The Behemoth Of Mallorca

"Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox. Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly. He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron."

The Book of Job gave us the Behemoth, a creature of great power, marauding across Old Testament lands. It is mentioned in other literature, always as some monster that could not be conquered. The Behemoth subsequently passed into the vernacular as a means of describing something extremely large and powerful.

In 2011, Maria Salom, the president of the Council of Mallorca, adopted the Behemoth as the symbol of her Council. It was an expensive and inefficient Behemoth, she explained, prior to becoming president, but she was going to tame it.

Maria is not possessed of godly powers, so tackling the Behemoth was always going to be tricky. It is a creature that mere mortals should be wary of. Including President Bauzá. When he had the audacity to suggest that the Behemoth be cut down to the size of a dormouse and adopt an essentially advisory role, the fires of hell threatened to engulf him. Strangely, though Maria was all for emasculating the Behemoth, she was not inclined to agree with her superior in the Consulat del Mar. The Behemoth might need resizing downwards but it would remain the equivalent of a baby hippo, ready at any moment to grow back to full lumbering size.

Does anyone like the Council? Derided for being expensive, bloated and an unnecessary and pointless level of public administration, it would seem that few have a good word for it. However, not all is as it seems. The Council has its many supporters, one of which is The Pine Party - El Pi. It wants to turn the Council into the government of Mallorca. It is fighting for "what we want most: out land, our language and our culture". Fine, but does this require the Council of Mallorca retaining full or indeed greater Behemoth status? El Pi, whose chances of securing seats in the regional parliament are fractionally greater than zero, might well be eyeing up better opportunities in the Council, where one of its progenitors - the Unió Mallorquina - once ruled: Maria Munar would charge across the island on the Behemoth, gobbling up ever more pieces of power with which to feed its voracious appetite.

Jaume Font's party would thus not be in agreement with Maria Salom. She has proposed reducing the number of councillors at the Council from 33 to 23, so completing the "paradigm shift" she has introduced, one of creating Behemoth-lite. Having done away with half of the senior management types at the Council, Maria is intent on further cutting the amounts spent on political representation. Bauzá, forgetting the dormouse proposal and now showing solidarity with Maria, who is after all number two behind him on the PP's parliament candidate list, opined that Maria was coming up with "real solutions, the fruit of analysis and consensus".

The trouble is that Bauzá and others throw the consensus word around when it clearly doesn't exist. He would only need to ask Jaume Font. Or Francesc Miralles, who heads the PSOE list for the Council's election. "For the PP, the Council is outdated and non-existent", as demonstrated by the Salom proposal. The intention is to weaken the Council. But why should he believe this? Like Bauzá's attempt (a dashed one) to reduce the number of parliamentary deputies by sixteen, Salom's proposal is one with which it is hard to disagree. Why on earth are 59 deputies needed? Or 33 councillors? What is the point of them all?

The more fundamental question of course is what is the point of the Council of Mallorca. The easy answer is that there isn't one. For an island (and islands) with the population that there is, surely it isn't necessary for there to be this additional level of public administration. Well, possibly. But if there were no Council, there would still be a requirement to administer the roads, the waste, the land, the water, the culture, among other things. It is too simplistic to believe that these should all be shifted to the Balearic Government: it is a government for a region not for an island.

The other islands have their councils, and Mallorca needs its as well. But what it doesn't need is an administration that grows like topsy into the Behemoth that it did, duplicating efforts, dispensing positions and jobs of questionable validity, behaving like a government it never was. The Behemoth has been caged if not fully tamed. But will it be unleashed once more?


Index for April 2015

Alcúdia tourism promotion - 11 April 2015
Alcúdia's bridges - 25 April 2015
Balearics presidential candidates - 8 April 2015
Being Mallorcan - 22 April 2015
Ca de Bou - 12 April 2015
Cala Ratjada - Germans in the 1930s - 29 April 2015
Council of Mallorca - 30 April 2015
Día Sant Jordí - 19 April 2015
Easter picnics in Mallorca - 5 April 2015
Education march - 27 April 2015
Ensaimada - 14 April 2015
Health treatment, immigrants and PP - 6 April 2015
Hotelier power in Mallorca - 15 April 2015
José María Rodríguez - 16 April 2015
Mallorca and Wisden - 9 April 2015
Maria Dolores Cospedal - plundering gaffe - 26 April 2015
Olive ebola - 28 April 2015
Palacio de Congresos - 13 April 2015
Palma - 2 April 2015
Partido Popular imploding - 3 April 2015
Partido Popular parliament list - 18 April 2015
Proportional representation - 21 April 2015
Soapy pine of Campanet - 4 April 2015
Souvenir shops - 1 April 2015
Tourism law - 20 April 2015
Tourist tax - 10 April 2015, 24 April 2015
Travel writing - 7 April 2015
Worst hotels - 23 April 2015
Zero advertising spend on tourism - 17 April 2015