Heaven Or Las Vegas

Three steps to heaven … First step, the initial gathering of the newly made-up parliament of the Balearics; second step, the debate of investiture; third step, taking possession. On 18 June, José Ramón Bauzá will officially be acclaimed as president.

While the process of transition, both at town hall and regional government levels, will have seemed interminable, Bauzá has been busy drawing up his plans for government and for its organisation. Following a trend established by Antich, certain portfolios will be combined in creating super-ministries.

For Antich, the impulse behind establishing super-ministries – transport with environment, tourism with employment – was twofold. Firstly, it was a cost-cutting exercise; secondly, he simply ran out of ministers, once the old Unió Mallorquina was booted out of government.

The spin behind Bauzá’s amalgamations will also be twofold: cost-saving but also greater agility, of which the second will be open to question. There is a third, which is by far the most significant.

Bauzá is envisaging six or seven super-ministries and one stand-alone ministry, tourism. They are likely to be headed by his allies.

There is nothing remarkable about a head of government packing his cabinet with those he can trust to tow the party-line but, in so doing, the broad church of the Partido Popular in the Balearics will be funnelled along one narrow aisle, the pews to one side in particular, the left, forced to kneel in supplication through gritted teeth.

Of the various ministries, keeping tourism by itself shows the importance attached to the ministry. Bauzá should be applauded if this turns out to be the case. But it is still unclear who will be heading it. Carlos Delgado’s is the name which refuses to go away; Delgado, the force behind Bauzá’s Damascene progress on the road ever more to the right and treated with suspicion by Mallorca’s hoteliers who have said they don’t want him.

One other ministry, education and culture, could end up in the department of the presidency itself. This, in itself, says a great deal, as also would the absence of ministers among the awkward squad. One of these is Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor.

Pastor, it was thought, might have jumped and joined forces with his former PP ally, Jaume Font, when Font left to form the La Lliga party. For him to have done so would have been political suicide. La Lliga, not unexpectedly, fared badly in the regional government elections; it is contemplating merger with the eclipsed former UM, now the Convergència.

Pastor remains; the most charismatic cheerleader for the local left of the PP. Without him in a position of power, with Delgado in one, and the most important one, and with education and culture under Bauzá’s umbrella, everything will become very much clearer. For this will be the nuclear option that could have been anticipated.

While Delgado, despite the hoteliers’ mistrust of him, could actually prove to be a very good tourism minister, the mistrust is shared by many within the PP and is indicative of the battles that lie ahead in what is anything but a unified party. But more significant than a Delgado appointment would be the siting of education and culture within the department of the presidency.

For education and culture, substitute the two words with “language” and “anti-Catalanism” and you get a far greater appreciation as to why it would be so significant. It would be a clear declaration of the personal intent of Bauzá (and Delgado) to pursue a social agenda of the sort that helped to alienate Font, Pastor and others.

By packing his cabinet with obedience, Bauzá may be sure of initial victories, but it could well develop a bunker mentality when the worm turns both within his party and the islands in general. The first victory is likely to be economic. Plenty of advance warning is being given – the classic there is no money, blame it all on the lot before line, á la the Tories and á la any party set on deep cuts to expenditure while no one is really looking and no one is inclined to challenge. But it’s what comes later that is the scary part. Bauzá and Delgado ensconced in the casino playing a high-risk game of social roulette.

From the heaven of acclamation to the Las Vegas gamble on the cohesion of Mallorcan society.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

* Been looking for an excuse to do the “Heaven Or Las Vegas” title, so I can do a Cocteaus’ thing. This remains utterly brilliant …

Out Of Proportion: A week in Mallorcan politics

Even by Mallorca’s bizarre standards, last week was a decidedly odd one for the island’s political classes. One party changes its name, one politico slams judges and prosecutors for getting above their station, and another defends the previously indefensible.

The Unió Mallorquina is dead. Long live the Convergència per les Illes Balears. How are we now supposed to anglicise the party? No more is it “unionist”. Is it convergenist, whatever this might mean? The new party has swiftly adopted an abbreviation – CxI – which is even more obscure, except for an “x” marking the spot of where the old UM body is buried.

Ex-UM mayors and councillors have been similarly swift in discarding their past, rushing to converge on the Convergència, every good man and not so good man coming to the aid of the new party. As if anyone will buy it. They’re dead men walking towards the cliff’s edge of falling into oblivion, and the new party as a whole might yet tumble with them if a judge’s demand for a 1.6 million euros bail, levelled against the UM, is upheld. What a political party is supposed to post bail for is beyond me. You can’t exactly bang up a party as such. Or maybe you can. The alacrity with which the UM transmogrified into CxI might have been expedient in the hope that the UM would no longer be liable. For whatever it is supposed to be liable.

The judges and the prosecutors are having a jolly old time of it. The UM, even in death, is the gift that keeps on giving and keeps on allowing the legal system to throw out wild statements about bail amounts and demands for time in clink. While politicians, accused of getting up to their usual shenanigans, are unseemly, so also is the publicity blaring of the m’learned-friends institution. A million euros bail here, a twenty-year stretch there. Do I hear a million and a half or thirty years? It’s the prosecutors’ public auctions for guilt not yet proven. And the press, of course, love it. Where would it be in Mallorca without its outlandish headlines of how much and how long?

Into all this has emerged the odd figure of Ramón Socias. Odd, because he pops up now and then, disappears for a while and then re-appears, offering some grand insight into the less-than-healthy state of Balearics’ political or social life. The central government’s delegate for the islands, he’s a bit like the Governor-General of Australia. You don’t really know what the point of him is, but he’s there, nevertheless.

Or perhaps he’s like an honorary head of state, were the Balearics to be a state, which they most certainly are not, as José María Aznar would fervently insist. Though Francesc Antich is “president”, in the same way that Zapatero is “president”, neither can, in strict constitutional terms, be thus. You don’t get presidents in monarchical democracies, which would mean that Socias is a sort of über-non-president.

Whatever Socias is, he gave the judges a ticking off for acting in a “disproportionate” fashion in hounding the poor former UM-ists who have allegedly been siphoning off Palma town hall moolah for some political advantage. Cue all manner of indignation. Unseemly the process of arrest and publicity may be, but there is also meant to be such a thing as the independence of the judiciary from the executive. Socias had a point, but whether he was wise to express it is another matter, and the head of the judges’ deanery was one who did think it unwise. On balance though, Socias’s intervention might yet be seen to be wise, if it cuts out what is the real disproportionality, namely the media-manipulated fandango of the prosecutors’ song and dance.

While Socias, by implication, some might suggest, appeared to side with the allegedly corrupt, the Partido Popular’s leader, José Ramón Bauzá, entered the fray to seemingly support former president Jaume Matas. He praised the investments of the ex-PP president and reckoned that court cases involving him were “for show”. So, do we now have to believe that Mallorca is engaged in Stalinist-style show trials? Maybe we do. Bauzá’s intervention was doubly peculiar, given the brownie points he has won for not allowing candidature of any politico implicated in corruption and his avowal of legal reform to tighten the noose around future corruption.

One might have thought it wiser for Bauzá to keep quiet where Matas was concerned, especially as Jaume has to try and scrape together the odd million or so in order to stay out of nick. Again. Another headlining bail demand, this time for his nights at the opera building that didn’t get built. Disproportionate? All for show? Maybe Bauzá should have a word with Socias, and together they both keep mum. Or perhaps he should suggest that Matas changes his name.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Source Of The Problem: Jaume Font and the PP

Jaume Font. James the Source. The source of much discontent within the local Partido Popular; discontent that will rumble on despite Font’s departure from the party.

Jaume has not, he says, been happy with the party for some years. He became less happy last summer when he found his route to the presidency of the Council of Mallorca blocked by the party’s leader, José Ramón Bauzá. Joe Ray has achieved something astonishing. What should have brought him plaudits, not nominating anyone for the forthcoming elections implicated in any scandal, has backfired.

Font was the most prominent member of the party to be so denied nomination. The accusations against him, which revolved around the so-called “caso plan territorial de Mallorca”, were archived along with the whole case in November. The perceived injustices against individuals whose innocence was being questioned were just the background to the greater division that Bauzá had successfully managed to create. The left of the party has been alienated by his anti-Catalanism, his equivocal attitude towards regional autonomy and by perceptions that the real control is in the hands of the party nationally and via the puppet-mastery figure of Carlos Grytpype-Thynne, Sr. Delgado, Mr. Thin, the mayor of Calvia.

Bat duly taken home, the fountain of another party is to gush, with Font its spring. He has rejected the idea of his joining the Unió Mallorquina, unlike another ex-PP member, Miguel Munar, who has already risen to a position of high command in a party stripped of much of its leadership through scandal. Instead, there will be a party with a power base in his home town of Sa Pobla, to which, in an act of indignant snubbing, Joe Ray was not invited to the end-of-summer celebrations in September.

The support of the “poblers” alone would not get Font very far, which is why he appears to believe that a grander party, let’s call it the Font Front (in fact the Lliga Regionalista Balear), should be formed. This could embrace the UM and presumably others disenchanted with the unpopular head of the “populares”, Joe Ray. These might include the PP spokesperson in the local parliament, the boy on the burning and under-demolition-threat bridge of Porto Cristo, populist baldy Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor. Another one of the great disaffected, Guillem Ginard, the former mayor of Campos who fell out with his UM buddies and formed his own party, +Acció, is also said to be in the frame for the Font Front.

There isn’t a terrific amount of clear blue Med between the UM and the left of the PP. In many respects, they are very similar. The UM’s USPs of Catalan and autonomy appear to be those also of the anti-Bauzá PP. Only a fervent attitude towards independence on behalf of the UM might be said to distinguish the two.

The danger for Font, however, is that a coalition with the UM could easily be portrayed as the union of the discredited. Though the case against him has been archived, i.e. to all intents and purposes dropped, and though the new-look UM has tried to distance itself from the corruption cases, Font was environment minister in the Jaume Matas government. Bauzá has not only sought to block nominations of those implicated in scandal, he has also sought to draw a line under the Matas regime and its corruption allegations. Font’s going is not something that Bauzá will be unhappy about.

If he hadn’t managed to put his foot in it so often, as with his self-confessed “mental lapse” regarding Catalan, Joe Ray’s cleaning up of the PP would by now, you would have thought, have placed him in a position of far greater strength and have also afforded him greater popularity. But he has underestimated the “Mallorcan-ness” of much of his local party, thus bringing about the division that he now faces. In November he had to meet with PP mayors from across the island, alarmed by the friction, with Font and Pastor firmly lined up against Bauzá.

Though there may be a possibility that others will jump ship from the PP, it would be a huge risk to any politician with his or her eye on the main chance of governmental power. There are three months until the elections, which is not long to put into place an effective party machine. However, it is being said that there are some powerful businesspeople willing to support it.

The PP should walk the coming elections, but even were it to win, how long would it take for the divisions to re-surface? They are ones largely of Bauzá’s making. His apparently honourable intentions to present a “clean” PP have been undone by what one commentator has described as the “breaking of the bonds between the PP and Mallorca”. There are unhappy campers on the party’s left and a strident right-ist agenda would only make them unhappier. Just like Jaume Font.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

United We Speak: Catalan or Mallorquín?

When is a language a dialect, and when is a dialect a language? Opinion as to the distinction between the two is one on which you will find a lack of unanimity. Linguists themselves can’t agree.

If you are inclined to do so, you can go back far enough with most “languages” and argue that they are in fact dialects. It all depends where you want to start. But for current-day purposes, there are languages which are undeniably languages, one of them being Catalan. Or is it? A definition of a language is that it should be that of a “state”. You may have noticed that there is no Catalan “state”.

Alternatively, a language is a language if there exists a “standard” form, which is the case with Catalan. Except, of course, that there are variants. Nevertheless, the language has its own “code” in that dictionaries determine the standard form. The fact of there being variants does not negate a claim to being a language. Were it to, then English would fail the test. In the case of English, standard codes of language as set out by dictionaries, most obviously the Oxford English Dictionary, are important as there is no body which arbitrates on what is or isn’t standard English, as is the case with Spanish (Castilian) or French.

The problem with these variants, however, is the vagueness as to the language-dialect distinction. Let’s take Mallorquín. Is it a language? There is no Mallorcan state and there isn’t a specific language code, or at least as far as I am aware. Where it appears, in dictionary form, is in the work of Antoni Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll who included Balearic languages (or are they dialects) in an all-embracing Catalan dictionary.

Greater unanimity of opinion surrounds the political dimension as to whether a language is a language or a dialect. Think what you will of the politicisation of the language debate in Mallorca, but to deny the importance of politics would be to completely fail to understand the debate, and it is a debate that has been sparked into ever more controversial life by the leader of the Partido Popular (PP), José Ramón Bauzá, who has said he will reform the so-called law on linguistic normalisation if his party wins power in May next year. This would have the effect of relegating Catalan in favour of Castilian and the languages of the individual islands.

What Bauzá argues is that there is no such thing as a “unity of Catalan”. He seems to believe that Mallorquín and the other languages of the Balearics are that – languages, and not therefore dialects of Catalan. Why does he think this? The reasoning is political. If Mallorquín is distinct, then so is Mallorca from Catalonia. The political motive lies with his alliance with the Spanish state and not the aspirations of a Catalan state, language and all.

Bauzá has attempted to prove linguistically that Mallorquín is not a dialect by mentioning certain Catalan words that are not used in Mallorca or the Balearics. He has come unstuck, his theory being disproved by teachers at the institute in Inca from where a protest of schools in Mallorca is being planned against him. Moreover, even if they weren’t used, this wouldn’t prove anything. Dialects do tend to change words. Indeed Bauzá’s whole linguistic argument is preposterous. The Catalan lineage from the time of the conquest of the thirteenth century is indisputable, except by a few who claim that a brand of Catalan was imported directly from southern France. Mallorquín has fundamental differences to Catalan, such as with the definite articles “es” and “sa” (and even these aren’t used in all instances), but the differences are not so great as to suggest some sort of separate development or major divergence that might qualify it as a distinct language.

Town halls in Mallorca have responded to Bauzá by approving Catalan as Mallorca’s “own language”. Manacor has just followed the likes of Sa Pobla, Pollensa and Inca in doing so. Why should they do this? Apart from the political aspect, the town halls are their own local repositories of culture, and language is indivisible from culture. In Manacor, there is an additional political flavour. The mayor is Antoni Pastor, a member of the PP who does not see eye to eye with Bauzá.

But what makes this all the more curious is that claims for a Mallorquín language are therefore being denied by those who oppose Bauzá, be they from his own party or from the left of the political spectrum. So Mallorquín is a dialect, and to say it isn’t would be to deny the supremacy of Catalan. It is a somewhat bizarre argument when you consider nationalist pretensions to the existence of a Mallorquín language, though perhaps it isn’t so bizarre when you consider that in a different Catalan-speaking part of Spain, Valencia, the far-right has supported the notion of a separate language to the extent of calling for linguistic secession from Catalan.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether you call Mallorquín a dialect or a language. What does matter is where you stand on the issue politically. And that, it would appear, is all that matters.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pastoral Care: The Partido Popular’s woes

The Partido Popular is the natural party of Balearic government. Since autonomy and the creation of the first government in 1983, it has been the dominant party, save for the two periods of administration under coalitions led by the socialists (PSOE/PSIB). It should regain power in the elections this coming May, but it is doing everything it can to prevent this.

If the PP’s leader, José Ramón Bauzá, were a football team manager, he would now face the terraces of his party shouting “you don’t know what you’re doing”. He has managed to alienate different factions, firstly by his policy of selection, secondly by making a pig’s ear of the language issue and upsetting the Catalanists, thirdly by seeming to be controlled by the right-wing mayor of Calvia, Carlos Delgado, fourthly by appearing to set the local party on a lurch to the right and one that goes against the notion of regionalism and fifthly by, to the utter amazement of many, overlooking the likes of the mayor of Manacor and the ex-mayor of Inca as candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca in favour of someone called Maria Salom, a member of Congress in Madrid.

It’s an impressive charge sheet, one to which can be added the hand of the party centrally in helping to make Bauzá’s decisions for him, as with Salom, an apparent lack of openness in selection and an underlying tension of not so much a north-south divide but a Palma-Calvia versus everywhere else schism.

It is this final element that underpins the problems that Bauzá has brought upon himself. It is hardly a new issue. Other parties in Mallorca have faced the same internal antagonisms caused by the dominance of the Palma-Calvia axis. The nationalist Unió Mallorquina (UM) party, undergoing one of its regular periods of bloodletting, did this in spectacular style some while back when “choosing” Palma man Miguel Nadal to succeed Maria Antònia Munar as party leader. Its leadership election saw the then mayor of Alcúdia, Miguel Ferrer, vanquished at the end of a process that had at one point seen Nadal take his bat home in a fit of pique, only to return to the fray and be anointed by Munar.

The polemic within the PP is concerned not only with regionalism in terms of the interests of Mallorca and the islands but also in terms of the towns around the island. Martí Torres, the PP mayor of Santa Margalida has said that the “rest of Mallorca’s municipalities should carry as much weight as Palma or Calvia”. Other PP mayors in the “comarcas” (regions) have said similar things.

Torres is a supporter of one Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor. Where Bauzá is the ashen-faced manager of the PP, Pastor is a bald-headed refereeing Pierluigi Collina, blowing his whistle on the in-fighting, while also contributing to it, but hoping to bring back some “morals” to the PP. Crucially though, Pastor is the flag-waver for the PP and its regionalist tendency, the left wing of the party which has become disgruntled enough to have suffered a defection to the nationalist UM. The issue of regionalism, bound up in matters to do with language policy, domination or not by Madrid and equality for the towns of Mallorca outside of Palma and Calvia, is the local party’s Europe question. It is one that divides the PP down the middle, and Bauzá has proved to so far be incapable of creating unity. Quite the opposite. He has promoted division.

The Palma-Calvia dominance is entirely to be expected. With 70% of the island’s population residing in Palma and Calvia it couldn’t be anything other. Palma, as the capital, is “serious”. It is the centre of commerce as well as government. It is from where and to where you should anticipate the professional and political elite to have emerged and to have gravitated. But the Palma connection has problems. Especially for the PP. The former president Jaume Matas, embroiled in corruption allegations, and the grandfather of Mallorcan politics, Gabriel Cañellas who was not without his own problems when it came to accusations (he was absolved), are both Palma men.

This history should not be underestimated. It colours what is happening in the PP at the moment. It may be under the surface, but it is there all the same. The regions might once have produced some old farmer who got lucky as the local mayor, but they are now bringing forth a new and more professional political class in different parties – the businessman Fornes in Muro, the admirable Llompart in Alcúdia, the impressive Pastor in Manacor.

The old boys’ network is still very much at play, especially in the towns around the island. There is still a sense in which politics are the adults’ version of playground spats among peers who have grown up with each other. This isn’t about to go away, but nevertheless there is a further sense in which some growing up has occurred and that a new political maturity away from the Palma epicentre is bedding in, but is still being pushed onto the subs’ bench.

Bauzá threatens to undermine his party through a Palma and Calvia-centric arrogance, one allied to Madrid, and by alienating a coherent and confident left wing in the regions. The goal for election victory in 2011 is wide open, but unless he sets about repairing the damage, the cuddly current president, Francesc Antich, can even now, much against expectation, anticipate stroking home the penalty shoot-out winner.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Party Games: Bauzà’s lapse

The Partido Popular in the Balearics are making a video game/puppet version of themselves. It features the party’s leader, José Ramón Bauzà, pronounced Bowser. His number two is Calvia’s mayor Carlos Delgado, Charles Thin, represented by the old Goons’ character – Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, to whom he bears a not totally thin resemblance.

It’s a shame that Bowser is not a chameleon, but the Super Mario turtle – PP Bowser-style – combines in animated villainy with Grytpype-Thynne to make for a real hoot of an educational tool, one for the pupils of the Balearics. The big question is in which language they should be speaking. The preference should be Castilian. But this is too simple. There are also Catalan, Mallorquín, Menorquín, Ibicenco and Formenterense to take into account. The game does get somewhat complicated.

The solution is to make the animation a battle between Bowser and Grytpype, suitably cast as the Castilian-speaking villains, against hordes of Marios or Neddie Seagoons mouthing off in Catalan or versions thereof. But there’s a sub-plot, because we can’t be too sure about Bowser, as he’s prone to turn turtle. One day he says he’s going to kick Catalan into touch, and the next day he says that he hadn’t meant to say that, it was all the result of a “lapse” he had suffered during an early-morning radio interview.

Bowser has pumped out a whole load of oil onto the troubled waters of local language politics. He had done so by suggesting that, were he to become regional president next year, he would get rid of the law of 1986 which had granted Catalan dual-official status, a result of which would be to promote Castilian, together with the local languages, as the tongues of learning in schools – the so-called free selection, but without Catalan. He had done so, and then said he hadn’t meant it, having caused a hell of a stink in the process.

There is a fair old back story to all this.

Bauzà and Delgado were rivals for the leadership of the PP in March, the former winning quite comfortably. Before the leadership election took place, Delgado had some pretty harsh words for his rival, accusing him of having no credibility when it came to the language issue and of being opposed to free selection of language.

Delgado, on the other hand, is an advocate of free selection. He is unashamedly pro-Castilian and anti-Catalan, stating that Castilian is his “mother tongue”.

But since the leadership election, things have moved on. Firstly, Bauzà created something of a stir by making Delgado his number two, which didn’t go down a storm with the party’s moderate wing. Secondly, he managed to alienate this moderate wing by being perceived as being too close to the party’s national leader Mariano Rajoy; the insinuations are that he is something of a stooge. Thirdly, he increased this alienation by getting ever closer to Delgado, who is to the right of the party. So much so that, by the end of September, he was being branded a Delgado “clone” and, in an “Ultima Hora” blog, was said to have “adopted the anti-Catalan thesis” of Delgado.

It is against this background, therefore, that Bauzà did the radio interview, one in which he seemed to be following the Delgado line. The impression is of someone prone to vacillation and to misjudgment, which he quickly tried to rectify by claiming a lapse that allowed him to then try and distance himself from Delgado. But if he is capable of one lapse, then what other ones might he have? The words of Delgado regarding his credibility will be haunting him.

Bauzà might hope that when the elections for the regional presidency take place next spring, everyone will have forgotten about all this. It’s most unlikely. Though whether he has dented his chances are questionable. The PP will probably still win, but what confidence might there be in a president who seems far from sure-footed?

He should stick to video games. Bowser’s the one who always steals the game show. And he should be wary of Delgado. Grytpype-Thynne always managed to put one over on the fall-guy.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Not The Stupid Economy: Mallorca’s elections and opinion polls

Local elections in Mallorca and the Balearics are to be held next spring. An opinion poll conducted on behalf of “Ultima Hora” suggests that the current main opposition party, the Partido Popular, will win with an overall majority, thus negating the need for a coalition pact.

Since regional autonomy in the early ’80s, the PP has traditionally been the party of Balearics government, firstly as the Coalición Popular and then as the PP in its own right. It lost for the first time in 1999, to a pact headed by the current socialist (PSOE/PSIB*) president Francesc Antich, regained an overall majority in 2003, under the disgraced ex-president Jaume Matas, and then lost out again to an Antich coalition in 2007, despite receiving more votes than other parties. For the PP to now seemingly be heading towards electoral victory suggests a re-establishment of Mallorca and the islands’ social and political norm – conservatism.

While one can nuance the poll as being an expression of dissatisfaction with socialist government and management of the economic crisis, both at the local and the national level, the poll also reveals that the PSOE is on target to gain more of a share of the vote. It is the nationalist party, the Unió Mallorquina, which stands to lose most at the next election; it faces virtual oblivion. This, therefore, begs a question as to the influence of political corruption on voter intention. The UM has been deeply mired in scandal over the past couple of years, but the PP has been similarly tainted by the anti-corruption cases that have gone right to the top of its last administration – to Jaume Matas. The socialists, on the other hand, have escaped the sleaze, just about.

So does the poll simply reflect a reversion to the status quo of the two dominant parties – the PP and PSOE – or is there also the influence of corruption?

The PP has been looking to clean up its act, but an almighty row has erupted within its ranks as a result. Its leader and presidential candidate, José Ramón Bauza, has stated that any politician implicated in a scandal will not stand in the coming elections, which might rule all of them out, you might think. Bauza has gone so far as to say that if any charge levelled at him from his time as mayor of Marratxi were to be forthcoming, then he would step aside.

The opposition to Bauza’s stance stems from what could be unjust and unproven allegations. Not every politician implicated in a corruption case is necessarily guilty. But one has an equivocal situation, because in light of all the scandals, Antich drew up an ethical code under which investigations for any alleged wrongdoing were grounds for resignation. Yet, the president, whilst supporting the position of his main political opponent in asserting that this is not “unjust”, has said that he would not apply the same principle to his own party. The current socialist tourism and employment minister, Joana Barceló, has faced her own local difficulties dating back to her time at the Council of Menorca. Her case has been “archived”, i.e. nothing has been proven, but Antich could be accused of double standards.

Bauza’s determination to clean up the PP is laudable enough, but he opens himself and his party up to potential mischief-making. One can already hear the whispers of dirty tricks being plotted in the election machines of other parties. Bauza has another problem. And that is that some in the party believe that he has moved close to his one-time rival for the leadership of the PP, Carlos Delgado, mayor of Calvia. Moreover, it is felt that Bauza is too Madrid-centric, a possible puppet of the party’s national organisation and less inclined to stand up for local Mallorcan (Balearic) interests. While he has attempted to rebut the idea that Delgado has in some way been influencing him, it might be remembered that Delgado is antipathetic towards Catalanism; he has made a virtue of not speaking Catalan.

The poll could be seen as voter support for Bauza’s clean-up, but the party’s in-figthing threatens to undermine his good intentions and to place an obstacle in the way of its resuming its role as the, if you will, natural party of Balearics government. Bauza and his party may already have given the opponents an own goal because of the alleged closeness to Madrid; the UM and the socialists will exploit it for all its worth. Bauza, however, could respond by accusing Antich of hypocrisy. The elections should be about the key issue of the economy, but they’re likely to be overshadowed by the smell of corruption and the parochialism of insular, nationalist interests.

* Note: The PSOE is the socialist party at national level; the PSIB is the Balearics version.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.