The Old Folks At Home (29 November)

I went to the old folks home in Alcúdia yesterday. They had rung me up and asked me to come by. There was a surprise on entering the “residencia”. I remembered it when it was the Alcúdia hospital. The place has been completely transformed. They describe it as not really a hotel and not really a hospital, but it looked and felt more like a hotel.

I said to them that a perception of a residencia, among many Brits at any rate, is probably that of the “old folks home”, one of elderly people sitting around in stiff-backed chairs, staring aimlessly at a television screen, not always smelling of lavender, and waiting for the next trolley of tea to come by. The residencia really isn’t like that.

They wanted to do something about increasing awareness of what the place is really like, but that’s for elsewhere, as there is – along with every other part of Mallorca’s economy – a crisis in the residencia sector.

Workers at residencias across Mallorca have added their voices to the growing number of personnel that is either not being paid or is being paid late. Though the regional government or town halls don’t operate residencias, the companies which do are paid by government and the companies in turn pay staff salaries. Or don’t, as the government is in debt to them, as it is in debt to all manner of providers.

A protest planned for today outside the regional parliament by workers from different residencias adds to one staged by a hundred workers at the residencia in Marratxí on Saturday. It had been announced that November salaries for the staff in Marratxí would not be paid, this coming on top of delays in the past few months.

The residencia workers are far from being the only ones who have suffered because of the inability of government (or town halls) to pay suppliers, but problems with payment at this time of the year are particularly acute, given the proximity of Christmas.

The system of payment for those in the public sector isn’t collapsing, but it is on foundations that seem to be becoming ever more shaky, as is the edifice of the Mallorcan and indeed Spanish welfare state.

The residencias, in addition to their permanent residents, provide an important service through their day centres. These are important especially for the elderly who live alone and/or in conditions that are not much better than destitution.

A misconception that surrounds local society, in addition to one that the welfare state is particularly generous, which it isn’t, is that the family always takes care of its own, the elderly included. The family does of course provide, but not quite to the same extent that it once might have.

The Economic and Social Council for the Balearics has released information regarding the number of people aged 65 or older who live on their own. The percentage in the islands as a whole is just under a third, and one half of these either have no or very little by way of contact with family, while some 22% also have no obvious friends to call upon. Pensions, which Mariano Rajoy says he will safeguard, can be as low as 250 euros a month.

Demands placed on agencies outside the established welfare state have rocketed in the past few years, and not only for help for the elderly. The Cruz Roja and the Catholic charity, Caritas, are just two that have had to step in as a combination of economic crisis and a societal shift that has lessened the strength of the family has left an increasing number of people with little or no safety net; and crisis has itself contributed to undermining the wherewithal of some families to go some way to providing this safety net.

Crisis is not just damaging economically but also socially, and the strain of crisis is such that opposition parties accuse the regional government of stripping away nearly 250 million euros from that part of the budget that includes welfare and the family; a budget described as the “most anti-social” that the Balearics have experienced.

It is against this background, therefore, that the services of the residencias, more important than ever, find themselves also subject to the virus that is crisis and to a cycle of crisis that is vicious and seemingly never-ending.

Alcúdia’s old folks home, and more than just an old folks home, is mightily impressive. Whether the agencies of government are taking much notice of how impressive, however, is another matter entirely.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going To Waste (25 November)

Between the two town halls of Alcúdia and Sa Pobla, the company Tirme, which provides rubbish-treatment services on Mallorca, is owed in the region of 4.6 million euros. The amount is divided roughly evenly between the two administrations, a difference lying with how much interest they both owe (Alcúdia more than Sa Pobla).

This is not the first time that Tirme has gone in pursuit of outstanding debts from town halls. At the end of May, Inca got a demand for not far off two million. Just one strange aspect of the non-payments is that they relate to the period from 2008, in the case of Alcúdia, and from 2009 where Sa Pobla is concerned. How many other town halls are similarly in debt to Tirme? And if there are others, but even if not, how does a company operate when it is not being paid such vast sums?

Alcúdia and Sa Pobla are both negotiating payment terms, and the respective administrations are of course blaming the previous administrations. Which seems fair enough, but, just as one wonders how Tirme copes with not being paid, one wonders how it is that town halls can apparently just not bother paying. Sa Pobla is also in for about 1.35 million to three other service providers, including the rubbish collectors.

One gets the impression that the whole business world in Mallorca – that which has anything to do with the town halls or other public bodies – is surviving on the promise that they might one day actually get paid. But promises don’t amount to a great deal and they certainly don’t amount to cash flow or reassurances to lenders, if they are applicable.

Tirme, though, isn’t quite like other businesses. Most would find 4.6 million plus the couple of million from Inca and whatever else might be outstanding rather too much debt to bear. Tirme doesn’t. Or doesn’t appear to. This may be because of who owns it – Endesa, Iberdrola, Urbaser and FCC. Tirme is also a monopoly, and its concession for waste treatment lasts until 2041.

Tirme’s monopoly position is understandable in that its operations do demand heavy investment, so it has every right to be able to expect to have a period in which it can make a return on its investment. But not everyone is happy with this monopoly nor with how Tirme prioritises its investment and its operations.

A key part of Tirme’s remit is recycling. Mention the R word and you can be sure that one organisation will prick its ears up: GOB, the environmental pressure group. In August, GOB issued a statement attacking Tirme for what it claimed was the company’s concentration on incineration as opposed to recycling. GOB maintained that recycling plants were operating well below capacity, while the ovens were going full pelt in optimising as swiftly as possible the investment on incinerators at the Son Reus plant in Palma. Moreover, reckoned GOB, the incineration was allowing for the generation of electricity that was being commercialised.

GOB has accused Tirme of engaging in misleading marketing where its operations are concerned and has accused the Council of Mallorca, which, and truly bizarrely, has managed to extract a reduction in the cost of waste treatment for 2012 of slightly less than two centimos, of complicity.

But then, the story of waste management and treatment is far from straightforward; you wouldn’t expect it to be, because nothing ever is in Mallorca.

In January this year, the anti-corruption prosecutors embarked upon the so-called “Operación Cloaca”. This had to with allegations of false accounting centred on waste management operations sanctioned by the Council of Mallorca. Of those detained at the time, and I would make it perfectly clear that Tirme was not implicated in the Cloaca investigation, was an executive with FCC-Lumsa, one of the companies with a concession for recycling collection; FCC, which is a shareholder in Tirme.

Cloaca highlighted the dual system of waste collection (door to door as well as from green points) which had resulted in effect in payment for recycling doubling. Cloaca also revealed that town halls had been pressurised by an individual at the Council of Mallorca into adopting this dual system.

What Cloaca also highlighted was the sheer complexity of arrangements for waste management on Mallorca. Perhaps town halls simply don’t understand what it is they are meant to be paying for. Now, though, Alcúdia and Sa Pobla accept that they have to pay Tirme. But you wonder how many other town halls owe the company and whether the reason for non-payment has been more than just an inability to pay.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Look Bach In Anger

Where had the Welsh been all summer? At the going down of the season, they suddenly emerged, orange-wristbanded, into Bar Brit (Foxes Arms), which temporarily became Bar Bridgend, Pub Pontypool, Café Cardiff.

A huge Welsh flag partially blocked the entrance, the rest of it was blocked by a huge Welsh front-row forward: Tiny, as he’s known, released from culinary duties to mingle front of house and prop up his compatriots. Was there a special Welsh breakfast on the menu? Laverbread and leek perhaps? Not as such. There was no sign of any Brains having been shipped in specially either.

Prior to the Irish match, an encounter too close to call, a New Zealand newspaper came up with cultural aspects of the two countries to decide the winners. Most were still too close to call, e.g. music (U2 v. The Manics), but one had a clear edge – beer: Guinness v. Brains, a no-brainer, even if it proved to be wrong.

Guinness is usually the de rigueur tipple for the rugby aficionado, even at ten in the morning or perhaps especially at ten in the morning. Not that there was much of it in evidence either. Magners (very Irish) or something soft; a Coke for the teetotal rugby fan, a rare breed, rather like a teetotal rugby player is rare. Such abstinence was appropriate, however, as the main actor, as it was to turn out, is said to be teetotal: Sam Warburton, who sounds like a character from “Emmerdale”.

One had expected the streets of Puerto Alcúdia to be alive with the sound of “Bread Of Heaven”. The only bread was that of a bacon sandwich. The atmosphere was subdued, tense, one of anticipation, of destiny. The French were, after all, rubbish, and indeed, for much of the game, they did little to disprove the idea. Here was a team with the capricious Lièvremont sitting next to an assistant with a mop of hair that made him look alarmingly like the wackily-astrological Raymond Domenech, the French football team’s former coach. What is it with French teams that they get lumbered with coaches that they have no alternative but to completely ignore?

For nearly twenty minutes, all went well. The French had made a clear statement of intent; they were as rubbish as everyone had said they were. And then it happened. From a melee of what seemed merely to be one of those ingredients sadly all too often missing from contemporary rugby – a good old, stand-up fistfight – a forlorn figure trooped off. Sam took up his seat at the pitch-side Woolpack for a glass of non-alcoholic Brains. No one knew the awful truth, least of all the commentator Nick Mullins. Only when the words “sent” and “off” flashed onto the screen did the truth dawn on the myopic Mullins who had managed to miss the red card.

The tense atmosphere turned into an indignant one. Tiny said, more than once, “cheated by an English referee in the first game, cheated by an Irish one now.” What had happened to Celtic solidarity? But what else could have been expected? Monsieur Rolland, Irish by birth but French by name. Fluent in the language. There had been a clue before kick-off, his coming onto the pitch wearing a beret, a string of onions around his neck and whistling “La Marseillaise”.

One of the punters believed that a half-time review would result in the card being rescinded. It wasn’t. The half-time punditry was no less indignant, whipped up by the one-time poor-man’s Des Lynam, Steve Rider, managing to do a passable impression of a presenter who hadn’t the faintest idea about the sport he was presenting. Francois Pienaar abandoned his Afrikaans roots and became an honorary Welshman. Dieu, he was incandescent. Martyn Williams looked stunned, but maybe years of smashing into opposition forwards have left him permanently so.

Sam remained sadly rooted to his seat, as Monsieur Rolland removed the earpiece of his iPod with its collection of Maurice Chevalier tunes, spat out his Gitanes and blew to start the second period. Bar Bridgend needed a burst of “Cwm Rhondda” to lift the spirits. What did raise hopes was the try, but Hooky had kept hooking his kicks, Jones The Boot booted one against the upright and Halfpenny lacked half a yard.

And so the dream died. The Welsh flag came down. Bar Bridgend returned to being regular Bar Brit, Puerto Alcúdia returned to normal and the wristbanded Welsh returned through the barren land of late summer to the all-inclusive to “feed me till I want no more” and to wonder at what should have been.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mayoral Wonga

How much should a mayor be paid do you suppose? To answer the question you have to know what he or she does exactly, which admittedly isn’t easy to get a handle on. A mayor does a lot of signing of things, puts in any number of appearances around and about, shakes a fair number of hands, chairs a few meetings, gets his or her photo taken pretty much every day.

There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.

The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition’s claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.

Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor’s remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor – 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.

Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he’s getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia’s mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn’t quite know, but down it has indeed come.

In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra’s. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.

Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?

A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn’t necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro’s one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.

Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.

Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).

It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls’ personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.

A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It’s a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Invisible Station

I’m making an apology on behalf of “The Bulletin”. If you had gone along to the ferry terminal in Puerto Alcúdia on Sunday and had expected to find some free watersports activities which you could have enjoyed, you would have been disappointed.

I showed a short news item (from Thursday’s paper) to someone in Alcúdia who, how can I put this, is in the know. The jaw dropped, followed by an expression of understanding as to how the mistake had been made. I understood it as well, as it’s a mistake many people are making.

What happened on Sunday was that there were indeed free watersports activities, but they were nothing to do with the terminal or the commercial port. They were part of a promotion, in the form of a “fiesta”, for the estación náutica. And it is this which caused the mistake and causes other mistakes to be made.

The estación náutica doesn’t exist. It is not bricks, mortar, aluminium, glass or any material. It is a “station” without physical manifestation. It is an un-thing. But the concept, and that is all it is – a concept, begs an interpretation of the physical. Of course it does. A station is a thing not an abstraction; hence a not unreasonable confusion with the terminal.

Since the estación naútica concept was first raised in Alcúdia – at the start of 2009 – I have written about it on a few occasions, and I keep making the same point; it is not understandable. The concept is elusive, it doesn’t translate into anything sensible in English (even watersports centre doesn’t work because this can also imply something physical), and it doesn’t even mean much to the Spanish; they also expect to find an actual centre.

This is not Alcúdia’s fault as such. There are other such stations in Spain and in the Balearics. But the confusion that has existed in Alcúdia with regard to the concept makes you wonder if it hasn’t occurred elsewhere. It must have done, and the same mistakes and misinterpretations are surely being made there.

In Alcúdia, however, to make matters less clear, there is a website for this station. It doesn’t work. For a time at the weekend it didn’t even load. Yet, there it was, proudly mentioned on the publicity, assuming it was seen. There was another website, for the “Fiesta del Mar” which is what occurred on Sunday and which was one of a series arranged by the estación náutica people in their different resorts, but it was in Spanish only. At least it worked though.

As part of this fiesta, there was also an evening event. The “orange fiesta”. Nice poster, shame about the language. Catalan only. I had an exchange on Facebook about this. Catalan is an official language and the fiesta was directed at locals. Well yes, up to a point, but Puerto Alcúdia is a tourist resort and why was the tourist office emailing the poster to those, such as myself, who have a stake in the local tourism industry? Moreover, the estación náutica concept is meant to be a way of attracting more tourists, of the so-called quality type.

But Catalan-only material appears all the time. In all sorts of resorts. The estación náutica concept, the publicity in Catalan are different types of example that raise the same question: what thought process lies behind any of this? Is there one?

I had a chat with a tourist about this. Is it stubbornness that results in the Catalan-only publicity? I don’t know that it is. It’s more likely a case that no one stops to really think who they are meant to be marketing to and what they are marketing. But who makes these decisions?

Alcúdia is a tourist resort with a highly diverse market. It would be impractical to put out material in all the languages necessary. But at a minimum it should be in English and German; more so than even Spanish, where tourists are concerned, as the level of Spanish tourism in Alcúdia is well below that of either the UK or Germany.

The counter argument is that Catalan (and Spanish) are the local languages and so this is how it should be. Sorry, but it isn’t much of an argument. Not if the market doesn’t understand either language.

Poor marketing occurs because the starting-point is the wrong way round. It should be the consumer, the intended market or markets, and it is this fundamental thought process that seems to be lacking.

I don’t know that there should be an apology for the mistake in “The Bulletin”. The apology should be coming from somewhere else. The trouble is you don’t where that somewhere else is.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Radio Ga Ga: Mallorcan radio

Something that popped up in yesterday’s piece was the Muro councillor who has responsibility for radio and television. It came as news to me because I wasn’t aware that there was either a local radio or television station in Muro. As far as the television is concerned, there is so little reference to it that you wonder which television the councillor is responsible for: the town hall’s plasma screen perhaps? As for radio, there is a Muro radio station, though I would have qualified as one of the 25% of the local population who was unaware of it when a survey was conducted in 2005.

They don’t seem to have repeated the survey exercise. Maybe because the results six years ago were not exactly a ringing endorsement of the station’s existence. Based on interview research with 554 people, the survey discovered that a whopping 6% of the local population said that they listened to the station every day. 75% said that they never listened to it. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the research was the average length of time the small number of listeners actually spent listening. All of eight minutes per day.

Maybe its listening figures are a whole lot better now, or maybe they aren’t. If not, then what is the point of the station?

The station is, obviously enough, one means of local communication and can be a forum for issues specific to the community, but then how many burning topics does a small town like Muro generate? Another finding from the survey suggested that news wasn’t a priority for listening in. 50% said they tuned in to hear music. And you can hear music on any number of other radio stations.

Having different forms of local media is laudable enough, but can they be justified either in terms of listening figures or cost? Are they more a case of me-too media rather than meeting a genuine need?

Alcúdia also has a radio station. It celebrated its twentieth anniversary last week. Unlike Muro, Alcúdia Radio does have a strong presence. Alcúdia is almost three times the size of Muro, so you might hope that it would do, and it makes its presence felt. For example, each year during the Sant Pere fiestas there is an Alcúdia Radio procession. The station is on hand to broadcast from the fiestas and the autumn fair. It is certainly listened to, as you can often hear it on in shops and hear the ads.

Ah yes, the ads. There must be a small studio somewhere with a couple of voiceover artists who try their best to vary their voices over whatever cheesy muzak they dredge out of the archives. It must become extremely difficult to know how to sound enthusiastic when you’re spouting the same “especialista en carne” line for the thousandth time.

Though Alcúdia Radio has become a fixture, it was, in its early days, a thing of some controversy. It had been going only a short time when an issue of the old local magazine “Badia d’Alcúdia” reported: “The municipal radio is losing listeners and will lose more … it is not a municipal station but a partisan radio station which serves only a part of the population.” It was politically biased, in other words.

And it is political bias that has continued to dog local media. It isn’t unusual for the media to adopt a particular political stance, but the bias has manifested itself in a different way; radio and television have been controlled by different parties.

In 2006 Ràdio i Televisió de Mallorca, TV Mallorca as it is commonly known, was created by a Council of Mallorca driven by the Unió Mallorquina. It was a rival to the IB3 radio and television service, at that time “managed” by the Partido Popular. In addition to charges of political bias and interference, these two broadcasters have failed spectacularly to make money and have failed to create wide audiences. President Bauzá suggested before the elections that he would close down TV Mallorca and privatise IB3.

Where was the sense in having two broadcasters? Very little. Arguably, neither was necessary. Which brings you back to the likes of Muro, to its radio and elusive TV and to need. Public broadcasting isn’t solely about profitability, but if it doesn’t address a genuine need then there is no point to it. There are plenty of alternative broadcasters and alternative forms of communication. But without the radio and TV, what would a poor councillor do?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Our Man In … : Resorts’ delegates

Puerto Alcúdia has now got itself a delegate. Lucky old Puerto Alcúdia. The post-election re-organisation at Alcúdia town hall has deemed a delegate to be necessary, when previously it hadn’t been. Does the port need a delegate? Maybe it does, but it has done well enough up until now without one.

Having delegates for towns’ coastal resorts hasn’t exactly been a great success elsewhere. They have been viewed as being toothless or simply lackeys of the mayor. This was the case in Can Picafort, for example, while in Puerto Pollensa the ex-delegate was considered, not to put too fine a point on it, to be a joke. The lack of respect that Francisca Ramon commanded came to a head when she addressed demonstrators in June last year. The volley of abuse that came back made it clear that she was thought to be “stupid”.

The delegates for the resorts are at least a recognition by town halls that their resorts do have specific needs. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the very existence of delegates has raised expectations that they might actually do something, when they are hamstrung by having no real authority or responsibility. In Puerto Pollensa the call has long been made for responsibility and also for a separate budget.

The logic of such a call is that the resorts should become their own administrative units. Because of the specific needs, there would be some sense to this, but any sense soon evaporates when you consider the added bureaucracy, costs and potential for duplication.

Were the electoral system to be such that councillors were voted in on the basis of wards, then there would automatically be voices for different parts of a municipality, but this is not how it works. The creation of delegates for the main resorts reflects the absence of such a mechanism, but it is also discriminatory. In Alcúdia, for example, what about Barcarès, Alcanada and Bonaire? Don’t they count?

The lack of geographical representation exacerbates discontent, such as that in Santa Margalida. Son Serra de Marina lies some seven kilometres away from Can Picafort and even further away from the town. Residents have complained that the village has been all but abandoned, and there have been examples – inadequate police presence, the deplorable state of the sports centre – which don’t help to refute their complaints.

At a more general level, there is an issue as to what councillors are responsible for. Depending on its size of population, each town hall is obliged to take care of certain services. These obligations are not mirrored by what councillors are charged with.

Up to a point this is reasonable enough. The towns have a wider responsibility for general welfare than those stipulated by law. There is no legal requirement, for instance, to take responsibility for tourism, but it would be distinctly odd if they didn’t.

Responsibilities such as those for public works and maintenance are clear enough, but some are less so, while the way in which these other responsibilities are jumbled together to form an individual councillor’s portfolio leads you to wonder what process is ever used for arriving at what can seem contradictory.

In Muro, for instance, there is a councillor in charge of education and culture and the town’s music band. Another looks after environment, youth activities, radio and television (what television!?) and transport. Yet another oversees sport, the police and traffic, and relations with the church. Go through this little lot, and there isn’t always a pattern. Is radio and television not culture? Might sport be a youth activity?Would traffic and transport not have some common ground? Indeed, what is meant by transport anyway? School buses? Public transport is not a responsibility of small authorities such as Muro.

It is not as if the responsibilities mirror those higher up the political administration food chain. Regional government has combined agriculture with environment. In Muro agriculture is lumped in with tourism. In Alcudia there is still responsibility for language policy, the regional government having scrapped a specific directorate for it. But what is most evident from the Muro portfolios is what isn’t evident. Unless the mayor has taken on personal responsibility for just about everything the town is really meant to look after – services, building works, finance etc. – and has a particularly hard-working governing commission, then no one appears to be in charge.

You are left with an impression, therefore, that town halls find things for councillors to do. Some are important, some aren’t. But where they all fall down is in the fact that their chief generators of income and employment, the resorts, get, at best, a delegate and not a councillor with real clout.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Magic Wand

The “vara”. Wand, rod, pole. Take your pick. A magic wand. Spare the rod. Poles apart. They all seem somehow appropriate in the aftermath of the game of pass the parcel to see who ends up unwrapping the mayoral wand.

New mayors may hope that they can wave their wands and make all the problems disappear, but the problems are only just beginning, and are mainly those of fractiousness.

The municipalities of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Santa Margalida highlight how fractiousness consumes the operations of town halls. In Alcúdia’s case, it will be new; for Pollensa and Santa Margalida, it will be business as usual.

The tensions that will now exist are only partly to do with party politics. They are more personal than this. And no more so than in Santa Margalida where Miguel Cifre has been handed the baton of mayoral office once again, fourteen years after a motion of censure resulted in his being kicked out of office.

Santa Margalida is a town of mutual dislike among its leading political lights. It’s why Cifre and his party of change couldn’t attract any other party with which to coalesce. He’ll run the town hall, if run is the right word, with a minority three short of that which was required. He’ll be a lame duck (aptly enough for a town which stages the annual nonsense of the duck throwing), and one despised by the Partido Popular in particular.

Another lame duck is now the second in command at Alcúdia, despite the fact that she abstained from giving any candidate for mayor her support. Carme Garcia’s decision to cosy up to the Partido Popular, one that went against the wishes of her party, the Mallorcan socialists, has unleashed a tsunami into what had been a rare oasis of calmness in the politics of local towns.

At every opportunity, at every meeting of the town hall, she can now expect to be hounded, attacked and vilified. And she will have brought it on herself. Photos of the councillors in Alcúdia, taken after the meeting to select Coloma Terrasa as mayor, were very revealing. Terrasa was smiling, wand in hand, ex-mayor Llompart was grinning and PSOE’s Pere Malondra was laughing. Garcia looked even more frumpish and put-upon than usual.

Llompart and Malondra further exposed her decision to side with the PP as an act of opportunism. It was rumoured that they would try something, and so they did. Malondra was nominated to be mayor. Had Garcia voted for him, a natural political ally for someone who claims to be of the left, then Malondra would have become mayor. She didn’t. The boys of the Convergència and PSOE were laughing at her, and so it will be for four years.

Pollensa doesn’t have a lame duck, it has a Tommy Cifre installed as mayor. Two Tommy Cifres, there are only two Tommy Cifres. Thankfully. It’s confusing enough with two of them. One Tommy Cifre, there’s only one Tommy Cifre in the PP. The new mayor, and not the one Tommy Cifre from the Mallorcan socialists. Cifre, together with the La Lliga lovely, Malena Estrany, will hope to restore some order to Pollensa town hall. They surely can’t do any worse than what passed for administration under Joan Cerdà.

Fortunately, both Cifre and Estrany are respected, which was not the case with Cerdà who lost any semblance of respect as a result of the fiasco over the aborted pedestrianisation in Puerto Pollensa. It was this which turned him into a lame duck for much of his period of office. The charge of lack of consultation that was levelled at him (among other charges) is to be addressed by Cifre. He has promised “citizen participation”, and a system of monthly meetings with associations across Pollensa is meant to come into being.

The PP-La Lliga coalition, one short of a majority, will be praying it can rely on the support of the one Unió Mollera Pollencina councillor. If not, and despite what respect there might be for Cifre and Estrany, then the fun and games in Pollensa are likely to continue.

But fun and games are what we want. They are what makes Mallorcan politics the theatre of the absurd that it so often is. A stage for illusionists who in every town conjure up a generally misplaced sense of their own importance. They wave their wands on new regimes and in a puff of smoke the old ones disappear. That’s magic.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Carme Chameleon: Alcúdia’s coalitions

While there are many town halls whose administration, post-election, is clearcut, there are plenty where it is not. One, as mentioned previously, is Alcúdia.

The Partido Popular and its would-be mayor, Coloma Terrasa, have eight councillors, one short of a majority of nine. There are nine other councillors, split among the Convergència and PSOE (four apiece) and the PSM (Mallorcan socialists) with one.

It is the final one on this list, the PSM, which is the most interesting, as the party potentially holds the key to the future administration in the town and, if it were to prove to be so, would be evidence as to how bizarre Mallorca’s politics can be. Bizarre and opportunistic.

The PSM is everything the PP is not. It is left-wing, nationalist (i.e. veering towards independence), Catalanist, and as green as a party can be without actually calling itself green. The twain of the PSM and the PP should never meet, except in darkened alleys when they encounter each other for an ideological punch-up, but the twain could yet meet in the corridors of Alcúdia town hall power.

The sole councillor that the PSM now has, Carme Garcia, is the first councillor the party has had in Alcúdia. Time to show some muscle, it would appear; time to be shown some respect. The PSM across the island has done fairly well out of the elections. Not that it fared any better at regional parliament level than it did in 2007. It has the same number of seats and its percentage of the vote went down fractionally. Yet, it can claim to now being the third force in the island.

A reason for this was the collapse of the Convergència. While it maintains pockets of resistance in town halls, such as Alcúdia, generally it has been consigned to the political dustbin, taking with it its own nationalism of the right. The PSM is now the third force and now the main voice for Mallorcan aspirations.

It is against this background that Garcia has said that she would consider an agreement with the PP whereby an alliance would create the nine councillors required. It would be the most unholy of alliances. More than this, it would be a complete sell-out of political credibility. Not of course that this stops parties combining with others when they have their eye on the main chance; think Liberal Democrats, for example. But a tie-up between the PP and the PSM would be utterly absurd.

Garcia, though she says that she would be capable of being mayor, doesn’t have the brassneck to suggest that a pact with the PP would mean that she should be mayor. Thank heavens for such humility. The people of Alcúdia might have granted the PSM the opportunity of town hall representation, but there should be some context in all of this.

The PP obtained almost 40% of the vote. The Convergència and PSOE were virtually identical – in the low 20s. The PSM got just over 6% from a turnout of 55%, which is its own story as it was by far the lowest among the five largest northern municipalities. I don’t know how many people this equates to, but from a population of some 19,000 and bearing in mind how many might actually be on the electoral census, an estimate might be around 300.

On any moral grounds, the PP’s right to administer the town hall and Coloma Terrasa’s right to be mayor should be givens. But they are not. The Convergència and PSOE formed the previous coalition. They might yet do so again, if Garcia could be persuaded. Such a scenario says much about the proportional system and much also about how local town politics are not always about political ideology. In the case of the PP and the PSM, they most certainly are, but the Convergència and PSOE are different.

Though ostensibly of the right and the left, they are chummy. This chumminess can be a virtue, and it worked well enough for most of the last administration, but it can equally be seen as being divisive, especially if it denies the PP its place in the town hall sun.

I make no bones. I don’t much care for the PP, but the electoral system can be held open to ridicule. The PP deserves to be installed, but there would be no thing more ridiculous than for it to be installed with the aid of the PSM.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Different World: Mallorca’s north-south divide

North, south, east or west. Wherever you may live in Mallorca, you will have a view as to where the place you live fits within the general scheme of things. My apologies, by the way, if you live in the middle, but for the purposes of the following, I’m afraid I will need to exclude you. But don’t feel put down, because you are not alone. And if you don’t live in Mallorca, you will still appreciate that location on the four main points of the compass can have meaning.

You may live in London, or you once used to; London and the south that have been damned for always being the focus of attention. It’s the media that’s to blame. Usually. But it has always been thus. Greater density of population, the capital city and the financial centre. And for England, read also Mallorca and Palma.

One needs to define what is meant by the south of Mallorca. In purely geographical terms, “the south” isn’t strictly accurate. The dominance of what is referred to as the Palma-Calvia axis lies to the south-west, but let’s ignore such pedantry.

The dominance is all but total. Everything revolves around the south and Palma in particular. You can judge for yourselves how the hierarchy works beneath Palma. It probably goes, in descending order, something like: Calvia, Manacor, Inca (and see, if you are in the centre, you aren’t neglected), Llucmajor, Marratxi, and then it’s anyone’s guess. If you are unfortunate enough to live right out on the east coast, you will know that, for all intents and purposes, you don’t exist.

The hierarchy reflects the degree of attention afforded different parts of Mallorca. It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that certain places receive less, far less or even no attention. If no one much lives in these places, if nothing much happens, then what can you expect?

Nevertheless, there are genuine antagonisms, and none more so than the north-south divide. Well, the antagonism is felt by those in the north; I would very much doubt that it is reciprocated. And it is an antagonism that crosses nationalities. The natives are as disaffected by Palma-centricity, far more so in fact, as are incomers from other countries.

I’ll give an example that is not unrepresentative. The lady in my local newsagents in Playa de Muro lives in Alcúdia. Why, she wanted to know, was there no coverage of the Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia at the weekend. It was an international event which attracted some two thousand athletes. The newspapers, the television; they didn’t cover it. Had it taken place in Palma, it would have been a different story. I wasn’t inclined to disagree with her.

The triathlon may not, compared with other international sporting events, register that highly, but for Alcúdia, and for Mallorca, it was a pretty important event. To be fair, it wasn’t totally ignored. There was mention in sports pages, which is where you might expect it to be mentioned, but the point the lady in the newsagents was making was that there would have been considerably more hullabaloo if Palma (or Calvia) had staged the event.

So why the apparent neglect? The charitable defence of the media is that it is all a resourcing issue, and let’s not forget that there are elections looming, with all the coverage they require. Less charitably, one can perceive this as being indicative of a Palma-centric arrogance, aloofness and disinterest in anything outside Palma’s boundaries or those of its westerly neighbour.

It isn’t only in media circles that the divide exists. It is there in politics as well. For all the publicity given to corruption scandals, they don’t have much influence on towns well away from the dominant south. Miguel Llompart, Alcúdia’s mayor and likely to still be its mayor after 22 May despite his association with the discredited Unió Mallorquina, once told me that the scandals were all a Palma thing. They were largely irrelevant to what happened within the town.

And you can understand this, because, and it is the same anywhere, people identify most closely with their own communities. Alcúdia, and you can name any number of places in Mallorca, could be in another world compared with Palma. And as far as Palma is concerned, it is in another world.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.