At 1 in the afternoon on Sunday, May 31, my husband and I heard the first fireworks. We had spent the morning at the beach, where most of Malta also was, because the water was perfect and it was 78 degrees and the ballots from the day before were being counted by hand. We did not know who had won. The fireworks told us to check the news.

Malta does fireworks during the day. This is … surprising. They are petards, locally called kaxxa spanjola, designed to make noise and a small puff of smoke without anything visible in the sky. Malta has more than 35 fireworks factories for a population the size of Fresno’s. They go off during summer festas, after Mass on big saint days, and, it turns out, when the governing party wins reelection.

On Sunday the booms started, and the horns came soon after. Cars draped in red flags began circling our village in Mellieħa—the color of the Labour party.

This is what an election ending feels like in a country that has not forgotten how to end an election.

I am American. I moved to Malta last December on an EU passport my mother left me. I cannot vote here, which I have come to think of as the price of admission for living in a country whose politics do not become world headlines.

In America, the 2028 presidential election started before the 2024 winner was sworn in. By spring of 2025, candidates were already flying to Iowa and New Hampshire to “get to know voters.” There is no off-season. An American campaign begins around the second Tuesday of your last good (or bad) mood. It ends, several years and several billion dollars later, when somebody concedes via a 14-page post at 1 in the morning. I assumed this was simply what democracy felt like: a low-grade fever you never fully shake.

Then I watched Malta call an election on April 27 and finish it on May 30. Thirty-three days. Three of those days were a holiday weekend. No primaries. No conventions. No exploratory committees. Billboards went up within 24 hours, preprinted and prepasted, clearly waiting in a warehouse for the starting gun. Leaflets landed in my mailbox by morning. I have ordered protein powder in America that took longer to arrive than the entire Maltese national election took to occur.

There are good reasons why picking the leader of a nuclear-armed superpower should take longer than 33 days, and I’m not here to promise you that Malta is some sort of democratic utopia. But surely we Americans can learn something from a country that holds an election without tearing itself apart—that treats politics as something to deal with and move on rather than as a way of........

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