The trouble with Malta is that, because of its insignificant size, it suffers from the political equivalent of short-person syndrome. It is precisely because of its lack of physical impact that it makes so much noise and wants to be noticed all the time. The latest such example is the EU divorce debacle.

Many excessively short people, most especially men, suffer from a Napoleonic complex. They are avid attention-seekers who go through adult life demanding their rightful place in the spotlight. The smaller they are, the more assertive they try to be, and when they are in positions of power this can present a problem, hence Napoleon. Virtually every man in the country’s most prominent positions is very short, and this is neither a coincidence nor the result of a DNA mix which has made Malta a nation of toy soldiers. It’s because short men are often driven to prove themselves in a way that tall men are not. As a general rule, the desire to be taken notice of is in inverse proportion to one’s size.

You will see this even in dogs. Those most prone to loud, irritating and persistent yapping are the smallest and the most ridiculous in their ineffectual aggression – poodles and Chihuahuas – while huge mastiffs, confident of intimidating by sheer bulk alone, are completely silent. In blocking the EU’s action on divorce, Malta has rendered itself the Chihuahua of Europe.

Dom Mintoff used to do this kind of thing in his heyday, yapping loudly on the international stage and obstructing this and that. His knew-no-better supporters used to admire him for it, seeing him as a kind of David who took on Goliath and won. But to those he tried to obstruct he was just an irritating Chihuahua or mosquito. Whip out the muzzle, whiz out the Flit, and that’s that sorted. If the government wishes to have an accurate assessment of how its decision is perceived now, it should remember how Mintoff’s obstructionist tactics were perceived then.

It’s not just the bad behaviour of obstructionism that people are bothered about. They have read the government’s move as damning evidence that, as far as divorce goes, Malta will be the last country left standing. Our fate as the divorce freak-show of the world and a Trivial Pursuit question (“Which is the only country in the world without divorce legislation?”) seems assured.

* * *

The curious thing about the government’s decision to block the EU-wide initiative on divorce is that it believes the people are on its side. Where on earth did it get this idea? Some time ago I wrote that the chief reason for the government’s detachment from popular reality is the homogeneity of its make-up: an overwhelming mass of ultra-conservative lawyers, the sort who refer to their old school as “college”. The net result is that the government is speaking to itself, hearing the echo, and thinking that the people share its views. They patently do not.

All of this makes me sad rather than angry. The political views that made me an avid and determined supporter of the last government – a firm belief in freedom and respect for the autonomy and dignity of the individual, as expressed in the goal of EU membership – are the ones that have made me so annoyed with this government. I see nothing in it that represents me or my fairly liberal views. On the contrary, I see it as the enemy of much I hold dear.

The government’s public image is now one of repressive bigotry. It has banged the drums of the maverick Gift of Life Movement too loudly and too long. The deputy prime minister has been scathingly dismissive of liberals (thank you, sir – perhaps you no longer need our vote). And is it my imagination, or are the various bishops and archbishops all over the place and in the news, in a way that they were not a few years ago? It is hard to shake off the bothersome notion that they’re hard at work pulling the strings of those who run the country. And those who run the country cannot understand that they have not been elected to impose their religious values and personal opinions on the rest of us, but to knock the economy, education and healthcare into shape. You don’t get that kind of thing done by waving your rosary beads around.

I ask myself now: can I vote for a core group of people whose views are so different to my own? The answer is no. The trouble is that I am even more uncomfortable with the opinions and attitudes of the prime movers of the other two political parties. I know that I am not alone in this quandary and that like me there are many thousands. The last time around, the Nationalist Party had a positive win at the polls when people voted for EU membership rather than against Labour. If the Nationalist Party is re-elected this time, it will be by default on the strength of votes against Alfred Sant rather than for Lawrence Gonzi. Dr Gonzi is a very nice man indeed and I like him a lot, but I don’t want to vote for a very nice man whom I like a lot. I want to vote for somebody whose political views I share.

I certainly do not share the views of those politicians who are led by the nose by a bunch of Gift-of-Lifers, who came out of nowhere and now want to tamper with the Constitution to satisfy their personal obsessions. How dare they? Nor do I share the political views of those who think that because divorce was a no-no in the past, it remains a no-no in the present, and will be a no-no until the end of time. The mixing of religion and politics makes me queasy. As another columnist, Kenneth Zammit Tabona – who as it so happens is a fervent and devout Catholic, unlike me – has pointed out already, the essence of Catholicism is free will. It is not whether the country has divorce legislation that should matter to Catholics, but whether they choose to use it. What others who are not Catholics choose to do about divorce is their own business, and not the concern of Catholics. The world is packed solid with divorced Catholics, in any case. Perhaps the government is worried about enacting a divorce law because it believes that the Catholics of Malta have to be protected against themselves and the danger of apostasy. There might be a rush of Catholics to make full use of it, you see, as there was in Chile when the divorce law came into effect two years ago. There were 50,000 divorce petitions in the first few days. With Chile having joined the real world, Malta is left standing alone with the Philippines – hardly salubrious political company, but then neither was Pinochet’s Chile. Maybe that’s why he got the Catholic funeral that Piergiorgio Welby was refused: because he held out against divorce. That must have won him brownie points with the Vatican, despite the mass torture and murder.

* * *

I cannot see how the government failed to predict the obvious: that with all the major political issues tumbled like skittles by the fact of EU membership, the elephant in the room – divorce – would become bright-red and neon-lit, and impossible to ignore any longer. So far, the government has succeeded in convincing itself that divorce is not an issue because there are no large crowds marching on the Auberge de Castille with banners that scream out “We want divorce now!” Hilariously, it has been the one to spark off the debate it was trying to avoid, with its Chihuahua behaviour on the European stage. Politicians in government shouldn’t wait until people are marching in the streets and writing letters to the newspapers before they start to listen and take note. If I, a mere columnist with no surveys at my fingertips, have managed to sense the public mood on this particular issue, then I cannot understand how the government has failed to do so. More extraordinary still is the Labour leader’s assertion that divorce is not an issue because there is no debate about it. Somebody should grab both party leaders by their ankles and anchor them to earth before they float off into the stratosphere.

If the government has failed to pick up the fundamental shift in popular opinion on divorce, then it should be worried. On the other hand, if it has picked up the mood but refuses to act, then we should be worried. The government is there to do what we want it to do, and not the other way round. Yet I don’t think the government has picked up the public mood. Had it done so, it would not have blocked the EU’s action on divorce, and more so, it would not have boasted about this to journalists. What did the government expect: wild applause from the devout Maltese as they celebrate with their pogguti and their bastidz? I use deliberately these two once-common derogatory words. Now that the absence of divorce has made Malta a nation of pogguti and bastidz, and every family has some of either one or the other and usually of both, those terms of abuse are no longer used.

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There has been a great deal said about why the government did what it did. The only thing that interests me is the claimed motive of the government itself: that it wants to avoid “the potential risk” of judges in the Maltese court being obliged to hand down divorce judgements to non-Maltese couples in accordance with the law of another country with which they are connected. Before you blink about this, you should be aware that Maltese judges have for years been deciding cases according to the laws of other countries in the sphere of private international law. So what’s the big deal if they might one day also have to include divorce for non-Maltese couples in the list of other things they have to decide, on the basis of expert opinion? Why does the government think of this in terms of “a potential risk”? This is not avian flu we’re talking about. The answer, I suspect, is not that the government fears the souls of judges will be condemned to rot in hell if they are obliged to give divorce decrees to heathen foreigners, but that Maltese people will rightly feel discriminated against – or to put it crudely, p**sed off – if they see foreigners getting in Malta’s court the very divorce which they are denied.

People have been complaining for decades about the gross unfairness of a legal situation in which they cannot get a divorce in Malta, but can get their divorce recognised here if they have some way of getting one in another jurisdiction. Just imagine how loud the anger will grow if non-Maltese couples can get a divorce in the Maltese court, while Maltese couples have to go overseas to get one. That, I believe, is what the government wants to avoid. But with its now-typical lack of perception and insight, in seeking to avoid making people angry, it has made them even angrier.

* * *

When The Times – whose readership includes the most conservative elements in Maltese society – asked people for their views on the matter in an on-line poll, the overwhelming majority said that divorce is necessary. They were scathing about the government’s stance, which they see as Quixotic, in blocking the EU action. The newspaper said that the comments came almost entirely from those who feel that “it is high time the government brings Malta out of the Middle Ages and into the 21st century”. The point was made that whether Catholics agree or not is irrelevant, because the Constitution guarantees religious freedom. And religious freedom, of course, includes the freedom to refuse religious rules, and the freedom from having the rules of even your espoused religion imposed on you by the State.

The grounds for the government’s refusal to legislate for divorce are purely religious. This means that the government has failed once more in its obligation not to be an agent of the Church. It failed in this in the mid-1990s when it allowed the Church to interfere in amendments to the Marriage Act, as a condition of the Church’s cooperation on the transfer of ownership of its property. That’s when the Church won the coup by which one spouse can prevent the other spouse from seeking an annulment in the civil court, by claiming a desire to have the marriage declared null by the Church.

The fatuous argument that divorce is a social evil, which is why the heroes of government are staving it off, is embarrassing. It is not divorce per se that causes the social problems, but the breakdown of marriages – and Maltese marriages are breaking down in their thousands even without divorce. With this reasoning, the government is saying that every other country in the world – except for the Philippines, which doesn’t have divorce either – is wrong. Only Malta, l’ombelico del mondo, is right. To refuse secular legislation on religious grounds makes the government no better than those Islamic States we look down on for insisting on sharia law.

The Prime Minister and his deputy, for they are mainly responsible for this burgeoning of Catholic bigotry as a form of government, are like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. You cannot stave off the inevitable forever. As one respondent to the newspaper poll put it, “Although I oppose divorce as a matter of principle, the more Malta waits to legislate, the more catastrophic the consequences for society.” That’s an accurate summation of the general view. We may not like divorce or want it for ourselves. We may not even approve of it. But we can see that it’s bloody necessary.

If the government does not give the people divorce, then the people will divorce the government. It’s as simple as that. The Nationalist Party cannot survive on the support of Paul Vincenti and his band of merry Gift-of-Lifers, the breastfeed-your-kids-until-they’re-20 brigade, and a bishop or two. It needs the votes of people like me. The Nationalist Party’s problem is that it no longer represents me, which means that it no longer represents thousands of others who think just as I do. These thousands are suspended in a political no-man’s-land: on one side, cassock-clutchers; on the other side, clowns.