Compulsive Disorders

Biel Company is allegedly the president of the Partido Popular in the Balearics. For several months, despite his having been given this accolade, he was rarely to be seen or heard. He is now finally beginning to demonstrate that he is indeed the president and to allay any suspicions or fears that he had been run over by a tractor in his native Sant Joan while regressing to his former life as champion of the farming community.

If you are not already aware, then by goodness you are going to become aware that there is an election in sixteen months time. The long campaign has started. Biel will be hopeful that this campaign heralds the long goodbye for Sweet and Friendly Francina and her chums in Més and Podemos. His hope may be misplaced. Biel has not exactly been rallying the electoral troops to the PP side.

Doubtless recognising that his party is at present heading for another election disaster, Biel has come out fighting in the long campaign. If all else fails, and there is in fact nothing else to try and pin on the incumbent Balearic president, then it is necessary to call her a compulsive liar. Which he has. Francina's lying has to do with a demand that the PP repays some 150 grand of 2007 election subvention. As if anyone actually cares. It was ten years ago, it was the time of Matas. Get over it, and talk about matters in the present. But no, the compulsion - for both Biel and Francina - is to rake over the past, and where Biel is concerned, the raking appears to mainly have involved the soil of his own personal agricultural heritage.

Is Francina a compulsive liar? No, she is not. She does, however, suffer from a compulsive disorder. It is not treatable. It is called compulsive consensus. So essential has it become for Francina to insist that her government abides fully by the principle of consensus that she has clearly come to believe this. Unfortunately for Francina, no one else does. The evidence stacks up by the day and will stack up further as she and her governmental buddies go into full-on election mode. Yes, we have sixteen months of all this to endure.

If there is a compulsive liar, then last week once more revealed who it was, as if the revelation were in fact needed. Donald Trump is not just a compulsive liar, he is a compulsive lunatic. But at least with DT there is the entertainment factor, even though presidents are not usually judged by their ability to entertain us all royally. So, Biel needs to understand the true meaning of compulsive lying in a presidential sense. Francina isn't even on the first rung of the compulsion ladder; not when compared with the master who has scaled its heights in The White House.

Biel should really be devoting far greater attention to a different disorder - compulsive citizenship. All Balearic politicians suffer from this due to their constant invoking of the citizens, but where Biel is concerned he needs to take due note of the party that has named itself in the name of the citizens (there's compulsion for you) - Ciudadanos. Biel said that he wasn't worried about the rise and rise of the C's. Well, he's wrong not to be worried, especially as he needs to be very nice to them. The PP hasn't got a cat in hell's chance of recovering all the seats that Bauzá destroyed in 2015, so the C's have to be looked upon as very real, potential coalition allies after the May 2019 election.

This, however, will mean that Biel has to cosy up to the morose leader of the Cs, Xavier Pericay. And he has his own disorder - compulsive anti-Catalanism. On and on he drones in this manner. Sixteen more months we have of this. The citizens may as a result decide to switch off from the Citizens party. The citizens might also wish to know what the Citizens party has to offer them apart from not needing to have a Catalan qualification for being a nurse. Curiously enough, the wild man of Més, compulsive independentist David Abril, has hit the nail on the head in this regard. Rather than constant attacks on Catalan, he said, let's hear some policies.

Xavier will unquestionably be aghast to learn that the leadership of the Council of Majorca, one part of which (the presidential part) has compulsive Catalanism, let the Obra Cultural Balear (compulsive Catalanists and compulsive independentists) have the use of the Teatre Principal for free so that it could turn its annual awards ceremony into propaganda for the incarcerated Jordis of Catalonia, with the acting speaker of the Catalan parliament, Carme Forcadell, handing out the gongs.

According to the Council's vice-president for culture, PSOE's Francesc Miralles (not prone to the same compulsion of the president), the Council always lets the OCB have the theatre for nothing. But Francesc declined to comment on what took place and nor has he said anything about the fact that apparently the cost of transmission for this gala occasion was borne by the IB3 broadcaster and the government's culture ministry (run by Més). 

Carme has since resigned as speaker, and when this became knowledge, our good friend Balti of the Balearic parliament (compulsive Republicanism) tweeted a message of support. "Health and Republic," said Balti, adding "strength from the companion islands".

Xavier will not have been impressed. Are any of us with all their various compulsive disorders?