Who’s going to be blamed if the tourism sustainability pact fails?

So much has been invested in this pact that if it fails to come up with truly significant conclusions, one can ask whether the exercise has been worth it. Investment doesn’t here mean money but the sheer amount of attention devoted to this initiative. And this attention, given that the pact was launched more than eight months ago, naturally generates expectation - great expectation that something genuinely groundbreaking will emerge. If not groundbreaking, at least developments of significance, ones well overdue, as there are those who have spoken about a need to change the island’s tourism model for years, decades even.

Governments and businesses have consistently sat on their hands or acted on the periphery, as with a tourist tax here or there. Only now are politicians actually talking in terms of a tax being dissuasive. PSOE never did back in 2002. They still weren’t at a time when the Armengol eight years were in their death throes. Iago Negueruela has become a convert to the tax as deterrent. More remarkable is Marga Prohens of the Partido Popular, who links the necessity for no more growth (or limits to growth, which one is it?) to a higher rate of high-summer tax.

But the tax has only been peripheral, a tactical ploy that has chiefly been of benefit in adding some millions to the annual budget spend. It has never been strategic, because there has never been a strategy, unless one wishes to go way back when and to the days of Franco’s technocrats who carved out an entire economic model predicated on holidaymaking and manufacturing new and cheaper cars under licence from Fiat.

And that was of course the strategy. Cheap. So successful and enduring was it to be that nowadays there remain those who can’t get into their heads that cheapness can no longer obtain. Subtly there has been a strategic shift but it has never been unequivocally stated and presented. And so never has there been an across-the-board vision of social requirements to support it. Hence we have arrived at what we have. It’s not necessary to labour the point. We are by now all familiar.

One can consider the sustainability pact to have been an attempt to head off or to at least moderate protest. Critics of the pact have said just this. In announcing it, the government was buying itself time while simultaneously seeking to shield itself from criticism. The PP’s messaging, one of blaming eight years of Armengol for pretty much everything, has stuck by, as an example, an explanation for saturation - the creation of 100,000-plus new accommodation places that the PP had never bat an eyelid at until they were in government and started to read the room (or rather the street).

The pact was offered and all manner of entities signed up. That was the purpose, and in this regard it was very good purpose. It was also a clever tactic. Critics would have been exposed had they said nay. Unfortunately, though, critical sources have found reason to abandon the pact. It has become a pact-lite because of the loss of a genuinely consensual basis for taking account of differing perspectives.

Més are the latest to walk, they arguing that the government has been pursuing measures without regard to the pact. Més don’t believe the PP have made any effort to encourage entities which have left the pact to return to the fold. Spokesperson Lluis Apesteguia is calling on the government to stop making announcements about tourist limits that it doesn’t intend to apply.

While there have been the statements regarding the tourist tax and limits on vehicles entering Mallorca, these also depend on the pact’s working parties. Until the findings are known, firm decisions won’t be taken, which almost certainly means that there won’t be limits this summer or an increase to the tourist tax. On the one hand the government has been speaking about them; on the other it has been deferring to the pact, despite seemingly having on some issues pre-empted the pact’s conclusions.

For all this, if the pact-lite ends up with proposals that fail to live up to expectations and which crucially do not have the stamp of consensus, Més and others, e.g. the Forum for Civil Society, may well have scored an own goal. Will they end up being blamed because they walked away?