Now what?

Pieta, we have a situation

The PN will soon be approving the list of candidates for the next election. At the same time, it is still bound by an anti-divorce position it took last February when the referendum was looming. Herein lies a problem.

Many forget that until it took this position, the PN was not against divorce. It just did not have a position. So up till February, it was perfectly acceptable for even those in its higher echelons to be in favour of divorce. In the 1990s, for instance, Michael Falzon was a PN minister and in favour. More significantly, Frank Portelli, a divorced man himself, was the president of the party's own executive council. More recently, the PN fielded a number of candidates for the local and the European parliaments who were also in favour. Until February, everything was hunky dory.

It no longer is. If the PN does not dump its anti-divorce position, it would have to decide what to do with all the prospective candidates in favour of divorce. These include sitting MPs and some government members. As far as new candidates are concerned, unless the PN is thralling the ill-lit corridors of the Azzjoni Kattolika for a bright spark, I very much doubt they will come across a single one who is against divorce.

The mess is pretty manifest. Should the PN approve pro-divorce candidates given its current anti-divorce position? How could a pro-divorce candidate have been approved before divorce became law but debarred now that it is? One could argue that just as the party did not kick out its pro-divorce representatives after it took its anti-divorce position in February, nothing needs to change. Not quite. Now, divorce is not just a law, but a law introduced by citizens themselves because their representatives failed to carry their responsibility. If the PN still aspires to continue running the country it cannot go to the people with a position which goes against what they voted for.

In addition, one of the justifications for the co-existence of pro- and anti-divorce positions on the PN's side of the House before the referendum was that in the 2008 they were elected in the absence of a party position. They were therefore free of party and constituency constraints. In the next election, there will be no such justification. The PN today does have a position on divorce. And that position so far is against.

Given that the exhausting and irritating divorce debate is over, that the referendum is history and the damn thing is law, these questions sound surreal now. It is as if we are in a 1950s low budget sci-fi movie. But there is no one to blame for this political time warping except the PN itself.

Finally, a niggling and not so trivial question. Do the people running the PN today think that they have a chance in hell of even coming close to winning the next election if they go into the campaign waving an anti-divorce stand? They would have as much chance as Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and his CNi brigade taking Malta out of the EU as they are still trying to do.

There is only one way for the PN to sort out this DIY mess. It should kill its anti-divorce position now.