The PN’s post-divorce dilemma

This feature appeared in MaltaToday's Wednesday edition

Is there life after divorce? The Nationalist Party certainly seems to think so. Having campaigned tooth and nail against its introduction last May – a battle it ultimately lost, despite enjoying a clear campaign funding advantage together with its comrade-in-arms, the Church – the PN now considers the entire episode to be over, and will not propose legislation to overturn the law once it comes into force in October.

“For the Nationalist Party the divorce issue is a closed chapter,” its Communications Office told MaltaToday this week, when asked if it intends to change its statutory anti-divorce position.

“The electorate decided in favour of divorce and as soon as there was a clear indication on 29 May that the Yes vote had prevailed Prime Minister and PN Leader Dr Lawrence Gonzi immediately declared that the will of the people will be respected and committed himself to ensure a parliamentary majority for divorce legislation in line with the referendum question.”

The party statement went on to observe that parliament approved this divorce legislation within months of this commitment, with the full cooperation and participation of the PN Members of Parliament.

“As a result of this, Malta’s divorce legislation will come into effect on 1 October 2011. The PN will certainly not propose to repeal this legislation.”

Significantly, however, the PN avoided specifying its intentions with regard to its declared anti-divorce platform: an issue which is understood to still divide the Nationalist Party into two discernable factions – those who, like MP Mario de Marco, publicly call for its removal in the light of the referendum result; and those who, like Austin Gatt (and former leader Eddie Fenech Adami, now in the backseat) still insist that divorce is somehow against the party’s DNA.

Flexible principles?

For all this, the dilemma for the PN remains its pre-referendum anti-divorce resolution – ‘unanimously’ adopted by show of hands during a general council meeting in February.

The resolution, to which the PN is still technically bound, states that: “thepolitical position of the Nationalist Party should remain in favour of the unity of the family and against the introduction of divorce because it feels that the introduction of divorce is not the best way to promote the value of the family since divorce changes the definition of marriage as being a permanent bond.”

Nearly all political analysts agree that this policy statement has effectively been made redundant by the Yes result obtained in the 28 May referendum.

Columnist and PN strategist Ranier Fsadni is among those to call for its removal – having argued against such intransigence even before the position was adopted. And at the most recent council meeting, guest speaker Prof. Joe Friggieri singled out this declaration, together with the outdated party motto ‘religio et patria’, as examples of the trappings that the PN needed to change in order to put this particular episode behind it.

But these considerations have clearly not factored in the political cost of abrogating this platform. For one thing, after the PN invested so much political capital in turning the divorce issue into a question of principle, it would appear unprincipled in the extreme to simply ditch its previous moral stand because it didn’t translate into the desired political result.

Any change to the present policy will almost certainly open the PN up to criticism for having traded in its cherished principles for political expediency. But there are also cogent practical reasons against changing the current policy platform before the next election: namely, that the move may automatically deprive the government of its wafer-thin parliamentary majority.

Austin’s antics

Shortly before the general council meeting in which the declaration was approved, Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt had written an article in The Times (26 January), in which he clearly threatened to resign his seat in parliament should the PN not take up a clear anti-divorce position

“I – labelled a conservative since I am anti-divorce (which goes to show the great democratic credentials of the pro-divorce lobby!) – will respect whatever decision the party takes,” he wrote a week before the general council was due to vote on its anti-divorce resolution. “If that decision goes against what I conscientiously believe in, I would resign from Parliament since I would not be able in all conscience to back a pro-divorce party, and I cannot ever expect my view prevails over the majority view.”

Gatt repeated this threat word for word shortly after the referendum result on 29 May, in answer to critics who had misconstrued the promised resignation as being somehow connected to the referendum result.

Clearly this was not the case, but in correcting this misapprehension, Gatt had no option but to outline the unexpected dilemma his article has posed for the PN.

In the light of his resignation threat – made in January and repeated in May – any change to the PN’s current anti-divorce platform will almost certainly prompt renewed calls for Gatt to make good on his word, and go.

In the extremely unlikely event that he does resign, his loss from parliament would automatically cost the government its single-seat majority: by law, necessitating fresh elections within 33 days.

Nor is it entirely clear how the party grassroots may react, considering that some of them clearly agree with former leader Fenech Adami’s insistence that the PN should defy the majority and overturn divorce legislation in spite of the referendum result.

To this end, members of an anti-divorce Facebook group claim to have already met with PN backbencher Edwin Vassallo to discuss the possibility of an abrogative referendum to cancel out the ‘Yes’ result.

It remains unclear exactly how many of the PN’s core voters agree with such plans, or how many share their party’s view of the matter as a closed chapter. Either way, it appears that the divorce issue has no intention of simply disappearing any time soon.