Giving And Taking Offence: Moments Of 2016

With there having been as much politics as there has been this year - failed election, failed investitures and so on - there was ample opportunity for the insults to fly. But the best was left until the end. With Mariano Rajoy on the point of being anointed, the Catalonia Republican Left's Gabriel Rufián decided to lay into PSOE, with whom he was less than impressed for facilitating the investiture. Traitors to socialism, he declared. Are they not ashamed to bow to the designs of a cacique that governs an autonomous community (he was referring to Andalusia)? A raw nerve was touched. PSOE were in uproar, their anger with Rufián matched only by that of Podemos, who walked out en masse when the Partido Popular's Rafael Hernando referred to four million dollars of Venezuelan party funding.

By the end of October, when these pleasantries were being exchanged, Congress had become used to the new realities of its make-up. Podemos strode in for the first time, and there were baffled looks on the faces of members of the PP as the Tenerife deputy, Alberto Rodríguez, was presented. Alberto sports full-on dreadlocks in a bun and a permanently angry expression. The (PP) vice-president of Congress, Celia Villalobos, offered her views. She didn't mind there being rastas in Congress so long as they were clean and didn't have lice. Alberto grew angrier still.

The PP were to be the target of one Carlos Pons Camps. A member of Esquerra de Menorca (Menorca Left), he had stood as a candidate at the December general election (coming absolutely nowhere). Four months later, he was still smarting. In fact, he was bloody furious, so much so that he took to social media and proposed the extermination of every single PP voter: roughly ten million people across Spain. He later apologised.  

Someone else who was forced to say sorry was Victor Fernández of Podemos in Alicante. Following the death of the Valencia "boss", the PP's Rita Barberá, he tweeted that she should be burned in order to keep a family without resources warm for a week. Even Podemos condemned his "deplorable behaviour". It had been black humour, he explained, but he promised not to do it again.

Twitter was the favoured medium of Loreto Amoros. She was to find herself as a candidate for the Senate with a suddenly and newly formed party, Sobirania per a les Illes (which just as suddenly un-formed itself). Suffice it to say that she didn't get elected, which didn't owe anything to her tweeting output. A 45-year-old mother of four, this hadn't prevented Loreto bombarding followers with her views on sex - "the week goes really slowly without fucking" - and on the Archbishop of Toledo, who merited a bullet in the back of the neck. To be fair to her, the archbishop had suggested that gender violence was linked to the fact that women asked for a divorce.

The archbishop would doubtless have disapproved of a video created by a 17-year-old Palma schoolboy which featured, inter alia, references to sex acts involving Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Various moral custodians (including the PP) were up in arms, citing religious hatred and law regarding the corruption of minors and pornography.

Some time later, and unrelated to this video, the general secretary of PSOE in the Balearics, Silvia Cano, was questioning the continuing live transmission of Sunday mass from Palma Cathedral by the public broadcaster, IB3. "Pornography," suggested Silvia, "also has its public". Silvia hadn't in fact been proposing that IB3 start filling its schedules with porn; she'd merely been drawing a comparison. But the very mention of porn had the custodians reaching for the nearest online petition in demanding that she retract her comments. She didn't.

Around the same time as there was the fuss over the schoolboy blasphemy video, the Manacor local magazine "Perlas y Cuevas" found itself - or rather its editor found himself - being blasted by feminist caceroladas (the beating of saucepans). This was because of its Sant Antoni special in January, which featured Aline, a Russian blonde and a topless one at that, in erotic poses with the Grand Demon. The editor, Antoni Ferrer, defended the photos by saying that they were professional and had not been designed to stir up controversy. Not everyone agreed with him.

Religion came to the defence of a defence lawyer. Manuel González Peeters, the lawyer for Diego Torres at the Nóos trial in Palma, branded former justice minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, an idiot when he appeared as a witness. González Peeters defended his use of idiot by arguing that, in the Bible, Luke had used idiot to mean someone who doesn't listen and that many popes have used the same word for the same reason.

Idiots or not, plenty of people had been listening to this and to the other insults uttered and offences given and taken in 2016.

Insults Are Not What They Were

One of Balearic president Bauzá's Babes, Partido Popular parliamentary spokesperson Mabel Cabrer, admitted last week that the party might lose its majority at the next regional elections, an observation that the electorate, with even a cursory glance at the latest opinion polls, would itself already have made. High on the parliamentary hill, Cabrer, the lonely goatherd, yodelled a lament which demonstrated that she and the party are genuinely rattled, and the ones who have been doing the rattling are Podemos. Mabel from her table warned of the dire consequences of Podemosism. "It represents a very dangerous alternative." "It would cause a total break with the model .. of Spanish democracy." Which, Mabel may not have noticed, is what Podemos are all about: a new model, one that would prefer to see the back of the discredited two-party model of which she is a member.

Alarmed by the prospect that she will almost certainly be out of a job after May, Mabel called for the election debate to be "high", which would make for something of a change for most current political debate in Mallorca. She also demanded that this debate was not sullied by insults and defamations. Ah yes, insults, something Mabel knows all about, as in when she called opponents of the Partido Popular's discount card Nazis and was later forced to apologise.

Insults, however, aren't what they used to be, as Bauzá discovered when he took Lorenzo Bravo, the general secretary of the UGT union, to court for having called him a fascist, among other things. The courts found in Bravo's favour, and these were courts. Bauzá took the matter to the Balearics High Court, having not got satisfaction from lower courts, but the decision remained the same: freedom of expression outweighed apparent impugning of honour. And now, a court in Palma has concluded that the "hijo de puta" insult has lost its meaning and is not injurious. The court reached its decision in a case involving two workers at an unnamed organisation who got into an argument. One called the other a "hijo de puta", so he was denounced.

With all this in mind, therefore, let the election campaign be full of insults. Nazis, anyone?

MALLORCA TODAY - Bauzá labelled a fascist by union leader

Lorenzo Bravo, secretary-general of the UGT union in the Balearics has called President Bauzá a fascist, later explaining that it was not the intention to insult the president but to draw attention to a call for him to set up a dialogue with the unions as part of the tackling of the islands' economic crisis. This is not the first time that Bravo has levelled an insult at the government. In September last year, he branded the Partido Popular pigs and had to publicly apologise when faced with possible legal action.


Update (17 February): The government has instructed the Balearics Attorney-General to consider legal action against Bravo.

This Fascist Groove Thing: Political insults

The parliamentarians of the Balearics will be breaking up soon. Their spring holidays will be a time for preparing for government - the next one - or for looking around for gainful employment if and when the elections on 22 May add them to the statistics of the unemployed. A dozen deputies will be given a little bonus, six grand's worth of payment to tide them over between parliament's dissolution on 28 March and the results of the elections being announced. Not exactly huge parachute payments, but nice work if you can get it.

One among the parliamentary ranks, finance minister Carles Manera, has been making plans. He will, assuming he is no longer in charge of the islands' coffers come the end of May, be dividing his time between the universities of Palma, Barcelona and the LSE. He may not be Milton Friedman, but future economists of Britain will be able to say that they were once taught by the chap at the helm when the Balearics' economy went into meltdown.

At the penultimate session of parliament, Manera has been doing his best to play down charges regarding irregularities with the islands' public companies, by which are meant organisations that are in effect government agencies. Hey ho, always an irregularity or several to keep local politicians occupied.

Manera will be just one of the jolly figures who has kept us entertained over the past four years to duck out of local politics. Some have already said that they are calling it a day, opportunely perhaps. Catalina Julve, she of the waste-collection scandal, is to quit politics. Presumably, she won't be emptying the bins anywhere near you soon.

Miguel Grimalt, our old friend "Enviro Man", is to be recycled into business somewhere. How much we once enjoyed him. We saw him here, we saw him there, we saw Enviro Man everywhere; one day planting a tree, the next reclaiming a dune, always immaculately turned out, even when he put on some wellies to go and dig to save the planet.

The dying days of the current parliament are a time for politicians to make hay while the sun sets. If not the finance minister and his attempts at regularising the allegedly irregular, then any number of the honourable gentlemen and ladies having their acerbic centimo's worth. Peculiarly, you might be interested to know, there is an insistence that decorum prevails and deputies are afforded the respect of being referred to as "honourable", just as in Westminster. Rarely has an adjective become so abused.

And abuse has been flying in the parliamentary chamber, as warring politicos engage in last-minute recriminations and pitch for the electorate's affections. Parliamentary speeches, Balearics-style, are with the aid of microphones, making the deputies like karaoke politicians, reading from a monitor of insults. Ravens, crows or vultures, the word "cuervos" can mean them all, and is but one affront to be traded as predatory Partido Popular politicos circle to pick over the carrion of the decaying body of the Antich administration.

Another insult is "fascist", an expression of contempt loaded with historical resonance, and one coming from the Partido Popular's Antoni Pastor in the direction of the Antich socialists. Why fascist? It doesn't much matter why, and it doesn't really hold much weight when the one using the insult is seated next to his party leader (José Bauzá) who, one suspects, he dislikes more than he does the opposition.

"Fascist" may count more as an insult in a country that was once so, but it is still an easy term to toss around, rather as it used to be in my days of student politics when everyone was a fascist. Unless you know someone to be the genuine article, and it was my misfortune to have known one (a key strategist with the BNP, though it wasn't realised that he was at the time), then it's an insult best left on the grooves in the political karaoke database.

But maybe this fascist thing is appropriate. As spring beckons, and some politicians (the Partido Popular's probably) will look forward to the darling buds of a return to power in May, we might remember Mel Brooks' song from "The Producers". "Springtime For Hitler" ... (substitute as and if you feel appropriate).


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.