The Revolution Will Be Pedestrianised

When you are a new political party, there are difficult decisions to be made, such as what you call yourselves. Podemos is the name. Or so we thought. It is nationally but not locally. We can thus conclude that Podemos is not so much a party more an alliance of brethren, a co-operative of "we can". Will voters in Palma be presented with marking the X against an option called Palma Co-Op or something similar? Who knows? The Podemos people in Palma, who can't call themselves Podemos, don't themselves as yet know.

At one point we had been led to believe that Podemos wouldn't run in municipal elections. Then there was a change of mind, but it came with this twist of nomenclature. The municipal Podemos can be Podemos but by another name: not-Podemos but is, as it were. My God, it doesn't half get confusing. And to heap further puzzlement onto befuddlement, there is not one but two Podemos factions, one which is Podemos and one which isn't, though of course neither of them can be come the elections. Strictly speaking, the one that is, isn't, as it is Catalan - Podem per Palma. The other is Tots per Palma, and I shall decline the opportunity to suggest that these Tots are a tad like tots, though I suppose I have. The Tots may well have it by election time and there may well also long before then be unity among the Podemos factions. The united co-operative of not-Podemos will select its secretary-general and hold its primaries in January.

This at least was the message that was emerging at the end of a week which had earlier been marked by what was being called the "battle" of the Podemoses. At the centre of this battle was the question of education. One imagines that when Pablo Iglesias and his chums came up with the idea for Podemos, they would have taken no notice of arguments over the balance of languages for teaching instruction in Mallorca, but notice does of course have to be taken, and the Tots wing rejected the notion of "immersion" in Catalan, i.e. a return to how things were before Bauzá came on the scene, which was what Podem were angling for. Tots reckoned that immersion would represent the politics of other parties, such as PSOE, and as Tots (or Podemos or whoever) reject such politics, immersion would not be acceptable. So, they have to yet decide where they stand on teaching language, though I would like to suggest they adopt a truly radical and revolutionary stance, and that would be to reject all languages. Teaching through body language alone. Or perhaps dust down the dictionary of Esperanto, the language of a Spanish anarcho-nudist movement of the early twentieth century.

Tots did, however, give one concrete indication of policy - literally concrete. Noting that Palma is not a European city, an assertion with which some may disagree, Tots said that they wished to eliminate the "abuse of cars in public spaces". Consequently, they would get rid of vehicles from the whole of the old centre of Palma. To borrow from Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution will be pedestrianised.