Lawrence Gonzi’s op-ed in this newspaper on Tuesday quickly made the headlines. He wrote at white heat in response to a statement by Minister Helena Dalli that seemed equivocal on abortion (later clarified as a strong stand against abortion). He began with a question (“After gay adoption, what’s next?”) and ended with another (“What are we going to do about it?”). They were, however, only two sides of the same interrogating look the former prime minister threw at civil society.

However, it’s also the sharp look of a man who knows that, in the very spirited defence of the party he once led, he is exposing its current limitations.

Make no mistake, the look was directed at civil society, whatever you may have been told. In one newspaper, his address to “those of you who are still sitting on the fence, keeping their eyes and ears closed” was interpreted as a reference to the Nationalist Party’s parliamentary group. Nonsense. Only one line before, Gonzi had justified the PN’s choice of abstention, calling it “a valid answer”. He could hardly do that and round on the PN in the very next sentence.

However, he did implicitly criticise it. But to see how, on what, and why, one has first to appreciate his fierce defence of its parliamentary vote.

Gonzi believes that in Parliament the PN did the right thing and all it could. In yet another section of the press, Gonzi was said to have been backtracking on his own stance some 15 months ago. Actually, he’s being entirely consistent. He’s always said that adoption policy is there for the best protection of the child’s interests; and he’s now saying that to present it as having to do with the emancipation of adults is either deceptive or deeply misguided.

Part of the article was therefore an indignant response to the way his name was bandied about in the debate, with him being portrayed as having held a position identical to that of the Labour government.

But in defending the PN’s actions on the issue, he also shows the party’s limitations. He acknowledges that the government just steamrollered over the Opposition. Not just in Parliament, since with a seven-seat majority that’s easy. The steamroller also operated in society at large. The approach that Gonzi himself endorses sank without a trace in the public arena. It failed to mobilise any significant public show of support.

Let’s spell this out because I think it brings out the predicament that the former party leader himself left implicit.

First, the adoption law itself was controversial and widely considered to be a major piece of legislation.

Second, poll numbers may vary, as might their interpretation, but there is no doubt that a majority of people are at best unconvinced, at this stage, that the law is in children’s best interests. (This column, incidentally, argued that it was.)

Third, some background. In private, many such people, including professionals in childcare-related fields, voiced their concern with PN MPs. No doubt, Gonzi was also at the receiving end of such concerns.

Fourth, however, when the PN led the charge against adoption-access in the name of the very people who are concerned, it ended up looking like the lonely charge of the Light Brigade. There is no doubt in my mind that even if it had voted No, the same would have happened.

These circumstances give rise to a paradox. The more fiercely one defends the PN’s course of action, the more one implicitly indicts it on another count. One effectively ends up saying that the best the party can do doesn’t make a difference. It speaks in the name of people who remain silent and, therefore, ends up sounding like no one’s voice other than its own.

In defending the PN’s actions on the issue, he also shows the party’s limitations

Some of you might say that perhaps the real predicament is that people at large aren’t too concerned, after all. And, indeed, the ghost of that thought does hover in Gonzi’s article. That’s what explains the sharpness of the address to the “fence-sitters” when asking them to contemplate “what comes next abortion, surrogacy, IVF... “Please note, the floodgates are wide open.”

He’s addressing the “fence-sitters” again when he asks, “What are we going to do about it?”. The “we” clearly is the wider society. Gonzi is echoing Simon Busuttil’s own public statements about how, he says, civil society has been cowed into silence by Joseph Muscat’s electoral majority.

That, at any rate, is their diagnosis. Whether, over the next four years, civil society responds or ignores the PN will depend on several issues. But one in particular looms large and needs to be tackled urgently.

It’s the issue of how the PN represents itself. It has currently taken to representing itself as a coalition of liberals and conservatives. In doing so, it evidently believes that it is representing a wider division in Maltese society.

The belief is deeply misguided. Such a division may well be true of politicians and commentators, who thrive on resonant battle cries and flags nailed to the mast; and who like to think it’s all in the name of a deeply worked-out philosophy, not mere opinion. It may even be true, to some extent, of a country like the US (although the electoral results suggest it’s nowhere near what the pundits like to suggest).

But Malta? The divorce debate saw the blurring of such lines, with different opinions within the same families, including some with kinship to senior clerics or strong commitments in Church organisations. Gay adoption has also seen a blurring of the lines, with a significant segment opposed that might otherwise qualify as textbook ‘liberals’.

The conventional divide makes little sense of the facts on the ground. And one can understand the reluctance of members of civil society to come forward if, in that way, they are going to be tagged with a label they don’t recognise as describing them.

In addition, many people who self-identify as liberals just aren’t – not in the sense of subscribing to a liberal raft of policies. Ditto for conservatives. Ordinary people get to hone their political views in response to issues they care about. Until recently, Maltese politics just wasn’t structured along lines which could be made sense of in liberal/conservative terms.

Expecting the world to conform to concepts is a mistake. And modelling a party as an alliance of two groups that don’t quite exist on the ground is a sure way to appear out of touch.

Journalists love the labels because they simplify their work. But to ordinary people the division comes across as dogmatic and sectarian – quite unlike their own view of themselves. They don’t focus on the idea of ‘alliance’; they focus on the idea of two groups in philosophical disagreement trying to get on with each other. It sounds more like a troubled marriage than a political party.

And their leader, no matter the innate gifts, will come across as a party manager, or family therapist, mediating between other people’s visions, rather than someone who can lead the country with a vision of his own.

ranierfsadni@europe.com