War: What Is It Good For?

If you are looking to start a war, then who better than someone who bears the name.

The Guerra Un-Civil of the elections has started, and a Guerra has entered the fray, limp howitzers of bile being volleyed over the current opposition and dripping from them like trails of blood from the corners of a Count Dracula mouth. This, the Dracula one, is an image that is increasingly disturbing me. It is as a result of a worryingly euphoriant eureka moment when I suddenly realised that José Ramón Bauzá has more than just a hint of the cape and high collar of a Transylvanian about him.

While Count Bauzá is drawing on the blood of the body Catalan, PSOE has appointed a witchfinder-general, its one-time central government vice-president. His name? Guerra. Mr. War. Alfonso of this ilk.

In war, there are the dispensable. Into the battle, therefore, cast an OAP politician everyone had forgotten was still with us. If he takes the flak, it doesn't much matter. Mr. War has come out all guns misfiring from a prosthetic hip. He has taken aim and his pop-gun has let out a pantomime sheetlet with a corruption bang scrawled on it.

The Balearics wing of the PSOE socialist party met in Palma on Friday for a pre-election powwow at which Sr. Guerra launched into the Partido Popular and suggested that, far from having reformed themselves, its leaders should be banged up in chokey.

This meeting was more a pre-voting day wake than a call to arms for the battles that await in government after 22 May. The local PSOE knows that it's going to be completely mullered at the polls. It's why Sr. Guerra was dragged out of his bath chair and unleashed his rallying cry to the troops. The cry of a desperate party that already knows its fate.

There is nothing left for PSOE to cling onto than the lifeboat of corruption. Sr. Guerra reiterated the still malodorous charges and cases that waft from the rotten-egg fertiliser in the corner of José Bauzá's new PP perfumed garden. But why bother?

It may be accurate to remind the electorate of the PP's sleazy past, but does the electorate take much notice? Were it to, and were corruption as significant an issue as it is made out to be, then it would not be the PP which is currently set to secure a 30-seat majority in the local elections. It would, instead, be PSOE; its collective nose is relatively clean and has not had to breathe in the whiff of political impropriety.

PSOE has gone on the corruption offensive not just because it's losing and because of the trial spectaculars of former PP president Jaume Matas, but also because it accuses Bauzá of hypocrisy. His grand clean-up of the PP was meant to have excluded any politician tainted by scandal from the runners and riders on 22 May.

Another PSOE grandee, Rosamaria Alberdi, the party's Balearics secretary, has claimed that Bauzá is duping the electorate, pointing to both Maria Salom, the candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca, and Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor, as two who have been implicated in the past.

The problem for Sr. Guerra, Sra. Alberdi and PSOE is that the electorate has more pressing matters to consider. It was unfortunate for President Antich that global economic crisis should have consumed his period in office, but it did not help with any ambition to secure a second term, when the PP is historically the natural party of Balearics government. Since 2007, Antich has effectively been a dead man walking, given the near certainty that the status quo of PP dominance would be restored.

Corruption once did influence an election. The Sóller tunnel affair of the mid-1990s did have an impact and led to PSOE and Antich taking power for the first time. But, and despite all the publicity the various cases attract, it has lost its power to shock. The electorate is not stupid. It knows or suspects that all the parties are up to no good or have the potential to get up to no good. Consequently, making corruption a key issue, the issue, is limp. It is the dying call of a party that knows that it is losing the war. It's not good for anything.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.