On Saturday civil society held its long-announced protest march to call for Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s resignation.

The march itself was very poorly attended – some 400, by the organisers’ calculations, attended.

This is a measure of civil society’s fragile grip on Maltese society but that is not all.

Maltese society is without a civil society: it is a life-long battle between two huge political forces with no civil society in between.

The protest against Konrad Mizzi’s and Keith Schembri’s malfeasance has been taken over by the Opposition and civil society was either late in the upcome or else overtaken by the massive Opposition reaction.

The end result was to bolster up the government’s reaction which shook off two successive No Confidence votes in Parliament as if it had been beaten about by a feather duster.

This is a very serious deficit in our country. No other democratic country we associate with has such a deficit and this brings us to question whether we are a real democracy.

What we have, as has many times been pointed out, are two vast tribes continually at loggerheads with no middle ground between them. Hence the perennial eyeball-to-eyeball atmosphere.

What does civil society consist of?

Let us start at the bottom. We may call civil society as that segment of the population that is uncommitted to either party. If this is the case, according to all surveys and polls, there is quite a big segment of the population in this category. This segment does not go to protest meetings, keeps its head down and does its own thing, lives its life and tries to keep out of political, for which read partisan, discussions.

It is an amorphous section of the population, apparently uninterested in what is going on and very difficult to rouse unless it is the eve of the general election when it would seem everyone has to declare his allegiance.

At the same time, this segment which answers NA to all poll questions or which says they will not vote, is the voter segment the two main parties all yearn to get on their side. Its mysterious, undeclared power is wooed by both parties and in fact it is this segment which crowns the winner.

But over and above the uninvolved sector there are also those in a position of responsibility who should take positions but in fact they do not. In this current Konrad-Keith case, for instance, the number of those sitting on the wall and sitting out ranges from the financial authorities, to the police and to the intermediate authorities.

And then there are the many constituted bodies which often make known their presence in the country but which too often fail to make known their stand on issues that are vital not just to their specific sectors but to the country at large.

It is not a question of all these segments not taking part in the protest march but the far more dangerous fact these segments are simply not there when the country needs them. It is this absence that makes civil society so small and ineffective.