Dear government - No I am not your project

I don’t know what’s more concerning: the fact that our government chose a campaign slogan that refers to the betterment of our country as their "project" or the fact that none of us citizens have called it out yet.

Either way, I personally am quite rattled by the wording chosen by the Labour Government for the 2026 snap election.

Within 24 hours of the announcement, we woke up to a total bombardment of Labour’s campaign, with seemingly three out of every four billboards dedicated to their message.

At first glance, one could easily say that the campaign is visually trendy. Bold fonts, catchy colours, clear imagery - it’s attractive, I guess.

But when you pull back the glossy campaign veneer, you get a deeply unsettling slogan that you cannot simply ignore: “Int Malta: Il-Ħolma Tiegħek. Il-Proġett Tagħna.” – You are Malta: Your dream. Our project.

It’s that word “project” that just doesn’t sit right with me. And it shouldn’t sit right with you either.

Let’s set the record straight early on. When a government frames the citizenry, the nation, or the collective future of a country as a “project,” it dangerously shifts the dynamic of democracy. In a healthy democratic country, the government is an employee hired to serve the public interest and look after the country on behalf of the people.

By calling our dreams "their project," the roles reverse: the state becomes the master architect, engineer, or builder, and the people become the raw material to be moulded, managed, or "constructed". As if we don’t have enough contractors on this island already.

When we look at history, even just recent history, to find examples of other governments framing a nation’s future as a project, we need only look at our fellow EU member states.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has spent over a decade explicitly framing his nation as a civilisational project - one that needed to be managed by him and his comrades in accordance to their plans.

In Poland, the PiS government took a similar approach - reframing the Polish state as a national project to be reclaimed and rebuilt according to a singular ideological vision, systematically dismantling the judiciary and media independence in the process.

In both cases, the citizen didn't lead. The citizen was led, shaped, managed. And in both cases, it started with language - with the quiet, almost unremarkable framing of a nation as something to be constructed by those in power.

And if we need reminding of where that thinking ultimately leads, history has given us far starker warnings. Hitler's National Socialism was fundamentally framed as a transformative engineering project.

Stalin took the utopian dream of equality and manufactured it into brutal, rigid five-year plans. Mussolini was perhaps the most explicit of all, weaponising the concept of the state as a grand architectural and social project to sculpt citizens into passive compliance.

In every case, the nation was a project. In every case, the citizen was the material. And in every case, it started not with violence, but with language.

One might argue that Robert Abela’s Labour is telling us that the dream belongs to us, the citizens and they’re just here to build it for us – they’re “in service” of “our” vision.

But what we truly need to understand is that a dream handed over becomes someone else’s blueprint.

Take Manoel Island, for example. That was our dream - a shared, collective vision for what that space could be, fought tooth and nail by activists and citizens. But now that it’s become their project, we’ve already lost the pen.

Illegal padel courts now sit over an archaeological site. Nobody asked us. Nobody consulted us beyond the bare minimum. That is what happens when a dream gets handed over - it becomes someone else's blueprint, shaped by someone else's priorities, and us citizens lose all agency over it.

They simply consult us at the vision stage and then sideline us at the delivery stage. That's not participation but a suggestion box.

Words matter. The language a political party chooses to carry their message is never accidental - it is deliberate, tested, and revealing. And Labour knows exactly what they're doing. Because on the surface, the slogan sounds generous. It sounds citizen-centred. It sounds like service.

But let's look at what it's actually saying. Let’s look a bit closer at the word “project”. Every project has an owner and a manager. In this case, the government is boldly stating that the Labour Party is indeed the manager of our dreams and our futures.

The word proġett inherently implies a top-down approach - they make the decisions on all fronts, and if we are their project, then we, the people who make this nation, work in it, and contribute toward its success, are reduced to mere commodities to be utilised.

This notion erodes the very foundations of a democratic state. It puts us citizens - a supposedly strong and valid pillar of society - into a completely passive role. We simply dream, and leave the execution up to those "managing" us.

Let me remind the Labour Party and the Prime Minister: your duty is to serve, not to manage. We are a nation of citizens, not a construction site.

So why haven't we reacted? Why have we collectively scrolled past, driven past, walked past and said nothing?

I think the answer is more uncomfortable than we'd like to admit.

Part of it is the sheer volume. When you are bombarded with three out of every four billboards carrying the same message before you've even had your morning coffee, your brain doesn't analyse but absorbs. Saturation is a strategy.

It works precisely because it overwhelms the critical faculty before it has a chance to engage. Part of it is fatigue.

We have been through enough election cycles, enough slogans, enough promises painted on enough walls, that we have collectively trained ourselves to stop listening to the actual words.

Campaign language has become wallpaper. And wallpaper, by design, fades into the background. But the most uncomfortable truth is this: the slogan is seductive. "Your dream, our project" asks almost nothing of us.

We simply dream - and someone else will handle the rest. After years of watching this island be carved up, after years of showing up to protests and signing petitions and fighting for things that got built over anyway, the idea of handing it over and just dreaming can be an appealing one. It feels like rest. It feels like relief.

And that is exactly why it should alarm us. Because a citizenry that has been worn down enough to welcome being managed is a citizenry that has forgotten its own power. We are not passive dreamers waiting for someone to action our vision. We are the nation. Not their project, not their construction site, not their blueprint to execute on their timeline according to their priorities.

Tamara Fenech

The dream was never theirs to take. And it is ours to reclaim.

Tamara Fenech is a holistic strategist for Purpose-Led Women