PN cannot afford to be divorced from reality

After a long day at the counting hall last Sunday, Rachel Attard and I went for a quick drive through the 9th and 10th districts, stopping in Sliema for a drink.

An eerie atmosphere of normality reigned everywhere. There wasn’t the slightest sign that these Nationalist strongholds had delivered the biggest Yes majorities against the party’s position.

Meanwhile, as Karmenu Vella, the architect of Labour’s next electoral programme, extolled Joseph Muscat’s statesmanlike ‘victory’ on my car speakers, the mobile phone chimed with text messages reporting pockets of celebration near Labour clubs in the south.

The irony was quite telling. Nationalist, not Labour voters had just introduced divorce to Malta. Yet it was all quiet on the northern front where most of the former live and mildly jubilant on the southern one where most of the latter do.

Demographically and historically, every plebiscite the PN wins is always a little miracle.

A natural party of government, it is nevertheless destined to govern majorities inclined to oppose it.

It won six of the past seven elections by being a broad church, cobbling together a shifting and wobbly coalition of economic, social, religious and cultural forces. Two things keep the PN’s act together: its prescience to be on the right side of history and, despite its warts and faults, that it can be relied on to do the decent thing.

This referendum has shown what happens when the PN veers away from this well-trodden path.

The seeds of the PN’s debacle on divorce were sown early, when religious convictions were allowed to prevail over political ones. As I wrote in The Times on the campaign’s last day, the No argument was a national card trick: religious belief passing itself off as dispassionate rational thought. It was faith wrapped up in a secular cloak to justify a political decision which has no basis in faith. Not surprisingly, the result was a mess.

On that fateful day in February when the party executive took a position against divorce there were at least 12 men, including MPs and cabinet members, who were either in favour of divorce, or believed the party should not take a position, or that it should tread very carefully. One of them was even going to propose divorce for childless broken marriages.

Alas, these gentlemen remained meek as lambs on that day. A cloud of incense descen­ded on the proceedings and the rest is history.

It must have been a pretty thick cloud. Judging by the stunned and shell-shocked PN stumbling around since Sunday it looks like it is facing the key question for the first time: what position would the government be in if the party took an anti-divorce position and the Yes won?

It is striking what religious intoxication or fear of it can do to perfectly rational men.

Before the referendum, the natural party of government had morphed into a naïve fringe party.

By Maltese standards a 53 per cent majority is a landslide. But there’s more to it. An analysis of the orientations of the 28 per cent who did not vote – and I am not talking consulting tea leaves here – shows that a comfortable majority of them were inclined to vote Yes. Various reasons – from anti-Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando to anti-Labour sentiments – decided to stay put.

Then there was also the question of inequality of arms. Making the fair assumption that the political and media power of the PN and PL cancelled each other out, Deborah Schembri carried the day against massive odds.

With only the independent media on her side, she prevailed over the Church, its pulpits, TV programmes, radios, websites and newspapers, and a professionally run No movement. While constantly fire-fighting the foolishness and deviousness of some of her own motley crew.

So make no mistake about it – there are more men and women with liberal views than even this landslide suggests. It is a Malta that has been gently evolving for over two decades. It threw out Labour in 1987, voted for Alfred Sant, got fed up with him and then rallied for Europe.

It is a Malta which cast its ballot for divorce and after the result continued to chat about football, summer fashion trends and the next trip abroad. This result has shown that the Church is not the Nationalist Party at prayer.

The PN was never a liberal party and highly unlikely to become one. Yet it was always the welcoming home of genuine liberals. If it starts to make them feel like unwanted guests rather than household members, as it did over the divorce issue, it would be signing its own electoral death warrant.

It was the first – and last – warning sign.