Armengol: The First One Hundred Days

Certain numbers carry significance for the suspicious and the commemoratively inclined. 111 is English cricket's number of suspicion: its Nelson. 666 is the Devil's number or the number of the beast from Chapter 13 - unlucky for some - of the Book of Revelation. 100 isn't associated with superstition or bad luck, but it has acquired a mythical status in politics. The first 100 days. Why the fascination with 100? For a kick-off, it's a nice round number. It is not 111. It's also reasonably short in temporal terms. 666 would be far too long, even if - with many a governmental administration - its beastliness would offer a more insightful analysis of performance.

Judging when 100 days start is a ritual of its own. In Mallorca, thanks to the procrastinatory nature of installing a new government, it isn't immediately obvious which day is day one, or day zero if you prefer. However, with reasonable certainty, we can take 3, as in 3 July, to be the day of commencement, the day when Francina Armengol held her first cabinet meeting and announced that it was Day Zero for the symbols of Bauzáism: out went the Law of Symbols, trashed was trilingualism (TIL).

On this basis, we can assume that 11 October will commemorate the first 100 days of Armengolism, a useful day as it will be a Sunday and so afford newspapers the opportunity to bulk up their weekend copy with First One Hundred Days specials. It is further useful in that the day after is Spain's National Day, the Day of Hispanidad (Spanishness). Travel agents will be especially happy because of the "puente" weekend, but how happy will others be? How much Spanishness might by then have been dispensed with?

There again, travel agents might have reason to be less than happy. Might the first 100 days witness the arrival of the eco-tax, the 666 devil's work of the horned demon of tourism vice-presidency Biel Barceló? He has said that he will work from the outset for a tourist tax.

Surprisingly, a survey - by the Mallorcan research organisation Gadeso - has found that only a slight majority (51%) of businesses in the tourism sector reject the idea of the tourist tax. Admittedly, only 23% actually agree with it, leaving a further 26% undecided, but one might have anticipated there being greater hostility towards it. Barceló might just be able to take some reassurance from the finding.

It is being said that the tourist tax will be the key legislative item for this government. Possibly it will be, though its passage through parliament shouldn't detain deputies too long, unless PSOE get cold feet, in which case the Més pact (and Podemos support) will collapse rapidly. PSOE's feet will stay warm, especially if Barceló is true to the implication of what he says and seeks to establish at least the legislative framework within the first 100 days. Armengol couldn't afford a falling-out so soon.

What else, apart from the tax, will the specials of Sunday, 11 October be obsessing over? There are already clear signs and not just the abandonment of TIL and the Law of Symbols. One has to do with land, a subject which is vitally important to Mallorca yet which tends to be overlooked in favour of the headline-grabbing of controversies such as the eco-tax. So important is that, even more so than education and language, it is subject to constant political revision which creates the legalistic chaos which surrounds rules on land, on its categorisation and on its use.

Armengol has indicated that another piece of Bauzá legislation - the Ley de Suelo (Land Law) - will be repealed in removing the amnesty that was applied by this law to predominantly rural properties that had been illegally built and which were more than eight years old. The law may, for many, have appeared to have been overly generous, but the fact that so many properties were involved (some 20 odd thousand if I remember rightly) did require some form of pragmatic resolution of their status. Now, the likelihood is that in addition to ever more confusion, the courts will come into their own in arbitrating between two opposing pieces of legislation.

This is an example of Mallorca's politics at its absolute worst. Continuity in legislation is rarely sustained, but when it comes to land, the disruptive legislative tendency causes constant uncertainty. Hence, all the endless cases that do indeed end up in courts. And into this mix comes what may be one of the most important changes during the first 100 days, the confirmation of far greater responsibilities for the Council of Mallorca and so its redefinition of the Mallorca Territorial Plan with all the implications this has for tourism, among other things.

Land law, tourist tax, Catalan linguistic immersion. The first one hundred days will be busy days. Just as well that no one's superstitious.

Playing The System: Illegal rural property

If a daily count of the most frequently used words in a collection of Spanish newspapers were to be undertaken, my guess would be that the word "ilegal" would be high up the list. Illegal is pretty much a fact of life here. So much so that it isn't always obvious what is legal and so much so that the very word "ilegal" has all but lost the potential to shock or surprise, so common is the incidence of things which are supposedly illegal.

The proliferation of illegality arises in part from a propensity among a not inconsiderable section of the local population to believe that illegality doesn't actually apply to them or to believe that it may apply but will eventually somehow be deemed legal. And occasionally, it is right for members of this section of the local population to believe that the illegal will suddenly become legal. If a regional government so decrees it, what had been outside the law is brought inside the law, and is inclined to be done so if it means that there's some money in it.

The beneficiaries of legalising the one-time illegal tend not to be ordinary Joe Soaps (or José Jabones). Rather, they are usually the less ordinary José Jugadores, the players of a system which can often appear to reward the less-than-scrupulous who, because of what they might have (money, power, connections and generally a combination of these), can be right in assuming that somewhere along the line they will get away with something.

The regional government has been drafting a land law - Ley de Suelo. This drafting has been taking an eternity and the time that it has been taking is in itself revealing. Whereas the government can draft, present and approve certain laws quite quickly if it so wishes, there are others which require much more time and more dotting of i's and crossing of t's. All very normal, you would think. Some laws are more complex, and land is far from not being complex, but compare the more than a year that has passed since the drafting was started with the rapidity of, say, the law on introducing trilingual teaching. Was this not complex? No it wasn't; not if the government ignored much of the complexity. And nor was it complex if the government, having passed the law, found to its horror that part of it was in fact illegal, and so hastily convened a meeting of the cabinet and, without any consultation with parliament, simply made legal the illegal. See, it can be as easy as that.

The teaching law did not, however, have any clear vested interests to take account of, other than those of the government itself. The land law is a very different matter. There are all those José Jugadores to think about for a kick off. And so the upshot of the drafting and the amending is that this new law will declare an amnesty on at least 20,000 properties that have been built illegally on so-called rustic land, i.e. rural land for which there was no building permission.

The very fact that someone brazenly goes and builds on land where they shouldn't be building says much for the mentality of the José Jugadores. And for their belief in legislation ultimately being written to remove the illegality. All that will probably be required to make things tickety-boo will be the handing over of around ten grand in folding notes to a relevant town hall. That's where the money comes into the story and is why the town halls have themselves been quite keen for the law to be passed. And it won't just be whole rural mansions or grand houses that will now be legalised (and they normally are grand houses; the José Jugadores don't do pokey places). So also will be farm buildings, such as barns, that had been adapted as accommodation; again completely without permission.

Personally, I find an alternative to legalisation - that of demolition - to be distasteful, but there are times when perpetrators of the distasteful get their rightful come-uppance and their properties are indeed bulldozed. This happened to the disgraced and incarcerated former mayor of Andratx, Eugenio Hidalgo. As his crime was to have been involved in schemes to allow illegal building, then he got what he deserved, and so did his house. But though normally it seems somehow wrong to resort to demolition, one does have to bear in mind the process whereby the property was ever illegally built. It's the process of playing the system by those, more often than not, who are in a position to benefit from changes to the system which, and do not rule this out, they might actually also be in a position to influence.

It's distasteful to demolish but it is equally distasteful to have built in the first place, and to add to the bad taste, there is another law which one has to consider when it comes to these grand houses in rural locations. The tourism law. It paved the way for a whole new range of rural tourism accommodation to be permitted. And which properties might now become such accommodation? No prizes for guessing. So, here is further evidence of the way in which tourism law has been created in collaboration with the way in which property law is drafted. The result is a tourism law which does of course penalise owners of perfectly legally built properties but which are deemed illegal for tourism purposes while at the same time giving an opportunity to owners of property that was illegally built. One rule for one ...