Denouement Day For The PP

Today is D-Day. Domingo Day also known in co-official language terms as Diumenge Day. It will also be Denouement Day. Two one-time friends won't end up killing each other, but one will be the loser of a long and complex affair.

At some point today we will know who will be the new leader of the Partido Popular in the Balearics. I'll bet you can hardly wait to find out. And wait there has been. A very long one. Interminable. Well, not quite, as it terminates today, with one of the candidates due to be terminated. Which one? The bookies will be weeping if the long odds outsider J.R. Bauzá romps to victory. Others will be joining them. Catalanists will be wailing their woes and hurriedly reinstalling the garlic over their portals, lest Count Dracula should darken their doors once more.

Joy, though, might be unconfined in certain quarters: let's call them the hoteliers. J.R. has been going down - in all likelihood - with all guns blazing. One of them has been fired at the tourist tax. Were J.R. to a) become PP president (again) and b) Balearic president (again), he has said that the tourist tax will be the first folly of the Psoemespodemos pact to be ejected with great force into the blue waters of the Med.

The spirit of Jaume Matas would thus be restored, Jaume having taken the legislative knife to the little lamented ecotax in 2003. And in eliminating the tourist tax, J.R. would be having his symbolic retaliation against Psoemespodemos. One of its first acts was to consign the law of symbols to the symbolic junk heap of Castile-Catalan rivalry. The Catalan flag could once more flutter without fetter and fear of ferocious reprisals by anti-Catalanist fundamentalists. Would J.R. and his chums do the conga in the way that Psoemespodemos so embarrassingly did, having removed the symbols law from the statute book?

Well, he would have to be president and have some chums. And they, unfortunately for him, are in comparatively limited supply. But those that there are will be with him all the way at Es Moli d'es Comte, which is the finca pile hosting the PP congress. What a shame they couldn't have waited another week. They could have had their congress at a congress centre. More spirit of Matas would thus have been abroad, though given that the Palacio has now become something of a Psoemespodemos gig (hmm, maybe not Podemos), they would probably have decided otherwise.

Es Moli, from what I can make out (thanks to TripAdvisor), could do with all the PP-ists firing off some five-star reviews. It is ranked 1,487 out of 1,776 restaurants in Palma (de Mallorca). "The political debate was somewhat sterile, but we loved the cabbage rolls with sobrassada." Or whatever. Still, perhaps it's an appropriate gaff for the occasion and for the PP's Count Dracula. The mill of the count. Though for J.R. it may prove to be a millstone too far.

And one of the stones that he insists on dragging around with him is multi-language teaching. What more can he add to the list of teaching languages? What about Uzbek? There must be the odd tourist from Uzbekistan in desperate need of understanding why he must pay the tourist tax. Or how about Klingon? Much more of a laugh than English, that's for sure.

Teaching has been just one of the issues that the local Spanish (and Catalan) media has been dissecting in the lead-up to D-Day. There has been virtually no room for anything else, the photos vying for space with the analysis, the quotes, the interviews. And best of the photos was one for the favourite, Biel Company, There was Biel, surrounded by Biel's Babes, the males pushed to the periphery. And when one of the babes is Marga Prohens, one would have to feel that Biel has it in the bag. Who, let's face it, would knowingly vote against Marga.

In somewhat less frivolous fashion, Company has stated that J.R. is not a company man, as in there's no way he'll be giving J.R. a job if (when) he wins the election. Bauzá, attempting to appear all things to all (company) men and women in the party, has hinted that he might do otherwise were he to win. However, that would be unlikely. One of his parting shots last week was to say of Company that he (Bauzá) made him a minister, he (Bauzá) affiliated Company to the party. "Let each one draw his own conclusions about him." And it's true. He did make him a minister. Company wasn't a PP member as such. He became one later.

Denouement Day is thus highly personal. There may be more than one loser. The PP is threatened with being split in half. Or more like into one third and two thirds.