VALLETTA: Emmy Bezzina is a frustrated and angry man. Frustrated because he is unable to divorce a wife he left years ago, angry at his country’s ban on divorce that he says makes Malta the laughing stock of Europe.

The 56-year-old has launched his own political party to rally support to liberalise laws in this tiny Mediterranean island which is the European Union’s smallest state, and arguably, on paper at least, its most socially conservative.

The predominantly Catholic nation of 400,000 people that is squeezed onto a rock in the Mediterranean south of Italy joined the EU last year.

Abortion is completely illegal in Malta, the only European country where marriage cannot be dissolved by divorce.

“Many members of the EU didn’t know there was no divorce or abortion,” said Bezzina. Malta’s leaders, he said, tend to avoid the issues when meeting their foreign counterparts.

“These people would be made the butt of ridicule if they were to speak about what goes on in Malta, so they prefer to keep their mouths shut,” the lawyer told Reuters in an interview amid stacks of papers in his studio in Malta’s capital Valletta.

In a country dominated since independence from Britain in 1964 by two parties — the conservative Nationalists and centre-left Labour — Bezzina’s Alpha party has made little headway, and he is tolerated with amusement by the government.

Across the sandstone piazza — nothing is very far from anything else in Malta — a government minister involved in family policies smiles when asked about Bezzina.

“He doesn’t have his finger on the pulse. People are very afraid (of divorce),” said Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, junior minister for justice and home affairs, whose office is dominated at both ends by large oil paintings of Christ.

“The big fear is that we are portrayed as bigoted fundamentalist Roman Catholics and that is surely not the case.

“It isn’t difficult to understand. Most people in Malta have been brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, they feel that divorce isn’t something that helps the family unit.”

The Maltese look north across the Mediterranean, Mifsud Bonnici says, and see declining family values in countries such as France, Germany and Britain where divorce is commonplace.

“Malta certainly stands out because she’s the exception to the general rule. But it doesn’t mean we must necessarily follow suit.”

On the contrary, Mifsud Bonnici says other countries in Europe are more likely to move away from social liberalism, citing the Italian government’s increasingly conservative stance on abortion and the likelihood that Spain’s gay marriage law would be repealed by a future centre-right government.

Britain has the highest divorce rate among EU members, who have widely diverging histories on the issue. Staunchly Catholic Ireland allowed divorce only in 1997, whereas elsewhere in the world, Chile legalised it a year ago and the Philippines is among the few countries where it is still banned.

Even the pro-divorce Bezzina admits that the Maltese would probably vote against divorce in a referendum. But that does not mean the island is full of happy families.

“Close to one third of the island is either separated or about to be, or is sleeping round with some other partners,” Bezzina says.

Malta’s unhappily married couples have three options if they want to live apart.

Like Bezzina, they can just do it, having children with another partner but remaining married to the first; they can apply for a religious or secular annulment — in which they have to prove before a tribunal that the marriage never really existed or was based on a fraudulent premise; or they can get what Malta calls a ‘separation’.—Reuters