Tonio Borg and Alfred Sant

In more ways than one, the past few weeks should have brought a little satisfaction to pro-EU, secular Maltese who have not felt comfortable voting for either of the two major political parties.

The interplay between Maltese and European politics has once more brought into stark relief the real choice which the Maltese electorate has been faced with over the past quarter of a century: a choice between a rabidly anti-EU party and a party which - in any other part of Europe - would be considered reactionary and ultra-orthodox.

Tonio Borg's hearing in front of the EP simply proved emphatically (if proof were needed) that issues which have been woefully downplayed by a host of media players, academics and politicians back home, are actually the very stuff that politics on the continent is made up of.

Far from being an exercise in humiliation and intolerance, as some columnists would have it, the EP hearing was politics in action: the politics of principles, values and ideological debate as opposed to the politics of accommodation which we pass off for the real thing in Malta.

No wonder then, that the very same pundits who sell the line that the PN has always been some sort of natural home for a wide array of political philosophies, were first off the blocks to denounce the 'intolerance' shown by EP political groups who were doing nothing more than taking their liberal, secular, Enlightenment politics seriously.

The fundamental, and unresolved, contradictions at the heart of Maltese politics take on an even more interesting twist when one observes the hysterical reaction to Sant's announcement that he intends to contest the European Parliament elections.

His detractors fail to realise, perhaps, that their champion, Tonio Borg, garnered significant (presumably 'tolerant') support from the independentist/sovereigntist wing of the European Parliament, which would, of course, be Alfred Sant's natural political grouping if one took political ideas to their logical conclusion.

Here, then, lies the second fundamental political contradiction: it is not Sant's desire to run for the European Parliament per se which is problematic, but the fact that he will conveniently run on a Socialist ticket, notwithstanding his long-held and well-known sovereigntist views.

David Friggieri in based in Brussels.