In the past months since I’ve been Opposition leader, I’ve mainly met two kinds of people: those who are hopeful and those who feel helpless.

One thing we have in common is that we have all been deeply affected, traumatised even, by what has happened in Malta in the last few years.

Even though many of us have done better financially (in many ways thanks to the injection of EU funds since 2004), the last few years have also been decidedly disturbing, for Labourites, Nationalists and the undecided alike.

One of the reasons for this has been the visible rise in organised crime and corruption.

For those who voted PN in 2017, there was also shock in seeing the electorate choose to elect Joseph Muscat again, despite everything we knew back then.

And then fresh trauma when Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed barely a few months later, not to mention the confusion within the PN in the years that followed.

For those who believed in Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, it was shocking to see them betray their own party, voters and ideology so brazenly. Chris Fearne’s recent speech in parliament expressed that sense of disbelief loudly and clearly.

But even the destruction of much of our country’s beauty has affected us all, with the radical increase in construction all around us, characterised by evidently poor infrastructural vision, lack of enforcement and the bulldozing of one green space after another.

And that’s without even mentioning Covid…

All this national trauma has left many of us lost, depressed even.

I regu­larly meet people who are sad all the time, who have little to no motivation, who engage in a lot of negative self-talk, about themselves, their political party, their country, their future.

Yet others, myself included, are hopeful. We believe things can still change. We have a sense of urgency. We’re motivated to find solutions and we understand that the solutions lie in our own hands.

Nevertheless, I understand those who feel helpless. Whether it’s the failure of our education system, the injustices in the justice system, Malta’s declining repu­tation or our economy’s greylisting.

If you’ve felt very low before, as I have, you know how difficult it is to take the steps towards recovery. Nothing anybody tells you resonates.

For me, I found hope in my family, especially my children. Their own resilience and hopefulness was conta­gious when I needed them most.

As Opposition leader, I don’t presume to have all the answers. But I am completely dedicated to finding the solutions we all need and taking the action that has to be taken. We’ve achieved huge changes already. But there is still much more to do, and to do it, we need to inspire hope in each other.

We need to share our ideas. We need to be open to each other. And most importantly, we need to believe that we can fix the problems we all see in our society.

Time is ticking, and if we don’t unite to heal this country, we stand to lose most of what we’ve all worked so hard to achieve.

So let’s work together to make our justice system fairer and more efficient, to make our industrial sectors more sustainable and our villages more liveable, and to find long-term solutions to our transport sector.

Let’s tax people fairly and make sure we use tax money for people, not against them. Let’s get real experts involved at every level, from policy to delivery. Let’s reward hard work and good ideas. Let’s attract the right investments to Malta and let’s make it easy for Maltese to invest overseas. Let’s make sure the world knows about Malta for the right reasons.

Let’s stop blaming each other for endemic problems instead of working with each other to finally solve them.

We especially need young people to lead the way, for their dreams to shine, for their aspirations to take hold and for their hopefulness to resonate with everybody else.

I am committed to bringing hope back to Malta.

If you are also hopeful, join me in this mission.