the Year.
It’s a remarkable start, and it’s only a start. If this is what SFL Malta can do in under a year, we can’t wait to see what comes next from this small, beautiful island and its bold young voices.
