In the patriarch’s shadow

Eddie Fenech Adami’s declaration during radio programme Ghandi x’Nghid that he still hopes a majority of  MPs will vote against divorce despite a 53% majority for divorce in the referendum, left political observers wondering whether this was simply the case of a retired politician freely speaking his mind, or a very lucid attempt by a shrewd politician to influence the course of events in his party and the country.

Party insiders tend to consider the latter scenario likelier. “When Eddie speaks he must surely have something in mind, he does not speak casually or purposelessly,” was a common comment by those familiar with the antics of the Nationalist patriarch.

So what exactly is going on inside Eddie Fenech Adami’s mind?

Probably he is shrewd enough to know that there is no chance that the divorce bill is voted down by parliament. At best, this was an attempt to embolden conservative MPs to vote No.

Surely, Fenech Adami’s thesis that MPs can freely disregard a consultative  referendum on a matter of conscience contrasts with Gonzi’s arithmetic calculus, which seeks to secure enough Yes votes to outnumber the votes of conscience, thus ensuring that the bill passes. 

And for once, Gonzi seems to have the maths on his side.

With only two Labour MPs intent on not voting for the bill, there seems to be enough Nationalist votes (ranging from the Prime Minister’s own brother Michael to Gozitan junior Minister Chris Said) to enable the bill to pass. 

Even anti-divorce hawk Austin Gatt, while reiterating his intention to vote No, has gone on record saying that the PN  will save the day “not because it believes that divorce is good for Malta but only because it recognises that the Yes won in a democratic referendum.”

What remains in doubt is whether Gonzi will be voting Yes, No, or abstaining.

By urging MPs to vote against divorce and disregarding the result of the referendum, Eddie Fenech Adami has simply made Gonzi’s already difficult situation unsustainable. 

For all three options facing Gonzi seem unattractive to the leader of a party torn between confessionalism and its equally strong liberal democratic credentials.

Moreover, his vote cannot be compared to that of a normal MP. As Prime Minister, he is expected to send a clear message whether he respects the results of a referendum or not.

If Gonzi votes No, he risks losing legitimacy with those voters who would feel that the Prime Minister will be disregarding their vote. 

But a Yes vote not only risks infuriating anti-divorce cabinet members who would like to have the Prime Minister’s backing – it would also set him on a collision course with his mentor, predecessor and maker.

Faced with a choice between the electoral death sentence of ignoring the vote of a referendum and going down in history as the Prime Minister who introduced divorce, Gonzi might feel cornered. 

One way to avoid the poisoned chalice in front of him would be by calling an election, which would probably shift the responsibility of introducing divorce to a Labour government.  But it’s hard to believe that the PN would commit such a collective hara-kiri. Another way out for Gonzi would be to resign and open the process for a new leader to be elected.  But this is also extremely unlikely.

And it is doubtful that Eddie Fenech Adami had this in mind when he expressed his explosive  thoughts on divorce. But irrespective of his intentions, Fenech Adami has  put his successor in a more awkward position, which makes a Yes vote on his part more difficult. 

But at the end of it all, Gonzi might well be hoping in a recovery at the polls in two years' time, fully knowing that he has two more years in government. And even if his electoral chances remain dim, he could still put his name in history as the Prime Minister who reformed public transport, rebuilt City Gate and kept the global economic crisis at bay. In this way, his historical legacy will not be limited to divorce.   

There is probably just one way to ensure a degree of serenity in the final two years – vote Yes for the introduction of divorce, thus closing the divorce chapter once and for all.

This is the suggestion made by PN-leaning ideologue Ranier Fsadni, who writes that Gonzi’s convictions on divorce are well known enough for a Yes vote to be interpreted as that of “a man of conscientious duty: one prepared to undergo the ordeal (for him) out of concern for a broader range of issues than those directly raised by the referendum.”

On the other hand, Fsadni sternly warns that a No vote “would see a large part of the electorate dismiss first his conscience, then his government.”

But the current parliamentary schedule, through which a final vote will only take place after the summer recess, means  that there will be no quick closure to the divorce issue and a No vote on Gonzi’s part could leave some elements in his government bitter.  

Re-exhuming the Mintoff syndrome

Fenech Adami has also unwittingly unleashed the spectre which once haunted former labour leaders Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant: that of a powerful former party leader determined to continue pulling the strings and refusing to vanish from history. 

Both Mintoff – the architect of the welfare state – and Eddie Fenech Adami – the liberator in 1987 and the “father of European Malta” in 2003 – dwarfed their successors in stature and historical accomplishments. 

Relieved from the onerous duties of lacklustre presidency, Fenech Adami could not remain silent while seeing the broad church he diligently built begin to fall apart. 

And in a bid to avert the impending disaster, Fenech Adami did advise Gonzi against holding a referendum, arguing that moral issues should not be decided in referenda.  His advice was only heeded at a very late stage, when a party resolution forced Gonzi to backtrack from his original idea to hold a referendum, relegating it to a double insurance policy in the unlikely scenario of parliament approving divorce. 

But by then, it was too late to avoid the referendum, as Labour leader Joseph Muscat was able to exploit divisions in the PN camp to force through the referendum. 

After an initial sortie in which he expressed pride in Malta being one of two countries in the world without divorce, Fenech Adami was largely absent during the campaign of a referendum which he would have rather avoided.

But he spoke very clearly after the referendum. 

While saying that MPs should take note of the result, they are free to disregard it since it is not binding and deals with a matter of conscience which should not have been put to a referendum in the first place. In this sense, he remained consistent with his original position.

But his disregard for the will of the majority expressed in the divorce referendum evokes contrasts with Fenech Adami’s role in history as the leader at the helm of a national resistance against Mintoff and KMB’s post 1981 minority governments.  In a discursive coup, Fenech Adami managed to make the word “maggoranza” [majority] synonymous with Nationalist Party. It also evokes contrasts with his party’s call on Labour to respect the referendum on EU membership.

But there is a certain consistency in Fenech Adami’s argument.  For in his mind-frame, the idea of a referendum on divorce was an aberration. Neither does he feel bound by the rules of democracy when dealing with so-called moral issues. Ironically, the former PN leader justifies his stance by making an arbitrary distinction between  sacred and profane, between issues where MPs should always vote according to conscience and issues where they should respect democracy.

According to Fenech Adami, the difference between the referendum in 2003 – in which the electorate was asked whether it wants Malta to join the EU – and the recent divorce referendum, was that while the former was purely political, the latter is “looking to challenge our social values.”

This raises the question; who is to decide which issues affect values or not? What makes issues like divorce intrinsically different from issues related to, say, the transfer of national sovereignty?

Curiously, instead of giving a helping hand to Gonzi in healing the cracks in the coalition of liberals, moderates and conservatives which gave the PN a majority in  every election except one between 1981 and 2008, Fenech Adami seems to be more concerned in his party’s ideological purity and place in history.

Eddie’s coalition

One could explain Fenech Adami’s current intransigence by the fact that he was never put in a position where he had to sacrifice “morality” to democracy.

Simply put, Labour was always there, ready to serve him with the glue to keep his coalition of liberals and conservatives together, whether the issue was normalisation in the 1980s or EU membership in the late 1990s.

He could even get away with murder, facing very little opposition when he ceded sovereignty to the church by recognising the temporal power of ecclesiastical courts in 1995.

The opening up of markets, increased consumerism, media pluralism and the growth of the leisure industry, along with the party culture throughout the 1990s also gave the impression to many of us who grew up during those times that Malta was gradually changing and becoming more like the rest of the world.

In many ways, these economic and social changes could well have paved the way for  greater secularisation. One expected the ideological superstructure to respond to changes in the social and economic infrastructure of society.

But the standard answer was: “its not yet the time for these things.”

In the 1990s, Fenech Adami felt confident enough to respond to calls for the introduction of divorce, not by quoting the Bible – as he did more recently – but by arguing that its introduction was still not inevitable.

And at that time, cultural conservatives felt no need to expose themselves to defend the theocratic edifice which was effectively protected by Fenech Adami’s government. This spared a whole generation from listening to extremist and loony arguments to which they were exposed for the first time in the past few months. It was only when threatened that worms came out of the woodworks.  

Coupled to this ability to deflect secular change by bringing about other fundamental changes was his larger-than-life stature.

In this way, the PN was able to grow in to a mass popular party, which included both traditionalists and social liberals.

In fact, the latest MaltaToday survey shows that 8.5% of the 400 respondents contacted voted PN in 2008 and voted Yes for divorce in the referendum. This would bring the total of pro divorce Nationalist to around 26,000 voters.  

But this could be a conservative estimate, and the number could be closer to 40,000 –  when one considers that surveys have consistently showed around a quarter of PN voters to be pro-divorce.

Of particular note is the fact that the predominantly Nationalist ninth district, which rewarded Lawrence Gonzi with 11,000 votes in 2008, 54% voted Yes in the divorce referendum.

While definitely not constituting the majority of PN voters, ‘liberal Nationalists’ are a powerful force to be reckoned with, especially in the absence of any powerful rallying cry, which necessarily keeps them in coalition with cultural conservatives.

In fact, given the first chance to vote in the first election for the European parliament, 23,000 voted for AD candidate Arnold Cassola, who scored his best results in the predominantly Nationalist ninth and tenth districts: both districts which voted Yes in last month’s referendum.

After losing all its mid term tests, in 2008 the PN, led by Gonzi, found a way to heal the cracks in its coalition; first by endorsing green issues and then by promising tax cuts to galvanise its middle class core vote. In this way, GonziPN managed to scrape through to power with a one-seat majority, which ultimately made the divorce referendum possible. 

Recovering that winning coalition of liberals and conservatives built by Fenech Adami has now become an issue of life or death for his successor. Ironically, the coalition builder of yesterday could now be destroying what he had built over three decades.