"Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?" When The Eagles released this, at a time when the music world was prepared to concede that they were any good, the leaders of the two main political parties in the Balearics were mere toddlers. José Ramón Bauzá and Francina Armengol might have grown up together, their entries into this world separated by some nine months: boy and girl, childhood sweethearts, forever devoted, forever in a pact of togetherness. Alas, this was not how it was to be. Fate conspired to keep them apart, to follow different paths, if only politically. Pharmaceutically they had a bond, his family pharmacy in Marratxi, her family pharmacy in Inca. Hence we have what we have: the world of Balearics politics, run by chemists, each dispensing paracetamol to relieve the giant headaches of the populace they cause.
Francina turned on José last week. "Desperado". Not just desperate but very desperate. "Muy desperado". José wanted to turn back the clock, to discover what they had been denied in their infancy. Togetherness. A pact. Francina was having none of it. Now a matriarch, for her a craving for the rules of the kindergarten - sometimes adhered to - applies only so much in the adult world of Balearics politics. PSOE's leader rejected a post-electoral accord with José's PP.
José was desperate. Desperate for an alliance to keep the PP in power. The mere suggestion of a pact with PSOE showed he understands what the polls say. Bye, bye, Bauzá. And with all the nasty, rough boys of the left forming gangs to beat up his mayors in the sticks, José was in desperate need of his own gang, his own pact. Every other party is pacting, so why not the PP? But José has found, as he will continue to find, that no one wants to join his gang. He is being consigned to a corner of the playground, the others having stolen his ball and calling him horrid names.
Spurned, José shouted that Francina's PSOE was slipping to become the third force in the islands' politics but that he was offering her a way to be more of a force, a part of a grand force of PP and PSOE. It is the time for "responsibility, high-mindedness, for democratic participation and stability", all of which only the PP, together in peace and harmony with PSOE, can offer. Francina wasn't listening, and as usual the Bauzá Babe In Chief contributed her penny's worth. Mabel Cabrer bellowed that Francina was interested only in agreements with "radical extremists".
José's pact gambit proved that the desperado had indeed taken leave of his senses. What is it, above all, that Podemos rejects? The two-party, PP-PSOE system. Yet here was José willing a duopolistic electoral carve-up, evidence of a perpetuation and magnification of the cosy system considered to be discredited by Podemos. It would not only have been Podemos who would have smelt a very large rat. The electorate would have detected the whiff as well. Desperation leads to desperate measures, but a PP-PSOE pact would be one too far, even for a desperado.
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