Ordinary People: Muro

How many of you know the town of Muro? Not the Playa de Muro resort that is mistakenly believed by many to be part of Alcúdia, but the town itself, some ten kilometres inland.

In common with other old towns in Mallorca, Muro is distinctly old. Roman in origin, its name (the wall) dates back to this time. The Moors, strangely for them, didn’t re-name it, but instead monikered the vast wetlands to one side of the town as Al Buhayra – Albufera. The town church is one of the most impressive and forbidding of all the island’s religious colossi. It is the imposing focal point for a town centre to which relatively few tourists venture. One reason for this is that there is no bus route that connects town to resort. The lack of direct public transport is symptomatic of an affliction that Playa de Muro shares with some other resorts, that of distance from the centre of local power, the town hall, and of perceived and possibly even real neglect.

Like other towns on the island, Muro’s past was one of agriculture. Its ruralism is re-created in the fine museum in the town, and the role of its co-operative during the earlier years of Franco has been assiduously documented by the town’s archivist in creating an outstanding source of original, historical material. Current-day Muro retains its association with the land. Together with its neighbour, Sa Pobla, it is the centre of much of the island’s vegetable growing.

The growth of Playa de Muro and a process of economic diversification away from agriculture owes much to one hotel chain. Grupotel. The chain is identifiable with the town, and so it is also identifiable with the town hall. Grupotel’s president is a former mayor. The current mayor, Martí Fornes, is a former director.

The accusation that is made regarding the apparent neglect of the resort doesn’t quite square with this town hall representation, while the one big tourism issue for the resort, the building of the golf course on the Son Bosc finca, is one in which Grupotel is a significant player; in fact, the most significant. It is the major shareholder, along with other hotel groups, of the development company.

Inevitably, given the opposing camps and controversy that surrounds Son Bosc, the golf course was a matter up for discussion when the town’s mayoral candidates gathered in the municipal theatre for their public grilling on Wednesday. There were seven of them in all, including Fornes. His party is the Convergència Democrática Murera, essentially an offshoot of the Partido Popular, and one founded by … the president of Grupotel.

Fornes has not enjoyed the smoothest of rides since replacing Jaume Perelló, he who has been obliged to take a holiday on account of vote-rigging in the late 1990s. While Son Bosc has dominated the headlines, he has been confronted, in addition to a parlous financial position that has left town hall suppliers unpaid, with the threat of being denounced by the local police for alleged harassment, with consternation at the decision to acquire the town’s bullring at a cost of some 450,000 euros and with the threat to property on the coast under new demarcation plans emanating from the Costas authority.

The most public example of this threat to coastal property has been the case of the bizarre enclave of Ses Casetes des Capellans, an urbanisation of former church cottages that reach into forest land and which sit right on land that has clearly been influenced by the sea, a key determinant where the Costas are concerned for sending in the bulldozers.

For reasons of sheer oddness and uniqueness, Ses Casetes must be preserved. And there is another reason. The cottages, for the most part, belong to ordinary people of the town who use them as holiday and weekending homes. It is the clash between ordinariness and the long march of tourism development that goes to the heart of the Muro debate, both politically and socially. There was no clearer an expression of this than a banner that was unfurled during a protest against demolition. “A golf course is for the rich, Capellans is for the people.”

It is the obsessing over the golf course that has created the town’s divisions. Not because it’s widely unwanted, because it isn’t, but because of what is seen as being a wrong priority.

Whoever wins the election in Muro, and perhaps more importantly who wins the regional election, will determine the fate not just of the ordinary people and their “casetes” but also that – finally – of Son Bosc. And the outcome is unlikely to be one that sits easily with many of those ordinary people.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Every Day People: Mallorca-ism

Politicians always say the right things. Or try to. Ahead of elections, they try particularly hard. They also have a tendency to repeat what has been said before. María Salom, the Partido Popular’s candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca, is no exception.

“I wish that Mallorca could live from tourism 365 days a year.” Amen to that. We all wish the same thing. Incumbents of various political posts have wished the same thing in the past, and will doubtless continue to do so. They, and we, can wish all manner of things. Like Roy Wood and wishing every day were Christmas, so we might wish tourism brought Christmas gifts every day of the year. Sadly, it doesn’t.

Salom is ticking the right boxes. She has even suggested the creation of “fiesta routes”, such as for Sant Antoni in January. It’s not a novel idea, as it has been suggested on many occasions, not least by myself. But for it to be given a political airing verges on that rarest of political attributes, some creative thinking.

Unfortunately for María Salom, she might not have much influence on a 365-days-a-year tourism. It seems to have escaped her attention that her own party, quite rightly, has said that it will do away with a tourism department at the Council. It’s unnecessary when there is already one along the corridors of the regional government. Ditto, of course, much of what has been grabbed as an irrelevant duplication of responsibility by the island’s Council. She herself has pretty much set out a blueprint for trimming the Council. It seems strange, therefore, that she should pronounce on something that is not hers to pronounce on.

Yet, it isn’t all that strange when you consider what else she has been saying. The dream, the wishful thinking of every day being a tourism day, is purely political froth. As also are her declarations in favour of preserving the countryside and of defending “Mallorca-ism”. It is just possible that she personally believes all this, but her party has shown little evidence that it does.

Or possibly she has been put up to fire a shot across the ambitious bows of would-be tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, who has made it clear enough in the past that he would give tourism needs priority over those of land and environment. Equally possible is that she has been allocated the role of portraying a cuddly, feminine face of the PP and of encroaching upon the virgin, untouched land of the island’s left wing along with its own avowed Mallorca-ism, the dual domains of the government’s current environment minister, the Mallorcan socialists’ Gabriel Vicens.

It doesn’t really wash, though. As sure as it was that when Vicens clambered aboard the environmental horse and cart and sought to kill off developments such as the Muro golf course, so the PP, newly restored to office, will take to its fleet of gas-guzzlers and flatten the finca. If they don’t, it will be a surprise and a reversal of a reputation as the life and soul of the 19th hole and the eighteen before it.

The right and left of the island are poles apart. Vicens once committed an act of “disobedience” by being one of those who went off for a trek along the camí (way) of Ternelles in Pollensa when he shouldn’t have done. In his other capacity as transport minister, you can be pretty certain that he hadn’t gone on a reccy to eye up the way as the site of a new motorway. Had it been a PP politician, he or she wouldn’t of course have been disobedient but instead would have been on the phone to place the purchase order for the tarmac.

It is this polarity that underpins the upcoming elections. While the diversions of corruption and the pressing need for economic growth will be two of the battlegrounds, it is the philosophical differences in terms of what Mallorca should be that are at the heart of the elections. They can be nuanced as a type of quasi-Luddite romanticism on the left and an industrial pragmatism on the right.

Campaigning for the elections is not meant to be occurring at present. The official date for the start of campaigning is 6 May, but it isn’t stopping the unofficial hustings taking place. Hence María Salom’s pronouncement and indeed the words of other politicians.

The Mallorca-ism to which Salom refers may, for a PP population, sound like an attempt at mollification of the more left-inclined who have been alarmed by some of the strident noises coming out of the party, but it is a central theme of what these elections are about; indeed what they should be about. As for tourism 365 days a year, where does this fit in with Mallorca-ism? There are some who, and I leave it to you to decide who, would rather this were never the case.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Our Honourable Friends: Mallorca’s mayors

How many are likely to mourn the decision of Pollensa’s mayor, Joan Cerdà, not to seek re-selection? He himself is probably not mourning the decision. On Thursday, he walked past me, talking into his mobile. He was actually smiling, rather than wearing his usual care-worn expression. The burden has been lifted. You wonder why he ever subjected himself to the post and to the vilification that has been directed towards him and which has characterised his term in office.

The chances of Cerdà’s party, newly named with the mouthful that is the Convergènica i Unió de Pollença, securing a further term must, you would think, be low. Transformed it may have been by name, it remains tarnished by its previous incarnation as the discredited Unió Mallorquina. From the less than good ship that was the UM has jumped the odd defector, such as the mayoral candidate for Jaume Font’s La Lliga, the not unappealing Malena Estrany. If the selection of Pollensa’s mayor were simply a beauty parade, then Estrany would cat-walk it. But it isn’t, as Joan Cerdà proved.

Who would be a mayor in Mallorca? Why would anyone wish to be? The honourable view is that it is an expression of civic duty, of doing the right thing. The honourable view is not one that is widely held; among the citizenship, at any rate. There may well be paragons of public virtue in Mallorca, but for every one that there is, there is also an Hidalgo or a Perelló, respectively former mayors of Andratx and Muro, and both languishing at the citizens’ pleasure.

The theory of very local democracy is one that should be unquestioned because of the closeness of the people to the people in authority. It is a fine theory, but the very closeness is what makes the mayoral office both difficult and open to abuse. Difficult because of the endless criticism that is likely to arise and which can rarely be avoided in the day-to-day of such small communities. Open to abuse because. Well, because you know why.

The politics of Mallorca’s towns, the positions of mayors in these towns, are reflections not of politics so much as of tribalism. Of networks, of families, of business association, of old scores that can go back to schooldays. Those who used once to fight in the playground now fight in plenary sessions, and the level of sophistication is not always greatly advanced from the days of the playground.

The political parties in the towns and villages are more social and tribal clubs than they are necessarily ideological. Mayors become mayors partly because of who they know, and their selection still owes something to the old system of the “cacique”, the local political chiefs, the fixers of the towns and villages of the nineteenth century. It is a current-day system that, for all the good intentions and of what is honour among some, retains the suspicion of favours.

Why is it that in many Mallorcan towns there are local variants of the main parties or simply “other” parties? Are these an expression of dissatisfaction, or is there another reason? The party political clubs have more than a hint of the self-serving.

The people who most matter when it comes to the election of parties and the selection of mayors are the Mallorcan people themselves, the majority of whom, of those to whom I have spoken about the elections, damn each and every party equally. It is not the recent corruption that colours their views and releases their damnation, it is the unspoken body language of a raised eyebrow or a shrug of a shoulder. It matters not which party is elected, nor which mayor is selected. Favours will arise, and everyone knows it, or suspects it.

But can anything other than this be expected? It should be expected, but how difficult must it be to refuse an uncle or cousin, to be immune to a parent’s longstanding friendship with someone who was the one who did, after all, give the old man the job that paid for the family finca? How difficult must it be to not be influenced by your wife’s suggestion that her brother’s business might be an excellent choice for such or such a contract?

Added to these conflicts of interest, mayors and councillors have to contend also with the demands of those largely disbarred from the grace and favour of the network – the foreigners. Those such as the British with their own agendas. Candidates may smile and say the right words, but what are they really thinking? Do they honestly care about whether someone has or hasn’t got a residency card? About whether someone has or has not to hold a piece of paper instead? Why should they? It doesn’t matter. Sorry, but it doesn’t matter. Inconvenience is not or should not be a political issue. Discrimination is, but it goes a lot deeper than a piece of paper.

Ultimately, what does matter is that a mayor presides over what his or her town or village is meant to be responsible for. Nothing more and nothing less. Waste collection, street lighting and cleaning, police. The stuff of the everyday plus the less than everyday, such as the fiestas. Should it really matter that just because someone is a relative that his business secures the contract for certain services? Of course it should matter, but until now it has been the unwritten rule. What is changing, though, is the impulse towards greater transparency, something which the island’s town halls have preferred to obscure. The impulse is also towards citizen participation and involvement, a movement that should assist in this transparency. The problem then, though, is who has the loudest and most important voices among the participating citizens.

Being a mayor in Mallorca. Who on earth would want to be one? Even for the honourable.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

This Fascist Groove Thing: Political insults

The parliamentarians of the Balearics will be breaking up soon. Their spring holidays will be a time for preparing for government – the next one – or for looking around for gainful employment if and when the elections on 22 May add them to the statistics of the unemployed. A dozen deputies will be given a little bonus, six grand’s worth of payment to tide them over between parliament’s dissolution on 28 March and the results of the elections being announced. Not exactly huge parachute payments, but nice work if you can get it.

One among the parliamentary ranks, finance minister Carles Manera, has been making plans. He will, assuming he is no longer in charge of the islands’ coffers come the end of May, be dividing his time between the universities of Palma, Barcelona and the LSE. He may not be Milton Friedman, but future economists of Britain will be able to say that they were once taught by the chap at the helm when the Balearics’ economy went into meltdown.

At the penultimate session of parliament, Manera has been doing his best to play down charges regarding irregularities with the islands’ public companies, by which are meant organisations that are in effect government agencies. Hey ho, always an irregularity or several to keep local politicians occupied.

Manera will be just one of the jolly figures who has kept us entertained over the past four years to duck out of local politics. Some have already said that they are calling it a day, opportunely perhaps. Catalina Julve, she of the waste-collection scandal, is to quit politics. Presumably, she won’t be emptying the bins anywhere near you soon.

Miguel Grimalt, our old friend “Enviro Man”, is to be recycled into business somewhere. How much we once enjoyed him. We saw him here, we saw him there, we saw Enviro Man everywhere; one day planting a tree, the next reclaiming a dune, always immaculately turned out, even when he put on some wellies to go and dig to save the planet.

The dying days of the current parliament are a time for politicians to make hay while  the sun sets. If not the finance minister and his attempts at regularising the allegedly irregular, then any number of the honourable gentlemen and ladies having their acerbic centimo’s worth. Peculiarly, you might be interested to know, there is an insistence that decorum prevails and deputies are afforded the respect of being referred to as “honourable”, just as in Westminster. Rarely has an adjective become so abused.

And abuse has been flying in the parliamentary chamber, as warring politicos engage in last-minute recriminations and pitch for the electorate’s affections. Parliamentary speeches, Balearics-style, are with the aid of microphones, making the deputies like karaoke politicians, reading from a monitor of insults. Ravens, crows or vultures, the word “cuervos” can mean them all, and is but one affront to be traded as predatory Partido Popular politicos circle to pick over the carrion of the decaying body of the Antich administration.

Another insult is “fascist”, an expression of contempt loaded with historical resonance, and one coming from the Partido Popular’s Antoni Pastor in the direction of the Antich socialists. Why fascist? It doesn’t much matter why, and it doesn’t really hold much weight when the one using the insult is seated next to his party leader (José Bauzá) who, one suspects, he dislikes more than he does the opposition.

“Fascist” may count more as an insult in a country that was once so, but it is still an easy term to toss around, rather as it used to be in my days of student politics when everyone was a fascist. Unless you know someone to be the genuine article, and it was my misfortune to have known one (a key strategist with the BNP, though it wasn’t realised that he was at the time), then it’s an insult best left on the grooves in the political karaoke database.

But maybe this fascist thing is appropriate. As spring beckons, and some politicians (the Partido Popular’s probably) will look forward to the darling buds of a return to power in May, we might remember Mel Brooks’ song from “The Producers”. “Springtime For Hitler” … (substitute as and if you feel appropriate).

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Jobs For The Boys: Local councillors

Local elections take place in May, and there will be more posts to vote for in Mallorca than ever before. The law on elections allows for specific numbers of town hall councillors depending on the size of municipalities’ populations. Towns which have broken through different thresholds include Calvia. Now with over 50,000 registered inhabitants, it can increase its councillors from 21 to 25. Good for it. At the same time that it’s adding politicians, it’s cutting budgets for promoting tourism and looking after the beaches. Three towns close to upping their councillors to 21 are Alcúdia, Pollensa and Felanitx, but none has yet acquired the 20,000 residents to permit this. So they are stuck with 17.

Town halls, again depending on the size of the population, are obliged to assume responsibility for a range of minimum services. All of them have to look after basic services, such as refuse collection and street maintenance, and only as the number of people increases do these minimum services also increase.

Councillors’ jobs do not, however, correspond with these services. For starters, there are councillors who have no responsibilities as such, as they are members of the opposition. Broad responsibilities are often combined and given to one councillor, while there are plenty of “jobs” that are not included in the list of minimum services. Oddly enough, I can find no reference to police in this list, yet this is a town hall service (where it applies) that falls directly under the mayor.

The system of local government is still evolving. Until relatively recently, the precise role of town halls was not that well defined within what is a four-tier scheme of central and regional government, insular government (in the case of the Council of Mallorca) and the municipalities. But a progressive system of decentralisation has granted the town halls increased responsibilities and autonomy; all part of a political philosophy to bring democracy as close as possible to the people.

The philosophy is laudable, but it has not been and still is not without its problems. One is to do with financing. The divvying up of public money has tended to prioritise regional governments even to the extent of denying central government, while local government has been the poor relation, despite assuming more responsibilities. A second is that the philosophy has not been put into practice. Only now is “citizen participation”, be it through neighbourhood associations or public consultations, really starting to catch on. Certain councillors have had the responsibility added to their portfolios.

A third problem is a structural one: the sheer abundance of local authorities. This structure brings with it potential inefficiency. The populations of a half of Mallorca’s municipalities are under 5,000. It has been argued, with good reason, that expecting them to be efficient is unrealistic. The call has gone out, therefore, for mergers or to at least share services. One academic study reckons that spending needs for a town of 1,000 people is 23% higher (relatively, I assume this means) than one for 5,000 people. Merger, and you don’t have to be an economist to figure this out, would achieve some economies of scale.

Public spending bodies have been making similar calls to those coming from academia. The Sindicatura de Cuentas (like the Audit Commission) argues that there has to be a rationalisation of resources. The calls are not falling on deaf ears, as local politicians understand there are difficulties with the current system, but the president of the Balearics’ local authorities federation maintains that the system is the best. There again, he probably would; he’s also the mayor of Puigpunyent which has only around 2,000 residents.

The fourth problem, and this brings us back to the increasing numbers of councillors, has to do with these councillors themselves and issues of professionalism, qualification and the old-boys (and girls) network. One of the greatest drawbacks with localism, especially in Mallorca where everyone seems to be related to everyone else, is that of nepotism. In itself, it probably isn’t often viewed as being questionable or corrupt; just how it is. But with increased responsibilities come other ones, those of transparency and ethical behaviour.

The old-boys network is such that creating new councillors can simply mean adding more jobs for the boys, while the network is also at play even between different political parties. Most of the local politicians will have grown up with each other. Political differences don’t count for much when favours can still be granted. And grants are a further facet of the network. The same academic study which pointed to that 23% higher spend also considered what can happen with grants that are made to municipalities from higher levels of government. They can go to subsidising things that are not priorities or needed. And you therefore end up wondering who actually benefits and to whom the grants go.

For all its failings though, the system of local government has much to be said for it in terms of community and identity. Rationalisation would undoubtedly make sense, but just think for a moment about how passions can rise in England when boundaries are changed, new counties formed. The system is still evolving. It may be that rationalisation has to occur, but for the time being the number of councillors will increase. Whether they are needed though; well, that’s another matter.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.