Just over a third of Maltese people expressed trust in the legal system, an Eurobarometer survey found.
Only 35 per cent of Maltese people felt trust in the justice and legal system, compared with the 50 per cent in EU countries who said they “tended” to trust the legal institutions.
The survey was conducted in November, after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
At the time of the survey, which carried out 503 face-to-face interviews, no one had yet been charged with her murder.
The assassination and June’s general election were likely to have had an impact on the responses, the survey noted.
Fifty-eight per cent of respondents in Malta expressed satisfaction with the way democracy works in the country, while 39 per cent expressed dissatisfaction with the way democracy works.
A media trust index developed on the basis of the Eurobarometer survey also found that over half of the Maltese do not trust the media.
Only 14 per cent of respondents in Malta have a high level of trust in the media, compared to 53 per cent who have a low level or no trust in the media, the index found. The number of people who do not trust the media is almost identical to the amount of people, 51 per cent, who said they trusted the Maltese government.
The figure is significantly larger than the EU average. Only 36 per cent of EU citizens said they trusted their government.
Malta also ranked higher than the EU average when it came to trust in political parties, with 21 per cent saying they tend to trust parties, compared to the EU average of 18 per cent.
Respondents were also presented with a set of issues and asked to choose the two most important ones that Malta was facing at the time.
The issue that received most mentions was crime, included by 45 per cent of respondents. The issue that received the next most mentions was immigration (32 per cent), followed by the environment, climate and energy (22 per cent), housing (12 per cent), the education system (11 per cent) and rising prices (10 per cent).
Maltese people also felt very positive about the EU and membership, the survey found, with over 77 per cent believing that the country would not face a better future outside the EU.