“When we took office, we had an English governor general, an English queen, English currency, a Bank of England man as the head of our central bank,” he told The New York Times. “We had a police force run by a commissioner who stated openly that his loyalty was to the British crown and nobody else. This was only eight years ago. Now Malta is a republic. Everything has changed. Nothing is British anymore.”

Mr. Mintoff turned to other nations for support, provided they accepted Malta’s neutrality. He courted Libya’s Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi until they had a falling-out over offshore oil fields both claimed. But Italy pledged $95 million over five years. China offered a $40 million loan and long-term aid aimed at keeping the Soviet Union out of Malta. But Moscow edged in anyway, buying rights to store naval fuel there.

Mr. Mintoff’s efforts to play foreign rivals against one another often worked. But his domestic politics were fair game for critics, who charged that he corrupted democracy by using patronage, gerrymandering, legislation of doubtful constitutionality, even goon squads at the polls and physical bullying. He once had a fistfight in Parliament with the Nationalist Party chairman, who had called him “a despoiler of the church.”

A feud between Mr. Mintoff and the Catholic Church, the religious affiliation of 90 percent of Malta’s 350,000 people, generated heated clashes from time to time. Mr. Mintoff accused the church of threatening to excommunicate Labor Party voters, closed church-supported hospitals and demanded that the church abandon tuition charges in its schools. The church accused him of intruding on religious freedom.

By 1984, when he resigned, one of Europe’s longest-serving heads of government, Mr. Mintoff had eliminated foreign military bases in Malta, signed pacts for economic cooperation with the United States, China and other countries, and set his nation on a road to self-sufficiency with a welfare state, socialized medicine, diversified industries and most of its trade and tourism coming from the West.