The week that was

The Bauzá Uninstall

You won’t have had this message pop up on your PC unless you follow the naughty boys of Desgovern de les Illes Balears on Facebook. It was an instruction for the José Ramón Bauzá Uninstall. “Please wait while José Ramón Bauzá is removed from Consulat de Mar.” “Uninstall José Ramón Bauzá ... a few days left.” “Warning!  Harmful and malicious virus detected.”
Desgovern appended a letter to the president with its instruction. “You have been the worst president in the history of the Balearic Islands,” it read.
To be fair, there haven’t been many presidents with whom he can be compared, only Cañellas, Soler (his interregnum was only brief), Matas and Antich, but it is fair to say that none of these presided over chaos of the variety now bringing turmoil to the backwaters of Majorca.
Pollensa’s Tomeu Cifre is the latest PP mayor to jump ship, he having done so pre-emptively rather than be pushed into the shark-infested waters of the “imputados”. Bauzá’s ethical code has backfired, albeit that this induction system has been a combustible for hypocrisy. The aggrieved mayors of Alaro, Vilafranca and now Pollensa have opted out of the system but have used the ethical code, one with which many disagree for its potential unfairness, as the launch pad for their departures.
 If they were as hacked off with Bauzá as they now say they are, why did they agree to re-stand as PP mayors in the first place and allow themselves to be seen grinning amiably in photo opportunities together with a buoyant Bauzá? They now want to sink his ship. They should have attempted to do so months ago. Sorry, fellas, but as it is the loss of candidacy (and you knew the rules) that is making you form alternative parties, then it sucks.
But while motives of these mayors can be questioned, lurking behind the scenes is a further hint of hypocrisy. Reports have suggested that Calvia’s PP mayoral candidate, José Manuel Ruiz, is still “imputado”. We understood that this had been dropped, and Ruiz insists that this is the case, so how is it that reports can suggest otherwise? There needs to be absolute clarity on the matter or else the suspicion persists that Ruiz, a candidate in a key municipality who Bauzá could afford to lose far less than the others, is somehow being shielded.
 As PSOE’s spokesperson Cosme Bonet put it the other day: “In Calvia it is unknown what will happen after the imputation of the candidate and no one is saying anything. Why are things different in Calvia? What’s going on?”
Ruptures in the PP are no longer imagined or spoken about as possibilities. The breakages have occurred. It is the ethical code which, curiously, has revealed the fractures. It is a code being written into the uninstall instruction. For the PP, the virus has taken over.

Another season - you know where

As we theatrical luvvy sorts know, the M-play, the Scottish play, is cursed and so its real name is never uttered. Similarly, and in order to avoid another cursed summer, none of us should refer explicitly to you know where. From now on, it will be the M-place, the resort that must not be named, except by British red tops. Enter, therefore, the Daily Star. It was getting its pop in first. Pool orgies and all that in a nice, new hotel in the M-place. The relevant news item (one that was actually irrelevant in that it was an item that was baseless) on the paper’s website is no longer available. Bad luck must have struck at the Star. Don’t go naming the M-place.
But you know it will be. Repeatedly. And the C-town hall (which must only be referred to thus for fear of dropping hints as to the identity of the M-place) will be asked for explanations. Like, why have hordes of muggers masquerading as prostitutes amidst the building work of the darkened streets of the M-place returned as soon as the first tourists of spring are sighted coming over the horizon?
The C-town hall has made much of local ordinance to rid the M-place of the devil of bar crawls. It has made much of the extra policing this season: the extra police needed to fine those drinking in the streets. Nary a word has emanated from this same town hall regarding the issue that matters most (and it does matter most). The prostitutes. Making much of the the bar crawls is the acceptable face of resort cleaning-up, one that is acceptable for consumption by the British red tops. The prostitutes are a different matter. Don’t go saying there’ll be a huge clampdown on them or the news will be all over the British press. There’s bad publicity and there is worse.
Another of the ways in which the C-town hall is to get tough is with “balconing”. With this in mind, it was interesting to note that the town hall of Salou acted in the way it did to a balconing incident there. A young British tourist fell from a balcony. He was on a student spring break. The town hall told the relevant tour operator and hotels involved in the Saloufest that they had to immediately cease using the “brand” Salou.
The town hall did this to try and avoid harm to its “good tourist image”. It has gone further, though, acting on local police investigations of irregularities with hotel administration, i.e. rooms being overcrowded. Good for Salou. When are town halls in Majorca going to do likewise? When are they going to look at arrangements for spring breaks, for the accommodation, for their activities in the island’s resorts?

All fall apart

Ever since parties on the left started to combine in order to present a unified presence at local elections, one has suspected that disunity would not be far away.
 And so it is in Soller.
Here the Junts per Soller have lost their Guanyem element (Guanyem being a sort of Podemos which isn’t Podemos).
The Guanyem lot say that PSOE and Més, two of the other Junts, were displaying “an excess of protagonism”.
 One takes this to mean that they wanted to be the main players at the expense of the new Guanyem kids.
This could have been predicted. Hotch-potches of leftist parties trying to get along are almost bound to fail. The Soller example will not be the first. The worry is that later examples will arise after the elections, when these alliances will fall apart over ideological issues and over which party seeks the greatest say and the most power.