Looking back at 2021 | Illiberals under COVID

In July 2021, some 250 protestors convened in Valletta for a spontaneous ‘freedom rally’ in which demonstrators chanted “no vaccine” and “libertà, libertà”. Since late 2020, a group billing itself as Health Human Alliance had been opposing face-masks, mandatory vaccines, and then public health restrictions of all kinds. 

Malta’s anti-vaxxers have remained on the fringes of society so far. But it is striking to find so many like-minded ‘illiberals’ fitting into this category. These are the people who have been militantly intolerant to the changes brought on a society – white, patriarchal, religious, heterosexual and cisgender – they can no longer claim to rule. Here one will find a motley collection of solo activists, religious preachers, third-party politicians, so-called ‘parents groups’, and a few MPs, attempting to dead-leg any sort of legislation that denudes them of the power they previously had (or thought they had). 

But intriguing to see how an opposition to science, or the belief that a global conspiracy is afoot by the pharmaceutical-government complex, can breathe renewed vigour to the very same illiberals who come together to oppose immigration, sexual health and reproductive rights, and gender equality. 

It would be too hard to find commonalities in such a heterogenous group as Maltese anti-vaxxers. A decent amount of COVID-sceptics hail from the Italian community, themselves witnesses to mass anti-vax protests in Italy, one of the worst-hit nations in the pandemic. In October, thousands of anti-vaccine demonstrators mobilised across the country, and in Rome leaders of the far-right New Force and other gang members were arrested. That kind of violence is unheard of in Malta, but members of the far-right and anti-immigration protagonists can be found in these crowds – like Raymond Ambrogio, a former police officer who convened a counter-protest to the Black Lives Matters memorial to Lassana Cisse in June 2020. 

Today Ambrogio is a member of the new right-wing Partit Popolari led by Paul Salomone. Despite attending the first anti-vax protest, Ambrogio still got vaccinated against COVID-19, but is against the use of face masks and ‘green passes’ that discriminate against unvaccinated. 

Partit Popolari itself promoted a ‘People’s Choice for Freedom’ protest on 18 December under the aegis of its association with Tom Meert’s Europeans United – a lobby that militates against COVID passports, rather than the vaccine. Nobody wants to die from COVID. 

Similar to PP, armed with equally religious conviction for its conservative cause, is Ivan Grech Mintoff’s Partit Abba, who also led anti-vaxxer protests in Valletta together with recruit and ex-gay activist Matthew Grech from the River Of Love evangelist congregation. On his Facebook, Grech celebrates the absence of face-masks at an airport in Hungary even for the non-vaccinated. Like him, River Of Love pastor Gordon John Manché is an avowed sceptic of COVID transmission and facemasks. 

But the presence of these right-wing, religious conservatives in the ‘anti-vax’ or COVID-sceptic movement has not excluded participation of ecologists like the lawyer Rudolph Ragonesi and an array of libertarians who are openly opposed to the right wing. 

Clearly, their mistruct of health restrictions mandated by COVID-19, and the power emergency measures confer to governments and civil servants, reflects a similar mistrust of institutional power elsewhere: the scientific establishment for one, which enables the wealth and influence of Big Pharma; a natural partner of that scientific establishment is often secularism, for it is here that science finds its political platform; and more often that not, where science and secular values are revered, humanism and civil rights follow. 

It is no surprise then that Malta’s anti-vaxxer minority is weaponised by fringe right-wing parties as another ‘culture war’. Like right-wing Catholic cleric David Muscat, who rails against the discrimination of vaccination passepartouts as ‘bourgeouis’, when his own advice “to defeating the pandemic is... prayer, penance, and amendment of life.” To Muscat’s ilk, the concept of humanist ethics or science-based policy, is seen as ‘bourgeouis’ privilege because it poses a threat to religious fundamentalism and a perceived system of white, patriarchal, religious, heterosexual and cisgender norms. 

When suddenly that system is upended by the entire electoral programme of a centre-left government – equal marriage and civil unions, IVF for all women irrespective of marital status, same-sex adoption, gender identity rights – even a serious pandemic becomes a rallying point for illiberals. 

As Marlene Laruelle of George Washington University (IERES) comments, reactions to the pandemic have largely depended on certain features of national cultures, such as individuals’ compliance with collective habits, sense of civic duty, public trust, and respect for government decisions. That explains Malta’s high vaccine take-up and compliance with public health restrictions and lockdowns in the context of strong support and trust in the governing Labour administration, and a strong social spending programme during the pandemic. 

Indeed, Malta lacks any of the “entrenched defiance of state decisions” one sees in the United States, with opponents of state-funded healthcare starting with the ‘Tea Party’; or in France with the 2018 ‘Yellow Jackets’ protests on rising fuel prices and tax burden. In these countries, Laruelle writes, the COVID backlash revealed “socioeconomic lines of friction rarely exposed in pre-pandemic times. For instance, blue-collar workers, who are already the most economically vulnerable, have been the ones whose jobs could not be shifted online.” 

But in Malta, a €1 billion public spend on wage subsidies and other economic programmes for businesses, transfer payments to keep consumption up, and even subsidies on energy and rents, helped balance out the restrictions of freedom brought about by COVID-19 with job security. 

In Laruelle’s word, illiberalism can be seen as “our own inner ambivalences toward how we live together and which rules should regulate this togetherness.” 

Only that in Malta, a social pact that strikes the right balance between security and privacy, popular approval for Maltese doctors and its public health system, and a strong press that amplifies knowledge of science, as well as abuse or unfairness on COVID measures, have been key in keeping a sense of national cohesion. 

It is no wonder that, shorn of real motivation to oppose vaccines or public health restrictions, Malta’s COVID sceptics belong to the same groups that the Equality Act, the religious zealots who support “anti-woke” firebands like Donald Trump, post conspiratorial links on COVID-19 vaccines by Maltese far-right activists like Moviment Patriotti Maltin, and view any sort of government regulation in favour of equality as “communism” or “cultural Marxism”.