Politicians always say the right things. Or try to. Ahead of elections, they try particularly hard. They also have a tendency to repeat what has been said before. María Salom, the Partido Popular's candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca, is no exception.
"I wish that Mallorca could live from tourism 365 days a year." Amen to that. We all wish the same thing. Incumbents of various political posts have wished the same thing in the past, and will doubtless continue to do so. They, and we, can wish all manner of things. Like Roy Wood and wishing every day were Christmas, so we might wish tourism brought Christmas gifts every day of the year. Sadly, it doesn't.
Salom is ticking the right boxes. She has even suggested the creation of "fiesta routes", such as for Sant Antoni in January. It's not a novel idea, as it has been suggested on many occasions, not least by myself. But for it to be given a political airing verges on that rarest of political attributes, some creative thinking.
Unfortunately for María Salom, she might not have much influence on a 365-days-a-year tourism. It seems to have escaped her attention that her own party, quite rightly, has said that it will do away with a tourism department at the Council. It's unnecessary when there is already one along the corridors of the regional government. Ditto, of course, much of what has been grabbed as an irrelevant duplication of responsibility by the island's Council. She herself has pretty much set out a blueprint for trimming the Council. It seems strange, therefore, that she should pronounce on something that is not hers to pronounce on.
Yet, it isn't all that strange when you consider what else she has been saying. The dream, the wishful thinking of every day being a tourism day, is purely political froth. As also are her declarations in favour of preserving the countryside and of defending "Mallorca-ism". It is just possible that she personally believes all this, but her party has shown little evidence that it does.
Or possibly she has been put up to fire a shot across the ambitious bows of would-be tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, who has made it clear enough in the past that he would give tourism needs priority over those of land and environment. Equally possible is that she has been allocated the role of portraying a cuddly, feminine face of the PP and of encroaching upon the virgin, untouched land of the island's left wing along with its own avowed Mallorca-ism, the dual domains of the government's current environment minister, the Mallorcan socialists' Gabriel Vicens.
It doesn't really wash, though. As sure as it was that when Vicens clambered aboard the environmental horse and cart and sought to kill off developments such as the Muro golf course, so the PP, newly restored to office, will take to its fleet of gas-guzzlers and flatten the finca. If they don't, it will be a surprise and a reversal of a reputation as the life and soul of the 19th hole and the eighteen before it.
The right and left of the island are poles apart. Vicens once committed an act of "disobedience" by being one of those who went off for a trek along the camí (way) of Ternelles in Pollensa when he shouldn't have done. In his other capacity as transport minister, you can be pretty certain that he hadn't gone on a reccy to eye up the way as the site of a new motorway. Had it been a PP politician, he or she wouldn't of course have been disobedient but instead would have been on the phone to place the purchase order for the tarmac.
It is this polarity that underpins the upcoming elections. While the diversions of corruption and the pressing need for economic growth will be two of the battlegrounds, it is the philosophical differences in terms of what Mallorca should be that are at the heart of the elections. They can be nuanced as a type of quasi-Luddite romanticism on the left and an industrial pragmatism on the right.
Campaigning for the elections is not meant to be occurring at present. The official date for the start of campaigning is 6 May, but it isn't stopping the unofficial hustings taking place. Hence María Salom's pronouncement and indeed the words of other politicians.
The Mallorca-ism to which Salom refers may, for a PP population, sound like an attempt at mollification of the more left-inclined who have been alarmed by some of the strident noises coming out of the party, but it is a central theme of what these elections are about; indeed what they should be about. As for tourism 365 days a year, where does this fit in with Mallorca-ism? There are some who, and I leave it to you to decide who, would rather this were never the case.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label María Salom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label María Salom. Show all posts
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Hello, Goodbye: María Salom and the Council of Mallorca
María Salom is not a name likely to ring many bells with you, but it may become familiar in the future and give us (well, me) the opportunity for some plays on her name: Salome, biblical seductress; Shalom, the Hebrew for peace and, idiomatically, for both hello and goodbye.
Hello to María Salom. Who is she? Salom is a member of the Partido Popular and is being lined up as president of the Council of Mallorca, a candidature that helped to cause the rupture in the party on account of Jaume Font having been overlooked. The candidature brought further into the open the splits within the party, causing indignation among leftish elements opposed to the perceived anti-Catalanism and alliance with the PP nationally of the local leader, José Bauzá, and causing Font to go off and form his own party.
Salom's candidature is widely believed, by the indignant left, to have been one dictated by the national party. She herself was closely aligned with Madrid, having been a deputy in the Cortes before assuming a similar role in the Balearic parliament last October. Back in the Mallorcan mainstream, and with local elections looming, she has been making her views known about the body over which she hopes she will preside.
In January, Salom referred to the Council of Mallorca as an "inefficient and expensive mastodon". She said that she would press for an ending of the Council's "accumulation of functions" and their duplication with other institutions. This was to be applauded, but her choice of animal to describe the Council was open to an interpretation she may not have intended. The mastodon has been long extinct. The Council's extinction would not be lamented, but when you are looking at becoming its president, you don't presumably advocate making yourself redundant. Or do you?
She is now saying that she will lop off some 15 million euros of the Council's budget and divert it towards social policy. Amongst savings in her sights are those on "advertising material and other superficial items that are not a priority". Whatever might she have in mind? How about the 400,000 euros the Council splashed out back in the summer of 2008 to start a campaign to promote the use of Catalan in restaurants? Yes, you have read this correctly. 400,000 euros.
This was just an example of the idiocy that the Council has got up to. Let me stress, this is not to deny the promotion of Catalan, but when it is being directed in a pointless fashion, as it was with this restaurant campaign, any good intentions are exposed as daft. As daft and as pointless as the Council often portrays itself and as pointless as it is as an unnecessary tier of additional bureaucracy.
One would imagine that this would be just the sort of thing Salom would put a stop to. Not only because it was a waste of money, but also ideologically, if one assumes that she is on-message where Bauzá's anti-Catalanism is concerned.
What one has thus far heard from Salom regarding the Council, short of her actually wanting to close it down, makes much sense. So why is there another sense? A sense of unease.
Partly, this has to do with the charge that she is a put-up job by the PP in Madrid and, therefore, an instrument of how the national party perceives the future for regionalism (not very favourably). But there is also the matter of her past.
The Sóller Tunnel case was the first great corruption scandal to hit Mallorca following the introduction of autonomy. It claimed the first president of the Balearics regional government, the PP's Gabriel Cañellas, who was forced to resign when he was implicated on a charge that involved the payment of some 50 million pesetas (300,000 euros) for electoral purposes. The case was eventually dropped, in 1997, primarily because of the invoking of the statute of limitations.
In August, 1989, a bank account was opened into which was paid a sum of money by ... María Salom. She was, when the case first came to court in 1995, cited as one of the signatories for bank accounts into which went euphemistic "donations" from a company called Cuart, owned by a friend and business partner of Cañellas, which was granted the concession for work on the tunnel.
Salom was never charged. She appeared as a witness, but that was all. She has since responded to questions about the case by saying that it would take too long to explain. Which it probably would. She was only young at the time when that first bank account was opened, 21 in fact. And she was a woman. She was probably just doing her job.
None of this would probably matter or would have been raised, had it not been for one thing. Font was supposedly denied the candidature as president of the Council because he was, at the time, implicated in a corruption case (the charge has now been archived). Bauzá has made much of not allowing anyone implicated to be forwarded for electoral nomination. Once Salom was presented as candidate, the whiff of possible hypocrisy brought the Sóller Tunnel case back to the fore.
What would take too long to explain casts a shadow over her candidature. It may be unfair that it does. She is saying much about the Council of Mallorca with which it is hard to disagree. But there is still the worry that she is somehow a stooge for an anti-regionalist and pro-Spain PP. It doesn't really help that, by coincidence, her husband's surname and now part of hers is De España. However, if she were to become president, might she in fact go further than she has thus far alluded to? Hello to the presidency, but goodbye to the Council of Mallorca. It would be a seductive message.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Hello to María Salom. Who is she? Salom is a member of the Partido Popular and is being lined up as president of the Council of Mallorca, a candidature that helped to cause the rupture in the party on account of Jaume Font having been overlooked. The candidature brought further into the open the splits within the party, causing indignation among leftish elements opposed to the perceived anti-Catalanism and alliance with the PP nationally of the local leader, José Bauzá, and causing Font to go off and form his own party.
Salom's candidature is widely believed, by the indignant left, to have been one dictated by the national party. She herself was closely aligned with Madrid, having been a deputy in the Cortes before assuming a similar role in the Balearic parliament last October. Back in the Mallorcan mainstream, and with local elections looming, she has been making her views known about the body over which she hopes she will preside.
In January, Salom referred to the Council of Mallorca as an "inefficient and expensive mastodon". She said that she would press for an ending of the Council's "accumulation of functions" and their duplication with other institutions. This was to be applauded, but her choice of animal to describe the Council was open to an interpretation she may not have intended. The mastodon has been long extinct. The Council's extinction would not be lamented, but when you are looking at becoming its president, you don't presumably advocate making yourself redundant. Or do you?
She is now saying that she will lop off some 15 million euros of the Council's budget and divert it towards social policy. Amongst savings in her sights are those on "advertising material and other superficial items that are not a priority". Whatever might she have in mind? How about the 400,000 euros the Council splashed out back in the summer of 2008 to start a campaign to promote the use of Catalan in restaurants? Yes, you have read this correctly. 400,000 euros.
This was just an example of the idiocy that the Council has got up to. Let me stress, this is not to deny the promotion of Catalan, but when it is being directed in a pointless fashion, as it was with this restaurant campaign, any good intentions are exposed as daft. As daft and as pointless as the Council often portrays itself and as pointless as it is as an unnecessary tier of additional bureaucracy.
One would imagine that this would be just the sort of thing Salom would put a stop to. Not only because it was a waste of money, but also ideologically, if one assumes that she is on-message where Bauzá's anti-Catalanism is concerned.
What one has thus far heard from Salom regarding the Council, short of her actually wanting to close it down, makes much sense. So why is there another sense? A sense of unease.
Partly, this has to do with the charge that she is a put-up job by the PP in Madrid and, therefore, an instrument of how the national party perceives the future for regionalism (not very favourably). But there is also the matter of her past.
The Sóller Tunnel case was the first great corruption scandal to hit Mallorca following the introduction of autonomy. It claimed the first president of the Balearics regional government, the PP's Gabriel Cañellas, who was forced to resign when he was implicated on a charge that involved the payment of some 50 million pesetas (300,000 euros) for electoral purposes. The case was eventually dropped, in 1997, primarily because of the invoking of the statute of limitations.
In August, 1989, a bank account was opened into which was paid a sum of money by ... María Salom. She was, when the case first came to court in 1995, cited as one of the signatories for bank accounts into which went euphemistic "donations" from a company called Cuart, owned by a friend and business partner of Cañellas, which was granted the concession for work on the tunnel.
Salom was never charged. She appeared as a witness, but that was all. She has since responded to questions about the case by saying that it would take too long to explain. Which it probably would. She was only young at the time when that first bank account was opened, 21 in fact. And she was a woman. She was probably just doing her job.
None of this would probably matter or would have been raised, had it not been for one thing. Font was supposedly denied the candidature as president of the Council because he was, at the time, implicated in a corruption case (the charge has now been archived). Bauzá has made much of not allowing anyone implicated to be forwarded for electoral nomination. Once Salom was presented as candidate, the whiff of possible hypocrisy brought the Sóller Tunnel case back to the fore.
What would take too long to explain casts a shadow over her candidature. It may be unfair that it does. She is saying much about the Council of Mallorca with which it is hard to disagree. But there is still the worry that she is somehow a stooge for an anti-regionalist and pro-Spain PP. It doesn't really help that, by coincidence, her husband's surname and now part of hers is De España. However, if she were to become president, might she in fact go further than she has thus far alluded to? Hello to the presidency, but goodbye to the Council of Mallorca. It would be a seductive message.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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