MALLORCA TODAY - Pollensa town hall pact collapses

Almost inevitably, the pact between the now former La Lliga party and the Partido Popular at Pollensa town hall has collapsed, two of the three councillors from the old La Lliga who had formed the pact having decided to join the opposition. The pact had, in any event, been operating in a minority since the last regional elections, but now it can count on only five PP councillors and one of the ex-La Lliga three. The rupture is the consequence of two factors.

One is the fact that the merger between La Lliga and the Convergència parties in the Balearics was always destined to be problematic in Pollensa on account of ill-feeling between the parties that goes back to the last elections and to Malena Estrany's decision not to join the Convergència but to opt for La Lliga. Estrany and Tomeu Fuster declined to form a merged entity in Pollensa and have since become unaccredited councillors. The third La Lliga councillor, Martí Roca, does not have the same qualms about the merged group. Had Estrany and Fuster agreed to come into a merged party, then, adding the two Convergència councillors, they would, in theory, have created a new pact of ten councillors, i.e. a majority.

The second factor is that Estrany and Fuster have been critical, as have other councillors, of the apparent inertia on behalf of mayor Tomeu Cifre to come to a working solution for the administration of the council. Cifre has been insisting that a pact and therefore administrative team can be re-made, but now that Estrany and Fuster have gone into opposition, he is left with few options. He could bring the two Convergència councillors into the administration. This would bring the pact number back to eight, still a minority as it had previously been. But there would be a genuine issue as to how democratic this might be. The Convergència, though it secured two councillor posts in 2011, received only 9.5% of the vote two years ago, well down on La Lliga with 15.8%. Other parties in Pollensa, notably the Alternativa and PSOE, which had a higher percentage of the vote than the Convergència, would almost certainly not join a pact.

Increasingly, it is looking as though mayor Cifre may face a vote of no confidence, and as the opposition has suddenly become stronger, his position would be insecure.