The Rules Of The Playground

Campanet is one of many villages in Mallorca which masquerades as a town. With a population of just over 2,500 people, it hardly merits the title of town. In Spanish (or Catalan), it wouldn't receive such a title, but in English, it does, for the sole reason that it has its own town hall.

Not a lot happens in Campanet. Its proximity to the motorway means that it isn't off the beaten track, and it does lay claim to reasons why it might be visited - the caves and the aquatic phenomenon of the "Fonts Ufanes" - but like other villages, it is easy to overlook it.

It is rare for Campanet to register for any reason other than that the springs are being particularly active (which they have been, thanks to recent deluges). On one occasion, a year or so ago, it did come to wider attention because of regular cuts to the water supply; the system was so antiquated, it was falling to pieces.

It now has another, doubtlessly brief moment in the spotlight owing to a little local difficulty, and it all has to do with its town hall.

In January this year, the president of the Mallorca hoteliers federation suggested that, as a way of saving money, the town halls in Mallorca should be done away with. Though she argued that all the ayuntamientos should go, she probably had in mind the likes of Campanet in particular. What, after all, is the point of a village of 2,500 people having a town hall?

There is sense to the hoteliers federation argument, and it is one that has been made by others, but were it to be acted upon, it would undermine the principle of localism and of the devolution of representation, even to the smallest of communities. It would also run up against the forces of loyalty to these communities, the strength of which resides in families, the local networks and sheer parochialism.

The principle of localism is a sound one in that it takes democracy ever closer to the ordinary people. The strength of the system is, though, also its weakness, not just in making local government as a whole more expensive but also in creating what amount to fiefdoms, rife with rivalries.

It was once said to me, about Muro, that the town hall is a playground for adults. The individuals know each other, grew up with each other and had their fallings-out in the school playgrounds which they now take into later life. It is that strength of families, networks and parochialism that fuels small-town (and village) competition, squabbles and vendettas.

Campanet's little local difficulty has its roots in events that go back two decades. The decision of the mayor, Joan Amengual (PSOE), to chuck councillors from the PSM socialists out of his few-months-old coalition administration has more to it than the mayor having apparently taken umbrage at the PSM councillors having organised a committee to arrange festivities for Three Kings.

Petty this may seem, and is, but the PSM councillors having seemingly gone behind the mayor's back has echoes of what happened in 1991. Amengual, who, in true dynastic fashion, had succeeded his father as PSOE chief, was the then second in command at the town hall to the PSM mayor, Francesc Aguiló. Amengual withdrew PSOE support for the then coalition when Aguiló, without telling him, called a meeting with the village's pensioners.

The bad blood, over something this inconsequential, has festered ever since. Aguiló went on to be mayor until 2007. He was succeeded by the PSM's Francesc Morell who was mayor in coalition (with Amengual) and who gave up the mayorship - just one of the peculiarities of how pacts work in Mallorca's town halls - so that Amengual could serve for a year.

And now, PSOE and Amengual, finally in a position of dominance, have, or it would appear, taken their revenge. Moreover, Amengual has said that he had not agreed that Morell could share the mayorship and take over in 2013.

Amengual maintains that there have been other factors behind his breaking of the pact with the PSM, but it is being seen as simply the outcome of a long-standing feud predicated on utterly trivial matters.

In the small towns and villages, such feuds can and do arise, and they dominate local politics; Santa Margalida is just one other example. They are not really about the rules of politics but about who controls the fiefdoms, and lend support to calls to scrap the town halls - and not just on financial grounds. They are really about the rules of the playground.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

English Speakers: Mayors and town halls

"Mayor Talks To British Community". This shock-horror headline hasn't appeared, but should have. A mayor going along and talking to a bunch of Brits in a Brit-owned bar. Whatever next?

The mayor in question was Tommy Cifre. Two Tommy Cifres, there are only two Tommy Cifres present among Pollensa town hall's cadre of councillors, but only one can be mayor, and it isn't the one from the Mallorcan socialists. The mayor came, he spoke in a sort of English and conquered those who were concerned about the quality of the tap water.

It's not, however, that you expect him to be perfect in English. Why should he be? Some Mallorcan politicians can apparently do English reasonably well. President Bauzá, or so it has been reported, impressed tour operators and others at a World Travel Market lunch with the "fluency" of his English. One who didn't, it would seem, was the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida, who is only of course the national government's tourism secretary and formerly the tourism minister. You can't have someone able to communicate effectively with representatives from one of Spain's principal tourism markets; that would just be pointless.

But it doesn't matter because there are always interpreters and translators. Mesquida may be able to call on such services, but the town halls can't necessarily. Take Alcúdia, for instance. A while back I received an email asking if I could put into serviceable English the Spanish description of the Roman town. Sure I could, and did, and sent it back with a note asking where I should send my invoice. Not that I seriously anticipated a positive response; and so I was therefore not disappointed to receive no response.

Though Alcúdia town hall now has a superbly scripted English explanation of Pollentia and the monographic museum, is it right that it should get one gratis and as a favour? Seemingly it is, and I hope all the British and English-speaking tourists are grateful. But is it also right that there appears not to be anyone actually employed or contracted (and paid accordingly) who can do English properly? And I do mean properly and not just in a somewhat better than putting a translation through Google fashion.

I don't expect mayors to speak English. It was good of Cifre to give it a reasonable crack, therefore. In many Mallorcan municipalities, ability in English or another main foreign language would be almost completely unnecessary, but in towns such as Alcúdia and Pollensa - especially Pollensa - then I do expect some decent English; not by the mayor but through the systems of communication that exist. Ten per cent of Pollensa's resident population is British; the town has an overwhelmingly British tourism market.

The counter-argument is, of course, that all these Brits should damn well learn the lingo, always assuming we know which lingo is being referred to; and in the now Partido Popular-dominated Pollensa town hall it is still stubbornly Catalan. But dream on; most will never learn the native sufficiently well and certainly not sufficiently well to engage in the political process.

A mayor coming to speak to the British community (and it must be said that it was more than just the Brits) is an aspect of this process. A question about tap water may sound trivial in the scheme of things, but in fact it isn't; town halls do, after all, have legal responsibilities for sanitation.

But more than this, and this is where the whole argument about voting rights for expatriates tends to founder, is the fact that if communication is not understandable, then how can expatriates ever be expected to be anything like fully engaged in the process over and above a small minority that takes an interest regardless of the language? Ahead of the local elections in May, in which expatriates were entitled to vote, where were the communications in relevant languages? Perhaps there were in certain municipalities, but I was unaware of any.

Depending on municipality, Mallorca should display a multi-lingualism that reflects the realities of its population. English and German, probably French and Arabic; these might be considered the essential additional languages. Such reality is coming to be accepted; in Pollensa I know that local parties, and not just Cifre's PP, are keen to engage with the English-speaking population. So they should.

It's easy to dismiss expats as being uninterested in local politics. Many are, but many are not, especially at the local level. For a mayor as engaging as Tommy Cifre to come along and engage the Brits - in English - took some balls. He may have ballsed up his English, but so what? He made the effort.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Showtime: The new regime

So, as we all knew would be the case, normal order has been restored to Mallorca's politics. The PP prevail once again, as they normally have prevailed. The Bauzá bounce has trounced Antich, sending him into the abyss.

So long and farewell, Francesc. You arrived on a train in 2007, announcing that the past four years were to have been its age, and you left in the lost-luggage department of discarded political parties.

You take with you Francina, ar-mangled at the Council of Mallorca by the charms of Salome. While you, Francesc, were stepping from the door of the train to the platform of a new age, Francina was declaring that her doors would always be open. But now they are just hanging from the hinges, banging in the wind of political isolation. Will we see either of you again?

With you, go whichever allies you had managed to persuade to come along for the ride or who you were left with no choice but to appoint: Gabriel Vicens of the PSM, environment and transport supremo, a John Prescott for the tree-hugging classes, a left hook here to a golf course, a right upper-cut there to a train or two. Yes, Gabriel, it was you who really derailed the Alcúdia train.

You fought long and hard to protect a wild orchid and some birds at Son Bosc. Now, the PP will come yomping across the finca, staking out the bunkers for the golf course and taking high-velocity air rifles to any bird that flaps into view. The PP's gun dogs will sniff in the undergrowth for the bodies of old environmentalism.

Joana Barceló. Poor Joana. The final occupant of the tourism ministry. Ashes to ashes, you depart covered in an ash cloud and the shroud of misdeeds that were not of your doing.

We say goodbye to all these, tears dropping from our eyes as they wave from the back of the good ship PSOE And Friends which will drift around aimlessly for the next four years.

As we bid them adieu, we welcome the new king. Long live King Bauzá. The new emperor and his new clothes. We will find out whether he is wearing any. It is the lot of presidents of small islands that they can promise much but find they are as impotent as those who have gone before, and as reliant upon the largesse of Madrid as has always been the case. A Madrid that is eyeing up what the islands and other regional governments spend.

King Bauzá and his queen Salome will have been dancing the seven veils into the small hours of celebration and demanding: "Bring me the head of Francesc Antich". And there it is, on a plate, because it was always going to be. For four years, Antich had awaited his fate, the inevitable reversion to the norm of Mallorca's politics. The PP.

Away from the balls and palaces of Palma, the great unwashed in the provinces have been waving their own fond farewells. But for some, it is a long goodbye.

The trading, haggling and bartering of the town hall souks now begin. Winners who would be mayors or ruling parties may find they are neither. It is a peculiarity of Mr. D'Hondt and his proportional system that firstly, and like the Duckworth-Lewis cricket-matches-affected-by-rain method, no one has the faintest idea how it works, and secondly that a party can secure twice as many councillors as the next party cab off the rank and still find it necessary to keep the day job. Thus may be the prospect for Coloma of Alcúdia. One of eight PP councillors, but not a single friend among the other nine who might ensure she is pushed over the mayoral finishing-line.

The past few days of Mallorca political life have been jolly. The fun, though, is only now starting. We will wait four years for the next elections to entertain us, but these, the elections, are but the star attraction in the endless spectacular and Brian Rix with his trousers down Consolat de Mar and ayuntamientos' farce that is Mallorca and its politics. Let the new show start.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nobody Does It Better

Of the local town halls, only Alcúdia might be said to function adequately, notwithstanding the Can Ramis fiasco. One can probably add Muro, now that the PP-CDM have carved up the mayoral office and put an end to the slight inconvenience of a rival party having that office. In Pollensa, the administration stumbles from debt-ridden crisis to another, assaulted from all political sides for creating, for instance, "science fiction" in respect of its latest attempt to draw up a budget; at least the local police no longer deem it necessary to work to rule, which they did last year. Sa Pobla gives us near acts of fisticuffs in the open session, but nowhere does it better - or worse - than Santa Margalida.

Santa Margalida town hall is the gift that has been giving and keeps on giving, though one might also say that it is the cup that regularly overflows. From the potty notion that Son Real might have been turned into a golf course (and unlike the Son Bosc finca in Muro, there were very strong reasons for it not to have been, such as the ancient burial sites) through the spats over contracts for works in Can Picafort and fiesta expenditure to the current lunacy surrounding cups for a football tournament. Yep, this is politics, local-style, in Can Pic and at the town hall some kilometres away. This is the town hall where the opposition groups have walked out of meetings - as happened with a dispute about invoices - and have even set up an alternative open session, protesting at a change to the time of the regular one. Over the past week, it emerged that there was a plan under which establishments currently operating on a commercial basis, such as restaurants, would no longer have been classified as being for commercial use. This was before it was admitted that there had been an error, one laid at the door of the previous administration and, naturally enough, batted back across the net and laid at the current one's door.

Then we come to this football tournament. This was part of a fiesta for immigrants in Can Picafort. Five seven-a-side teams made up of players from South America took part in this tournament, itself all in the name of the process of social integration. When it came to the giving out of trophies, however, the mayoral delegate in Can Picafort vetoed the handing over of two trophies donated by the Unió Mallorquina party, one of the parties in opposition to the Partido Popular, of which the mayor is a member.

Now this may all sound very petty, and it almost certainly is, but there's a bit more to it. On the previous day, the UM published the latest issue of its local news-sheet. On the front cover of this were mocked-up 500 euro notes bearing an image of the mayor; this was a protest at the alleged squandering of public money. On the back cover was the reproduction of an invoice said to support this allegation. So, come the day of the tournament, the PP would appear to have sought its retaliation - by not delivering the trophies to players completely uninvolved in the argument.

"The Diario" styled this as part of the "never-ending row" between the ruling body and the opposition. One can probably style it differently. Kindergartens, asylums, breweries, there must be some analogy, the problem is trying to choose between them all.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Ray Stevens, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDEre-zjPNg. Today's title - I've a feeling we've had this before; ho hum, still a good (Bond) song.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)

Bend It

Flexibility. This might be a good word; a good word to describe how things are here. Not flexibility in the positive sense so much - as in he/she demonstrated flexibility in his/her thinking - but flexibility in the maybe we'll do what we're told to or maybe we won't sense. And often one fancies it is the latter. Let's take smoking in cafés shall we. Without wishing to puff on an old pipe once more and blow some smoke rings of explanation as to how the law is meant to apply (with the emphasis on the "meant to"), suffice it to say that, in some establishments, there is a no-smoking area and a smoking area. Theoretically, there is meant to be some physical division between the two, but let's not get bogged down in theory, for in practice what you have is a theoretical no-smoking area which is right next to a practical smoking area. In other words, it doesn't make any real difference whether one part of the café is dubbed "no smoking" because the smoke is available to all. How charitable these regulations are. And even in the no-smoking area, the rigidity of that no-smoking command is, yes, flexible. Or to use another word - ignored.

Now, without wishing to finger anywhere or anyone in particular, and given that I happen to like the place and am familiar with its coffees, pastries and baguettes, there is a café in Puerto Alcúdia that is mightily popular with locals and expats alike. It has - or had the other day when I was there - a particularly flexible approach to smoking (or no smoking, as it may be). Right by my head and therefore next to my table was a sign that read "zona no fumadors". I don't think I need to translate. I hadn't appreciated that the zona no fumadors appears to extend to one table alone, as - at the next table - were a trio, two of whom I recognised from a bar which, without wishing to finger anywhere or anyone, is by the grand canal in Puerto Alcúdia, and one of the two was puffing away heartily. At the adjoining table were two "girls", who I didn't recognise, and who were both happily making some serious inroads into a packet of Marlboro.

Flexible. It's not far from bendy, is it. And bendy is not far from bent. And bent is not far from rules. Flexible, that'll be it.


Meantime, rare old sport in the Junior Common Rooms, sometimes known as the local town halls. The only thing that appears to be missing from meetings of the town hall politicos is vast quantities of alcohol, which were deemed a pre-requisite in my day of student politics in the JCRs. Alcohol, though, was not the only requirement. I once chaired a special meeting that was a vote of no confidence in the editors of the college rag. It was packed out, but it didn't stop me having my apple crumble and custard while it was going on. But anyway, where was I? Ah yes, only slightly more relevant than JCR politics is what goes on in the town halls. Always good for a spat is Santa Margalida where the spokesman for the Unió Mallorquina was expelled from a meeting for having the audacity to accuse the mayor (Partido Popular) of high-handedness and something called "indocumentado", which, though it is pretty clear, I'm unsure as to the precise sense in which it is being used, and one needs to be a bit cautious as this all revolves around some 800 grands worth of invoices. Anyway, it all sounds like jolly good fun with accusations being hurled about to do with curbing freedom of expression and all that sort of stuff. There again, 800 grand is on rather a grander scale than debates we used to have about donating 20 quid to the Shrewsbury Three or the Iranian Ninety-One or the M Twenty-Five or the Temperance Seven - whatever cause it happened to be, and it was invariably of a right-on far-left nature and involved endless discussion as to whether payments were "ultra vires". If there is one or rather are two words that describe my university life, they would be ultra and vires, and I still don't know what they mean.

But the Junior Common Room to beat them all is of course that in Pollensa, where mayor Cerdà is under fire for the town's cleaning arrangements. When isn't he under fire? The United Left/Greens, the one-man mayoral destruction unit that is Pepe García, is having a go about the fact that the company that does the cleaning - sort of - has not had a contract for several months. Ah look, just don't worry about it. It'll be an oversight. You know how flexible things can be here.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Beverley Knight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vobWLTdCzvo). Today's title - the lead singer sadly died recently.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)