Mother's Ruin: The fall of Maria Munar

Since autonomous government was established in the Balearics in 1983, two politicians have been synonymous with the islands' democracy. And what democracy it has been. Gabriel Cañellas, president for twelve years from 1983, was forced to resign because of his implication in the Sóller tunnel scandal. He was eventually absolved.

If Cañellas is the patriarch of democracy in a Balearics style, then Maria Antònia Munar is the matriarch. There at the birth of a new party, the Unió Mallorquina, in 1982, Mother Munar went on to become its leader, the president of the Council of Mallorca and the speaker of the Balearics parliament. She has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.

The detail of the case against Munar is of little importance. It is the charges that were brought that are. Perverting the course of justice, fraud, falsification of documents, embezzlement of public funds. The charges are almost always the same and they always amount to the same thing: corruption. 

There will not be sympathy for Munar. She treated the UM as her fiefdom and dispensed patronage as it suited her. Miguel Nadal, a former tourism minister, and himself sentenced to two years and seven months, owed his succession to leadership of the party to Mother. During a fractious campaign to decide the successor, Nadal at one point threw a hissy fit, withdrew, but was then brought back and anointed by Munar.

This was an example of how Palma dominated UM affairs. Nadal was a Palma man and virtually everything that has since emerged that was corrupt about the UM had to do with Palma. Miguel Llompart, formerly the UM mayor of Alcúdia, once told me that the corruption was all a Palma affair. It wasn't completely, but Palma or not, it had the effect of bringing down an entire political party, now named the Convergència.

Another of those who owed his position to Munar was another ex-tourism minister, Francesc Buils, condemned to three years inside in connection with a different case. Buils, it would seem, just did as he was told. And since sentence was passed on him, a further investigation has been opened up - one to do with alleged irregular payments for coastal cleaning operations under the auspices of Buils' tourism ministry. One of the strangest aspects of this is why the tourism ministry ever got involved in such operations. They had been the responsibility of the environment ministry and yet, for no obviously good reason, they were transferred to tourism. The police are keen to know why. The tourism ministry was to become the focal point for the wave of corruption cases that engulfed the UM.

Munar was widely disliked. One Spanish journalist once headlined an article about her "the most hated woman in Mallorca's history". She is an example of the maxim of all power corrupts, and she was all-powerful, seemingly stripped of principles. I once described her thus: "a Cruella de Vil who has kidnapped a doe-eyed and naïve democracy and bundled it into the back of an official limo, secreted inside a massive wedge of cash". The reference to the cash is to 300,000 euros Munar is supposed to have handed over to Nadal when she was president of the Council.

In March 2010, in an interview with IB3, Munar said that "democracy is based on the confidence that people have in the institutions and politicians, and when this confidence is lost a dictator can emerge". She was absolutely right but a court has proven that she was not righteous. She was a product of the new democracy that, despite the veneer of free political association and the ballot box, still behaved with some of the mores of dictatorship, not least the elevation of the seemingly all-powerful.

President Bauzá is to be applauded in his attempts to rid local politics of corruption. At a time when the deeply worrying voice of the military is expressing its discontent with the political class (clear echoes of the 1930s), the president must be aghast that José Maria Rodríguez, the national delegate to the Balearics, has been forced to resign over corruption allegations that date back to the Matas presidency. Yet, though these allegations relate to a separate case, Rodríguez, when interior minister, was implicated in the Andratx case that resulted in the imprisonment of Eugenio Hidalgo, the former mayor of Andratx.

Despite Bauzá's best intentions, it never seems to end, and it was the Andratx case that opened the floodgates to everything that followed - to Matas, to Munar, to Urdangarin. Matas and now Munar have fallen and been ruined. One to go maybe. But how many more might there still be?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.