Carme Chameleon: Alcúdia's coalitions

While there are many town halls whose administration, post-election, is clearcut, there are plenty where it is not. One, as mentioned previously, is Alcúdia.

The Partido Popular and its would-be mayor, Coloma Terrasa, have eight councillors, one short of a majority of nine. There are nine other councillors, split among the Convergència and PSOE (four apiece) and the PSM (Mallorcan socialists) with one.

It is the final one on this list, the PSM, which is the most interesting, as the party potentially holds the key to the future administration in the town and, if it were to prove to be so, would be evidence as to how bizarre Mallorca's politics can be. Bizarre and opportunistic.

The PSM is everything the PP is not. It is left-wing, nationalist (i.e. veering towards independence), Catalanist, and as green as a party can be without actually calling itself green. The twain of the PSM and the PP should never meet, except in darkened alleys when they encounter each other for an ideological punch-up, but the twain could yet meet in the corridors of Alcúdia town hall power.

The sole councillor that the PSM now has, Carme Garcia, is the first councillor the party has had in Alcúdia. Time to show some muscle, it would appear; time to be shown some respect. The PSM across the island has done fairly well out of the elections. Not that it fared any better at regional parliament level than it did in 2007. It has the same number of seats and its percentage of the vote went down fractionally. Yet, it can claim to now being the third force in the island.

A reason for this was the collapse of the Convergència. While it maintains pockets of resistance in town halls, such as Alcúdia, generally it has been consigned to the political dustbin, taking with it its own nationalism of the right. The PSM is now the third force and now the main voice for Mallorcan aspirations.

It is against this background that Garcia has said that she would consider an agreement with the PP whereby an alliance would create the nine councillors required. It would be the most unholy of alliances. More than this, it would be a complete sell-out of political credibility. Not of course that this stops parties combining with others when they have their eye on the main chance; think Liberal Democrats, for example. But a tie-up between the PP and the PSM would be utterly absurd.

Garcia, though she says that she would be capable of being mayor, doesn't have the brassneck to suggest that a pact with the PP would mean that she should be mayor. Thank heavens for such humility. The people of Alcúdia might have granted the PSM the opportunity of town hall representation, but there should be some context in all of this.

The PP obtained almost 40% of the vote. The Convergència and PSOE were virtually identical - in the low 20s. The PSM got just over 6% from a turnout of 55%, which is its own story as it was by far the lowest among the five largest northern municipalities. I don't know how many people this equates to, but from a population of some 19,000 and bearing in mind how many might actually be on the electoral census, an estimate might be around 300.

On any moral grounds, the PP's right to administer the town hall and Coloma Terrasa's right to be mayor should be givens. But they are not. The Convergència and PSOE formed the previous coalition. They might yet do so again, if Garcia could be persuaded. Such a scenario says much about the proportional system and much also about how local town politics are not always about political ideology. In the case of the PP and the PSM, they most certainly are, but the Convergència and PSOE are different.

Though ostensibly of the right and the left, they are chummy. This chumminess can be a virtue, and it worked well enough for most of the last administration, but it can equally be seen as being divisive, especially if it denies the PP its place in the town hall sun.

I make no bones. I don't much care for the PP, but the electoral system can be held open to ridicule. The PP deserves to be installed, but there would be no thing more ridiculous than for it to be installed with the aid of the PSM.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.