I was not surprised that Deborah Schembri chose the Labour Party. I knew she came from a staunch Nationalist family, and I am saying this only because it has already been made public. But I always felt from the way she spoke, and in particular given the circumstances of her recent but explosive entry into public life, that she was much closer to the Labour Party.

She’s not on her own. Today there are many Nationalists who no longer identify themselves with the party they have always voted for. They are no longer comfortable associating themselves with a party that, in such a short time, has lost so much respect for different reasons.

For one thing, the staunchly conservative position taken against divorce angered the liberal section of the party, and particularly those supporters who have always seen the PN as the ideal home for open-mindedness and tolerance. It is no longer so.

I always wrote that it was political suicide for the PN to take the stand it did on divorce. But its stubbornness, as well as its inability to read the signs of the times, kept it entrenched in an antiquated mind-frame that pushed a large chunk of its own people away from it.

Some said that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando tried to hijack the party by presenting the Private Member’s Bill on divorce without bringing up the subject earlier within the party’s internal structures. Today, it is clear that it was Austin Gatt’s intransigent position, helped by a few others including Beppe Fenech Adami, which forced the party to take a decision that proved to be the wrong one. Their self-centred position has cost the party dearly, but they will never admit that.

In Dr Schembri’s case, there was never any doubt that, if she decided to go for politics, she would choose Labour. After the battle she led for the introduction of divorce legislation against the coalition made up of the Church and the Nationalist Party, it was impossible to think that there was any chance that she could later become part of the PN, the party that tried to destroy her.

With the stand it took, the PN closed the door to any possibility that Dr Schembri could have been one of the new faces the party needs desperately, and instead lost her to the Opposition. Labour seized the moment, and their gain is the PN’s loss.

But it’s not only Dr Schembri who feels more at ease in, or close to, the Labour Party these days. She is just the perfect example of the trend that started long before the referendum debate but which picked up momentum when the PN chose to handle the divorce issue in a confessional way, preferring to retain its close relationship with the Church rather than accept that society is changing.

There are many others who feel disillusioned by a Nationalist Party that is detached from reality, and which wrongly insists that, even now that the people have overwhelmingly voted in favour of divorce, its MPs should be allowed to abstain or vote “no” when the matter is brought up in Parliament.

It seems the PN has forgotten how much it had criticised the Labour Party for sticking to its guns against Malta’s European Union membership after the 2003 referendum. The PN then had said that the Labour Party was going against the people’s wishes. And what are PN MPs doing now when they say they will vote “no” to divorce or abstain? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Many of these Nationalist voters might not join Labour publicly, as Dr Schembri did, but they are surely shifting away from the PN. They might not bring themselves to vote Labour, but their abstention will hand victory to Joseph Muscat on a silver plate.

The Nationalist Party needs its liberal voters to win the election. But it closed the door to them on the divorce issue, and it will have a hard time winning them back to its fold. It’s a kind of betrayal that will not be easily forgotten and forgiven.

But it is not only the divorce issue that has pushed Nationalists away from their party. The Cabinet decision to increase the salary of ministers and parliamentary secretaries, which was kept hidden from the public for two years, is another situation that caused so much harm.

It is not enough to pompously re-open Bisazza Street in Sliema – a project that took longer to complete than it took the Japanese to recover from the tsunami – to regain the people’s confidence and trust. Infrastructural projects help to embellish the country, but they do little to improve the feel-good factor.

Neither is it enough to announce the setting up of a committee within the parliamentary group to discuss the way forward on the divorce issue. It will certainly do its part to submit proposals for the fine-tuning of the divorce law, but nothing will change the fact that the PN has lost so much credibility over the past weeks because of this issue. It will go down in history as the party that took an aggressive stand against divorce legislation, a position that was overwhelmingly defeated two weeks ago. Just as Labour continue to be reminded of the way they opposed EU membership, so will the Nationalists be reminded on the way they opposed divorce.

The confusion that reigns in the PN these days can also be seen from the position it first took on the setting up of a parliamentary committee on the family proposed by the Labour Party. We first had Foreign Minister Tonio Borg saying the government did not agree with such a proposal, and instead suggested a sub-committee within the Social Affairs Committee. Three days later, we had Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi changing tack and agreeing with Labour that the family deserves its own parliamentary committee.

What is worrisome – from the Nationalist Party point of view – is that the party has not realised how much it has lost and how much it is losing. It is just not grasping the fact that its popularity is at an all-time low, and it is refusing to accept that it has only itself to blame for the present situation. It is burying its head in the sand, pointing fingers accusingly at others, including the media, when it only has to look within to see where the culpability lies.

In the last election, Lawrence Gonzi led the Nationalist Party to victory by the smallest of margins ever recorded. From the way things are going, he will probably be remembered as having been the leader of the party when it registered its biggest ever defeat.

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