The week that was

The Behemoth Of Majorca

The Book of Job gave us the Behemoth, a creature of great power, marauding across Old Testament lands. It is mentioned in other literature, always as some monster that could not be conquered. The Behemoth subsequently passed into the vernacular as a means of describing something extremely large and powerful.
In 2011, Maria Salom, the president of the Council of Majorca, adopted the Behemoth as the symbol of her Council. It was an expensive and inefficient Behemoth, she explained, prior to becoming president, but she was going to tame it.
Maria is not possessed of godly powers, so tackling the Behemoth was always going to be tricky. It is a creature that mere mortals should be wary of. Including President Bauzá. When he had the audacity to suggest that the Behemoth be cut down to the size of a dormouse and adopt an essentially advisory role, the fires of hell threatened to engulf him. Strangely, though Maria was all for emasculating the Behemoth, she was not inclined to agree with her superior in the Consulat del Mar. The Behemoth might need resizing downwards but it would remain the equivalent of a baby hippo, ready at any moment to grow back to full lumbering size.
Does anyone like the Council? Derided for being expensive, bloated and an unnecessary and pointless level of public administration, it would seem that few have a good word for it. However, not all is as it seems. The Council has its many supporters, one of which is The Pine Party - El Pi. It wants to turn the Council into the government of Majorca. It is fighting for “what we want most: our land, our language and our culture”. Fine, but does this require the Council of Majorca retaining full or indeed greater Behemoth status? El Pi, whose chances of securing seats in the regional parliament are fractionally greater than zero, might well be eyeing up better opportunities in the Council, where one of its progenitors - the Unió Mallorquina - once ruled: Maria Munar would charge across the island on the Behemoth, gobbling up ever more pieces of power with which to feed its voracious appetite.
Jaume Font’s party would thus not be in agreement with Maria Salom. She has proposed reducing the number of councillors at the Council from 33 to 23, so completing the “paradigm shift” she has introduced, one of creating Behemoth-lite. Having done away with half of the senior management types at the Council, Maria is intent on further cutting the amounts spent on political representation. Bauzá, forgetting the dormouse proposal and now showing solidarity with Maria, who is after all number two behind him on the PP’s parliament candidate list, opined that Maria was coming up with “real solutions, the fruit of analysis and consensus”.
The trouble is that Bauzá and others throw the consensus word around when it clearly doesn’t exist. He would only need to ask Jaume Font. Or Francesc Miralles, who heads the PSOE list for the Council’s election. “For the PP, the Council is outdated and non-existent”, as demonstrated by the Salom proposal. The intention is to weaken the Council. But why should he believe this? Like Bauzá’s attempt (a dashed one) to reduce the number of parliamentary deputies by sixteen, Salom’s proposal is one with which it is hard to disagree. Why on earth are 59 deputies needed? Or 33 councillors? What is the point of them all?
The more fundamental question of course is what is the point of the Council of Majorca. The easy answer is that there isn’t one. For an island (and islands) with the population that there is, surely it isn’t necessary for there to be this additional level of public administration. Well, possibly. But if there were no Council, there would still be a requirement to administer the roads, the waste, the land, the water, the culture, among other things. It is too simplistic to believe that these should all be shifted to the Balearic Government: it is a government for a region not for an island.
The other islands have their councils, and Majorca needs its as well. But what it doesn’t need is an administration that grows like topsy into the Behemoth that it did, duplicating efforts, dispensing positions and jobs of questionable validity, behaving like a government it never was. The Behemoth has been caged if not fully tamed. But will it be unleashed once more?

A Balearics special

With impeccable timing, the regional election less than a month away, José Ramón landed in Madrid, a place he has strangely been avoiding, for a love-in with Mariano. All was harmony once more in PP-land, and what was even better was that Joserra was able to glow in the light of an agreement to establish an REB. Which is? A rebel yell that has lost its “el”? Hardly. It is a Régimen Especial de Balears, a special arrangement for the Balearics under which tax changes will benefit approximately 3,700 businesses and more than a thousand other taxpayers. Given the nature of the subject and true to form, the Balearics minister for finance, José Vicente Marí, managed to explain it all without explaining it, such is his prowess at baffling all and sundry with endless figures and percentages. But what it doesn’t mean is a new financing agreement for the Balearics, which is what Bauzá is really after. There is no chance of any move on this until after the regional and national elections, assuming that “stability” is maintained, i.e. the PP win both: stability has become the word of the moment. PSOE’s Francina Armengol was pretty clear what it meant though: a desperate attempt at winning votes through a measure that was “sectarian and elitist”. In this regard she was right: Bauzá and Rajoy were able to smile nicely for the cameras and create a fanfare for something that, once you went beyond the electoral propaganda headlines, is going to mean little for most of the electorate.

Podemos falling out

But with all the talk of stability, spare a thought for Podemos and an apparent lack of stability. One of its chief egg heads, Juan Carlos Monedero, has resigned as its secretary-general.
Mr Purse (for purse is what a monedero is) has attracted his fair share of publicity because of his trousering Latin American moolah in exchange for his knowledge, but this isn’t the cause of the rift with Pablo Iglesias (of whom it is obligatory to remark that he is “ponytailed”). It’s all to do with political strategy, Monedero accusing the leadership of turning Podemos into something resembling the “casta” of the PP and PSOE which it is meant to fiercely oppose.
More fundamental, as I have said before, is the potential for a loose formation such as Podemos to have its fall-outs. This one probably won’t be the last.