A Dubai in the Mediterranean

My colleague Matthew Vella has written a hard-hitting, uncompromising blogpost about the network underpinning Malta’s anti-divorce movement which should serve as an eye-opener to all those gullible enough to believe that old, terribly misleading, chestnut that the divorce issue “shouldn’t be politicized”.

Indeed, divorce doesn’t just throw us straight into the political arena (its rightful place to be taken up by serious parties) but also makes it patently clear that ideology is very much at play here.

Inevitably, I would say, when you have key government ministers making references to weeping Madonnas to bolster their argument. It’s not as if Tonio Fenech is some peripheral character in the Nationalist scheme of things who comes out of nowhere to play a ten-second cameo role.

As long as the divorce issue was confined to a couple of more-or-less cosmopolitan-minded PN-leaning opinion columnists, several people could live under the mistaken illusion that the PN was actually a very “broad church”, as the saying went. Liberals, we were told, could live comfortably within the PN fold. Quite evidently, to use another expression which has been flogged to death, the chickens have really come home to roost with a vengeance.

Can you really imagine any liberal in mainland Europe “living comfortably” with a government minister who so brazenly meshes potted logic and religious iconography to prove a political point?

And yet, here in Malta, land of topsy-turvy politics and home-grown idiosyncrasies where far-right leaders praise leaders of left-wing parties for “having their heart in the right place”, it’s quite OK for liberals to support politicians who wheel out their favourite religious icon as a political argument.

Right across the power networks in this fair land, people appease, look the other way, remain absolutely silent or attempt to convince you that “everyone’s the same at the end of the day, there’s no real alternative to the guys in power”.

There is, of course, a fairly straightforward reason for this state of affairs and it’s quite fitting that two central players militating in the Zwieg Bla Divorzju lobby group, André Camilleri and Arthur Galea Salomone, hail from the financial services and banking worlds. For when you look closely at the way things are panning out in this whole divorce saga, you get a rather precise picture of Maltese power networks in 2011.

This country is certainly neither Afghanistan nor Iran, as some frustrated individuals hyperbolically claim from time to time on online comment boards as a reaction to what they (rightly) perceive to be the ever-increasing meshing of church and state under the Gonzi administration.

The moniker “Taliban” has become a bit like the f-word these days, used so glibly that it’s become entirely shorn of its original meaning and, I suspect, taken with more than a pinch of salt by the people it’s addressed to. You can actually imagine Austin Bencini, that third horseman of the divorce apocalypse, brushing it off with a trademark “u ejja x’ezagerazzjoni!”

And yet this country under this administration doesn’t feel quite European either. For all our technological advances and glossy lifestyle magazines, the Enlightenment hasn’t quite taken root here.

And how could it when the movers and shakers, the guys occupying the hot seats over the past quarter of a century, have either appeased or enthusiastically embraced the Fenech Adami-Gonzi ideology, while most liberal thinkers and intellectuals simply look on as if nothing was amiss? It’s no surprise that compared to the fairly makeshift Yes camp, the No lobby appears to be a well-oiled machine: that air of respectability, the management strategy, the notebook full of contacts in high places, the direct links to the seats of power.

Matthew Vella was spot on when he homed in on the key factor underlying the divorce debate beyond the inconsequential arguments, technical niceties and convoluted logic: the power network which has successfully meshed Western capitalism and aggressive development with a blurring of the distinction between Church and State, turning Malta not into Iran or Afghanistan but into an altogether different type of place. Dubai.