When Canaries Sing Rebel Songs

Spain's awkward squad has just got bigger. The latest member to join the rebel souls of Catalonia and the are-they-aren't-they's in the Basque Country is the Canary Islands which, cast adrift in the Atlantic, originally Berber African rather than Spanish, were not fully brought under the control of Castile until 1495, a necessity to facilitate the use of the islands as a stopover for Columbus's voyages. The distance from Spain makes the Canaries a curiosity of colonialism contemporised within a framework of nationhood; it's as though Iceland were a part of the UK or was still a dependency of Denmark. Far away, there is none of the geographical umbilicism that hauls the Balearics towards Barcelona and Valencia while the political cord - the current one - has been twisted; accord between Santa Cruz and Las Palmas and Madrid has been ruptured, whereas the bond between Palma and Madrid remains, generally, harmonious.

One says generally, but the Balearics have their disagreements with Madrid. Financing and oil are the two most prominent, but presidential protests are ones that play to a Balearics gallery with a plot hidden behind the act; Bauzá's ambitions to tread the corridors of Madrid power may still exist, even if they have been weakened by too much hamming it up to his Balearics audience and by his being Brutus to the Madrid-admired Caesar of Mateo Isern. By contrast, the president of the Canaries, Paulino Rivero, has no such need for the duplicitousness of the staged political plot as he owes no debt to masters in Madrid. Paulino, his party - the Coalición Canaria - indeed the whole of Canaries politics at present are symbolic of the islands' remoteness; they are as though there has been a separate development.

Rivero's political interests were initially pursued within Adolfo Suarez's post-Franco democratic union coalition. He then moved on to something called the Agrupación Tinerfeña de Independientes (Tenerife independents), a party that had links to Francoism. This then became part of a Canaries-wide independence party and ultimately became what it now is - the Coalición Canaria, an unlikely conglomeration of Canaries' nationalists, ex-commies and right-wingers. Notwithstanding the former communist element, the coalition can best be described as centre-right with its unifying theme being that of Canaries' nationalism. If one were to look for a Mallorcan comparison, it would be that of the now defunct Unió Mallorquina.

Remote from the Spanish mainland, the Canaries find themselves divorced from the political mainstream in a similar fashion to Catalonia. But unlike Catalonia, there is no agitation for independence. Instead, Paulino and his nationalist coalition seek specific rebel causes. One of these had been the oil prospecting, until Repsol discovered that the oil was far from being black gold and ceased its exploration. The coalition were not left as rebels without a cause, though. They had another one. AENA.

The government in the Canaries has taken the matter of AENA's privatisation to the Supreme Court, and it has accepted the Canaries' request to look into a Canaries' demand that the privatisation is suspended. The justification for this is two-fold. One, was an acknowledgement of a lower court that a meeting of the commission overseeing affairs between the Canaries and the state had not been called to address the management of airports in the Canaries. The second was the notice that the Canaries Government had issued in July last year of a widening of powers under its statutes of autonomy in the event that the state ceases to have direct management of airports. What this all boils down to is the fact that the Canaries Government wants to have management of its eight airports, two of which - Gran Canaria and Tenerife South - are treated by AENA in the same way as Palma in that their taxes are the same.

It is difficult to see how the privatisation could be suspended given that shares are now on the market, but the court could, in principle, agree with the Canaries' argument. AENA, for its part, says that direct state management hasn't ceased because national government still holds a majority of shares. But whatever the outcome, there is a marked difference between the Canaries and the Balearics. The Bauzá government has mumbled about having management of the airports, and especially Palma, but has done absolutely nothing about it. Rivero has, and one can attribute this to the fact that, unlike Bauzá and the Balearics PP, he and his coalition are independent of Madrid. As such, one can argue that Rivero is genuinely sticking up for regional interests, whereas Bauzá merely alludes to them.

Even if the court dismisses the Canaries' claim, the point will have been made, and it is one that goes to the heart of state-regions' relationships and political associations. The Canaries can sing rebel songs, while the Balearics hum, not having the courage to sing the words.