English Speakers: Mayors and town halls (11 November)

“Mayor Talks To British Community”. This shock-horror headline hasn’t appeared, but should have. A mayor going along and talking to a bunch of Brits in a Brit-owned bar. Whatever next?

The mayor in question was Tommy Cifre. Two Tommy Cifres, there are only two Tommy Cifres present among Pollensa town hall’s cadre of councillors, but only one can be mayor, and it isn’t the one from the Mallorcan socialists. The mayor came, he spoke in a sort of English and conquered those who were concerned about the quality of the tap water.

It’s not, however, that you expect him to be perfect in English. Why should he be? Some Mallorcan politicians can apparently do English reasonably well. President Bauzá, or so it has been reported, impressed tour operators and others at a World Travel Market lunch with the “fluency” of his English. One who didn’t, it would seem, was the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida, who is only of course the national government’s tourism secretary and formerly the tourism minister. You can’t have someone able to communicate effectively with representatives from one of Spain’s principal tourism markets; that would just be pointless.

But it doesn’t matter because there are always interpreters and translators. Mesquida may be able to call on such services, but the town halls can’t necessarily. Take Alcúdia, for instance. A while back I received an email asking if I could put into serviceable English the Spanish description of the Roman town. Sure I could, and did, and sent it back with a note asking where I should send my invoice. Not that I seriously anticipated a positive response; and so I was therefore not disappointed to receive no response.

Though Alcúdia town hall now has a superbly scripted English explanation of Pollentia and the monographic museum, is it right that it should get one gratis and as a favour? Seemingly it is, and I hope all the British and English-speaking tourists are grateful. But is it also right that there appears not to be anyone actually employed or contracted (and paid accordingly) who can do English properly? And I do mean properly and not just in a somewhat better than putting a translation through Google fashion.

I don’t expect mayors to speak English. It was good of Cifre to give it a reasonable crack, therefore. In many Mallorcan municipalities, ability in English or another main foreign language would be almost completely unnecessary, but in towns such as Alcúdia and Pollensa – especially Pollensa – then I do expect some decent English; not by the mayor but through the systems of communication that exist. Ten per cent of Pollensa’s resident population is British; the town has an overwhelmingly British tourism market.

The counter-argument is, of course, that all these Brits should damn well learn the lingo, always assuming we know which lingo is being referred to; and in the now Partido Popular-dominated Pollensa town hall it is still stubbornly Catalan. But dream on; most will never learn the native sufficiently well and certainly not sufficiently well to engage in the political process.

A mayor coming to speak to the British community (and it must be said that it was more than just the Brits) is an aspect of this process. A question about tap water may sound trivial in the scheme of things, but in fact it isn’t; town halls do, after all, have legal responsibilities for sanitation.

But more than this, and this is where the whole argument about voting rights for expatriates tends to founder, is the fact that if communication is not understandable, then how can expatriates ever be expected to be anything like fully engaged in the process over and above a small minority that takes an interest regardless of the language? Ahead of the local elections in May, in which expatriates were entitled to vote, where were the communications in relevant languages? Perhaps there were in certain municipalities, but I was unaware of any.

Depending on municipality, Mallorca should display a multi-lingualism that reflects the realities of its population. English and German, probably French and Arabic; these might be considered the essential additional languages. Such reality is coming to be accepted; in Pollensa I know that local parties, and not just Cifre’s PP, are keen to engage with the English-speaking population. So they should.

It’s easy to dismiss expats as being uninterested in local politics. Many are, but many are not, especially at the local level. For a mayor as engaging as Tommy Cifre to come along and engage the Brits – in English – took some balls. He may have ballsed up his English, but so what? He made the effort.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Showtime: The new regime

So, as we all knew would be the case, normal order has been restored to Mallorca’s politics. The PP prevail once again, as they normally have prevailed. The Bauzá bounce has trounced Antich, sending him into the abyss.

So long and farewell, Francesc. You arrived on a train in 2007, announcing that the past four years were to have been its age, and you left in the lost-luggage department of discarded political parties.

You take with you Francina, ar-mangled at the Council of Mallorca by the charms of Salome. While you, Francesc, were stepping from the door of the train to the platform of a new age, Francina was declaring that her doors would always be open. But now they are just hanging from the hinges, banging in the wind of political isolation. Will we see either of you again?

With you, go whichever allies you had managed to persuade to come along for the ride or who you were left with no choice but to appoint: Gabriel Vicens of the PSM, environment and transport supremo, a John Prescott for the tree-hugging classes, a left hook here to a golf course, a right upper-cut there to a train or two. Yes, Gabriel, it was you who really derailed the Alcúdia train.

You fought long and hard to protect a wild orchid and some birds at Son Bosc. Now, the PP will come yomping across the finca, staking out the bunkers for the golf course and taking high-velocity air rifles to any bird that flaps into view. The PP’s gun dogs will sniff in the undergrowth for the bodies of old environmentalism.

Joana Barceló. Poor Joana. The final occupant of the tourism ministry. Ashes to ashes, you depart covered in an ash cloud and the shroud of misdeeds that were not of your doing.

We say goodbye to all these, tears dropping from our eyes as they wave from the back of the good ship PSOE And Friends which will drift around aimlessly for the next four years.

As we bid them adieu, we welcome the new king. Long live King Bauzá. The new emperor and his new clothes. We will find out whether he is wearing any. It is the lot of presidents of small islands that they can promise much but find they are as impotent as those who have gone before, and as reliant upon the largesse of Madrid as has always been the case. A Madrid that is eyeing up what the islands and other regional governments spend.

King Bauzá and his queen Salome will have been dancing the seven veils into the small hours of celebration and demanding: “Bring me the head of Francesc Antich”. And there it is, on a plate, because it was always going to be. For four years, Antich had awaited his fate, the inevitable reversion to the norm of Mallorca’s politics. The PP.

Away from the balls and palaces of Palma, the great unwashed in the provinces have been waving their own fond farewells. But for some, it is a long goodbye.

The trading, haggling and bartering of the town hall souks now begin. Winners who would be mayors or ruling parties may find they are neither. It is a peculiarity of Mr. D’Hondt and his proportional system that firstly, and like the Duckworth-Lewis cricket-matches-affected-by-rain method, no one has the faintest idea how it works, and secondly that a party can secure twice as many councillors as the next party cab off the rank and still find it necessary to keep the day job. Thus may be the prospect for Coloma of Alcúdia. One of eight PP councillors, but not a single friend among the other nine who might ensure she is pushed over the mayoral finishing-line.

The past few days of Mallorca political life have been jolly. The fun, though, is only now starting. We will wait four years for the next elections to entertain us, but these, the elections, are but the star attraction in the endless spectacular and Brian Rix with his trousers down Consolat de Mar and ayuntamientos’ farce that is Mallorca and its politics. Let the new show start.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nobody Does It Better

Of the local town halls, only Alcúdia might be said to function adequately, notwithstanding the Can Ramis fiasco. One can probably add Muro, now that the PP-CDM have carved up the mayoral office and put an end to the slight inconvenience of a rival party having that office. In Pollensa, the administration stumbles from debt-ridden crisis to another, assaulted from all political sides for creating, for instance, “science fiction” in respect of its latest attempt to draw up a budget; at least the local police no longer deem it necessary to work to rule, which they did last year. Sa Pobla gives us near acts of fisticuffs in the open session, but nowhere does it better – or worse – than Santa Margalida. 

 

Santa Margalida town hall is the gift that has been giving and keeps on giving, though one might also say that it is the cup that regularly overflows. From the potty notion that Son Real might have been turned into a golf course (and unlike the Son Bosc finca in Muro, there were very strong reasons for it not to have been, such as the ancient burial sites) through the spats over contracts for works in Can Picafort and fiesta expenditure to the current lunacy surrounding cups for a football tournament. Yep, this is politics, local-style, in Can Pic and at the town hall some kilometres away. This is the town hall where the opposition groups have walked out of meetings – as happened with a dispute about invoices – and have even set up an alternative open session, protesting at a change to the time of the regular one. Over the past week, it emerged that there was a plan under which establishments currently operating on a commercial basis, such as restaurants, would no longer have been classified as being for commercial use. This was before it was admitted that there had been an error, one laid at the door of the previous administration and, naturally enough, batted back across the net and laid at the current one’s door.

 

Then we come to this football tournament. This was part of a fiesta for immigrants in Can Picafort. Five seven-a-side teams made up of players from South America took part in this tournament, itself all in the name of the process of social integration. When it came to the giving out of trophies, however, the mayoral delegate in Can Picafort vetoed the handing over of two trophies donated by the Unió Mallorquina party, one of the parties in opposition to the Partido Popular, of which the mayor is a member. 

 

Now this may all sound very petty, and it almost certainly is, but there’s a bit more to it. On the previous day, the UM published the latest issue of its local news-sheet. On the front cover of this were mocked-up 500 euro notes bearing an image of the mayor; this was a protest at the alleged squandering of public money. On the back cover was the reproduction of an invoice said to support this allegation. So, come the day of the tournament, the PP would appear to have sought its retaliation – by not delivering the trophies to players completely uninvolved in the argument.

 

“The Diario” styled this as part of the “never-ending row” between the ruling body and the opposition. One can probably style it differently. Kindergartens, asylums, breweries, there must be some analogy, the problem is trying to choose between them all.