The Creative Tension Of Government

A year ago, I wrote an article entitled "We Can Collapse Governments". It was about Podemos: We Can. In it I suggested that a coalition, formed from PSOE, Més and Podemos, "could be thrown into chaos or could collapse". It was prophetic, one might say, in being more than just a suggestion of possibility in the future. The past tense of the modal "can", i.e. "could", was an indication of what Podemos is turning out to be. The positivity of "we can" is being replaced by the conditions of "we could". Podemos, the party of the conditional. We could, if you were to agree with us.

Podemos, the advocates of openness, dialogue, participation, shroud all this with confrontation. It is to their credit that they don't just swear blind allegiance to a government of which they are nominally a part, but of which, in truth, they are apart. One wondered why they didn't wish to formally join the Balearic government, but now this is becoming clearer. On the outside but still vital for giving Armengol a majority, they can challenge and confront without being subjected to the admonishments of the opposition that would come from formally being within government. It's clever, but how good is it for the smooth operation of government?

It is increasingly evident that the real power within Podemos in the Balearics is Laura Camargo, the parliamentary spokesperson. This was suspected to be so before Alberto Jarabo was selected as leader and now it is being confirmed. Recently, Camargo spoke of the tension within government. Creative tension. It was a good thing.

This reminded me of a situation years ago as a senior manager. One of the company's owners and so a board member was the principal brains of an organisation littered with academic eggheads. He once spoke in glowing terms of the value of creative tension, something that he and the board were engineering, to which I suggested that there was plenty of tension and not enough creativity. It was a company with a highly political culture, and within this culture if there was no one to manage or moderate the process of this creative tension, which there wasn't, then the consequences would be as they proved to be. Fierce arguments conducted within an ill-defined framework that left some highly disaffected.

One of the many buzzwords surrounding government at present is consensus. Read more or less any report and you will find reference to it. Consensus, though, requires some compromise. It isn't achieved by the confrontational nature of creative tension, unless there is someone to moderate the process. And there isn't.

Mariano Rajoy has referred to Podemos as an experiment. He was right but not in the way that he meant. Podemos are a concept which renders a definition of them in terms of a conventional political party largely meaningless. They are an abstraction chiselled principally from the walls of academia, a world in which argument is everything. Hence, creative tension is deemed a good thing, even if it fails to achieve the desired consensus.

Attractive though Podemos are as an alternative to largely discredited political parties, the confrontational style may lose them more friends than it gains. A company's struggles with creative tension are shielded from the public. A government's is not. They were right to challenge the appointments of Juli Fuster and Pau Thomàs and to support the Partido Popular in the charges of PSOE nepotism, and they will have gained admirers for having done so, but what further confrontations will there be? And might the viewing public begin to take a negative view of constant arguments between those who are supposedly meant to be partners?

It is most unlikely that either Fuster or Thomàs will be removed from their respective posts as director-general of the regional health service and as advisor to the employment ministry. The defeat of the government, by which one means PSOE and Més, was an embarrassment, but the result of the vote will not, one would think, claim Fuster and Thomàs. But it was more than just an embarrassment, as it revealed the divisions brought about by the Podemos desire for creative tension. PSOE have taken a hit and so have Més. A year ago I was suggesting that Més, because of experienced campaigners such as Biel Barceló and Fina Santiago, might play the moderating role, but though Barceló has said that Fuster's appointment could be viewed as being somewhat questionable, he and Més have stayed loyal to the pact with PSOE. They are as much in Podemos's firing-line as PSOE.

But how can there be a government in which issue is taken over almost everything? Consensus cannot be attained under such circumstances, and the stridency of Laura Camargo is such that she has in effect thrown down the gauntlet to Armengol to break the far from solid foundations of the pact. Then what?

The New Age Has Been Delayed

So, as I was saying before I was chopped off in The Week That Was column on Sunday, all manner of nepotistic doubts have been raised about Thomases (and others) associated with PSOE. Firstly, there was Jordan Thomas. He was the 20-year-old social media guru saviour of the drug-inclined youth of the Balearics, appointed by the wife of the head of the IB-Salut health service, she being the health minister, and he - the husband - having stood on behalf of PSOE for Santanyi town hall election along with the boy Jordan. Having now resigned, there is a different Thomas on the scene, one Pau Thomas, the son of PSOE's parliamentary vice-president, Vicenç Thomas. Pau has got himself an advisory gig in the ministry of employment, at which PSOE's Iago Negueruela is the minister.

Vicenç, as he well knows, once tweeted an unfavourable tweet referring to the appointment of the girlfriend of the Partido Popular's Carlos Delgado, who was then the tourism minister, as an advisor to the tourism ministry. Carlos appeared totally unmoved by suggestions that there was something a touch iffy about signing on the live-in at a salary of some 46 grand (a similar amount to that which the boy Jordan will no longer be getting). Think what you like about former president Bauzá, but he pretty much stuck to his ethical code guns: hints of iffiness and the root cause of it required being shown the door. Which is what Carlos had to do, if only from the door of the tourism ministry.

We were supposedly going to be enjoying a new era of politics in which there would be no sleaze, no favouritism and lots of transparency. Bauzá, the way things have been going, was rather better at all this than the new-age fellow travellers of the trinity that comprises the Armengol regime. 

Biel Barceló, the vice-president but not a member of Armengol's PSOE, has admitted that there have been some "errors" with appointments of advisors and senior officials, and he specifically referred to the husband affair at IB-Salut. He had thought the appointment slightly odd. Seemingly, according to Biel, it wasn't the missus who got Juli Fuster the job at the health service, but Armengol. As has been said consistently, Fuster is eminently qualified for the post, but this matters less than perception. She must surely have known that the Fuster fuss would kick off. In which case, if she was intent on him becoming the health service's director, then it might have been wise to have appointed someone else as health minister: Vicenç Thomas, for example, who, in addition to being a qualified doctor, was health minister from 2007 to 2011. But then, as we now know, Vicenç has his own slight embarrassment.

Apart from allegations of nepotism and favouritism, why are all the various officials and advisors needed? In the case of Fuster, it's clear. The health service does need someone to run it, and there are various other organisations which likewise require head honchos. For the most part, however, the appointments are political: new government, new directors. There are exceptions to the rule, Pedro Homar at the Palma 365 Foundation is one, but it is understandable that there should be this turnover. New government means new and different policies and those who are sympathetic to them.

But what about all the advisors? What actually do they do? Patricia Gómez, the health minister, had to explain why the unqualified Jordan Thomas was given the post he has now resigned from. The fact that he knows how social media work was a pretty lame justification. At least we were privy though to what his post entailed, which is more than can be said for the advisors knocking around at the Council of Mallorca, an institution bedevilled in the past by all sorts of insinuation but which, under the new president, Miquel Ensenyat, appeared destined to become a beacon of transparency. So what's gone wrong?

Manel Carmona, the leader of the Esquerra Unida (United Left), has had a right old go at the 26 advisors taken on by political parties at the Council, seven of them by Podemos, a party which had previously made a virtue of highlighting advisory excess. Carmona might be accused of sour grapes, given that he, through the tie-up with Guanyem, was squeezed to such an extent by Podemos and the rest of the left that he ended up with nothing after the elections, but he surely has a point when he says that nothing is known about the qualifications or roles of these advisors. Ensenyat needs to address the issue urgently, while Podemos, which has been vociferously sounding off about other appointments and demanding its say in them, might well take a look at itself. This is meant to be a new political age. Or has this already been forgotten?

Family Relations Are Good For Your Health

Well, it was hardly unexpected. For new members of the regional government, there was the potential pitfall facing the health minister, Patricia Gómez. And blow me, she has tripped up in precisely the fashion that had been suggested. It is, therefore, wholly to have been expected that the Partido Popular - minus a leader but being represented in parliament by the presentable Marga Prohens - should shout nepotistic foul. When you, as newly made health minister, go and appoint your husband as director-general of the IB-Salut health service, then you should anticipate that some flak might come your way. The surprising thing is that there isn't more of it.

Juli, otherwise known as Julio, Fuster is Mr. Gómez. He had been in the running for the health minister's job, but the missus got it instead: it would have been less likely that she, had Juli secured the ministerial post, would have got the IB-Salut post. Marga has described the appointment as "unacceptable", "neither transparent nor good government" and "an insult to the intelligence". She might also have added that it looks like a bit of a carve-up.

President Armengol insists that there are now two people who are "professionally magnificent and exceptional" in terms of their CVs in situ at health. Patricia, meanwhile, does not consider there to be any conflict in the appointment when the "director-general has a brilliant professional career" which rises above his personal background.

I'm not for one moment doubting that either of them is anything other than professionally magnificent and exceptional, but no conflict? Come on, of course there is. Marga's accusation of lack of transparency might be said to not hold much water when Fuster's name is there for all to see on the government's website, but the allusion she makes to transparency is perfectly understandable. What were the criteria for the appointment and who else had been in the running? Anyone?

But even assuming that Fuster matched the criteria perfectly (which I'm sure he does) and was a superior candidate to others, Marga's transparency charge cuts deep into what we believed we would now be getting from governments. Open ones, free of suspicions; transparent ones with no hints of anything conducted behind closed doors. Transparency is code for being against corruption, of which there is absolutely no suggestion in this instance, and I'm most definitely not saying there is, but in the murkiness of all that brought Podemos (and now others) to the conclusion that the time was right for a "new politics", there often lay allegations of nepotism, of favouritism, of "amiguismo": more than just allegations; they were fact.

It was nepotism and cronyism that went a good way to bringing Spain to its knees. This was because of the appointments to boards of banks - mainly smallish, local savings banks - of those with no banking experience and seemingly no ability to ensure good governance or to not succumb to the occasional temptation.

There is no reason, let me stress again, for believing that the appointment has been made for anything other than perfectly sound professional reasons, but the merits of Fuster are not, in the current climate, what matter above all else. What does matter is perception. If the public (and opposition) perceive negativity because of a suspicion of nepotism, then I'm terribly sorry, Patricia, but there is conflict.

When, during the lifetime of the previous administration, the tourism minister Carlos Delgado appointed his girlfriend (later his wife) to a post as adviser to the ministry (on a salary of some 50,000 euros), PSOE and Més demanded that he resign. Carlos defended the appointment, saying that Lourdes, the girlfriend, was highly qualified for the role (something to do with communication at the ministry) as she was a journalist and spoke five languages. No doubt she was perfectly qualified, and the PP leadership at the time didn't, despite Bauzá's mission to preside over a government minus any hints of sleaze, see anything amiss, until the story blew up in the leadership's and Delgado's faces: he was forced to withdraw the appointment.

The circumstances may be different, but is the principle not the same? And where, one has to ask, are Podemos in all this? As they seem to have poked their noses into mostly all parts of the new government's organisation, does Fuster's appointment not strike them as being maybe contradictory to what they avow?

Fuster is eminently suited to the post. He was previously the IB-Salut director during the first PSOE-led government from 1999. So yes, he's surely the right man and, yes, the health service will be in good hands. But. The new politics. What's changed? Ada Colau in Barcelona has appointed her husband to her team. The co-ordinator at the Madrid mayor's office is the husband of the niece of Manuela Carmena (the new mayor). Podemos types both.

Dealing In The Cosmetic: Party finances

The Tribunal de Cuentas is the Spanish equivalent of the UK's Audit Commission, meaning that it vets government and public sector accounts. Its members are voted on to the tribunal by Congress and by the Senate. Their appointments are, therefore, not totally independent of political power, but once appointed they are meant to be independent.

Earlier this month the tribunal released a report which was so damning that it should have caused a massive outcry. Somehow, it didn't. This report detailed cases of tax fraud and financing irregularities committed by mostly all of Spain's leading political parties, which therefore included both the Partido Popular and PSOE. These irregularities amounted to offences in respect of false accounting (not showing real income and expenses), unlawful debt cancellation and donations received and loans to other organisations. They related to the financial year 2012. Accounts for 2013 and 2014 are to also be placed under scrutiny, though when reports might be issued isn't known.

The tribunal's findings support much of what is said about the lack of transparency of party funding and about what has been styled as the corrupt nature of the political system and of the leading parties in particular. That the report didn't cause the massive outcry which might have been expected could be put down to the fact that no one was in the least bit surprised. It might also be attributable to the difficulties which any of the parties would have faced in being critical. As they are more or less all fingered, it is impossible to seek political advantage by accusing rivals of allegedly corrupt activity.

As damning as the report is, why has the tribunal not taken action before against political parties? The constant claims of irregularities in their financing would surely have required that it should have. One reason may have something to do with the nature of the make-up of the tribunal's board and of appointments at the tribunal. Among the directors is the brother of the former Partido Popular prime minister, José María Aznar. There is also Javier Medina, the president of the audit section, who has been associated with the tribunal since the late 1970s and is linked to the PP. His wife, brother and sister all work at the tribunal. In addition to these individuals, there was - as an El País blog reported last February - the wife of the Spanish Ambassador to the UK, while a PSOE appointee at the tribunal had his sister-in-law working there.

Spanish media have been clear in pointing out the nepotism as well as implying that the tribunal's independence has not been as it should. Getting to grips with political party financing, therefore, was potentially only ever going to be a sham or cosmetic exercise, as one report styled it. However, it could well be that the charges of nepotism shook the tribunal into action and perhaps they shook the political parties up as well. Would the parties have known what the tribunal was going to report? They may well have done. Just before Christmas, and so a couple of weeks before the report came out, a third meeting of parliamentary representatives of various parties agreed several measures to be placed in front of Congress for approval. These included banning corporate donations altogether and putting an end to the practice whereby banks would write off debts held by political parties, a practice which has been common for years. They also agreed that illegal party financing would be included as a crime in the penal code. Why hadn't it been before? A very good question.

So, the agreement was made and then the report appeared, echoing much of what had been agreed. The tribunal's report was damning and also unique in issuing such a "reprimand". A reprimand!? Is that all?

The timing of the parliamentary agreement and of the report have to be questioned for more than just the short period between them. There was surely another dynamic compelling some rapid response. In one word ... Podemos. The main political parties, and to the PP and PSOE have to be added the likes of the Basque National Party and the two parties in Catalonia which form Artur Mas's CiU, are running scared. Podemos's assault on corruption, which includes the corrupt nature of the political system and apparatus, has made them act in the hope that they can staunch the flow of support towards Podemos.

It's all a bit too late though and has the feeling of attempts to save skins, those of the main parties and of the tribunal. There wasn't a massive outcry over the report because it simply confirmed what everyone knew or suspected, while, unless it is reformed, the tribunal's credibility is too enfeebled for there to be more than a suspicion of a belated cosmetic exercise by a body controlled by the very forces it is supposed to control. 

Altered Minds: Innovation in Mallorca

It was informative to hear an interview for the BBC with Brent Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube. His business was a product of California's Silicon Valley, where he still believes, despite the emergence of serious technology leaders such as YouTube, that young entrepreneurs can make it if they have the right products and are able to draw on the right talent pool. Hurley described Silicon Valley as a "state of mind", one which allows new businesses, even when confronted with what might seem obstructive taxation (as there is in California), to breakthrough. It is all a question of mentality, and this mentality can permit similar technology-based clusters to rise up elsewhere.

Hurley's views are, however, ones predicated on a particular culture. The American business culture has long hailed the risk-taker and the entrepreneur, it has long been aided by risk capital, it has long been one of the "can-do" rather than the cannot. The American business culture also underwent a seismic shift in its attitudes when the realisation was made as to the competitive nature of Japanese corporations. From the late 1970s onwards, this culture was transformed within organisations. Hierarchies became less the order of the day. Participation, empowerment, flat structures all found their way into the management and organisational lexicon.

In Mallorca, ambitions are harboured for something along the lines of Silicon Valley. It would be more of a Silicon Hollow, one fancies, but there are certain factors which could allow such ambitions to be realised. Well, one in particular; the climate. Mallorca's a nice place to live and work, it has a nice lifestyle, it has a Mediterranean climate (obviously), one similar to Californa's. This climate-lifestyle axis has brought interest in terms of business location from overseas, while the technological infrastructure, notably Palma's ParcBit, does offer some grounds for being optimistic that a technological new age dawns in Mallorca and helps to move the island's economy away from its dangerous and lop-sided dependence upon tourism.

But initiatives such as ParcBit can only go so far. The vision, albeit an unclear one, for a more technological future is obscured by the existence of elements that California does not suffer from. There is, for example, a very different business culture, both generally and within organisations, one that is partially a reflection of what remains a societal culture: one of the hierarchy.

This hierarchy can often come in the form of a patriarchy or matriarchy. Families have a tendency to dominate the business culture and so the culture mirrors the deference shown within the family structure. It might be a culture which is healthy for continuity but it is rarely a culture which fosters free thinking, challenges to decisions, innovation. It is also a culture which can breed one of the most pernicious elements of the family organisation, that of nepotism, and this nepotism is something else which manifests itself in wider business and governmental society. Friendships, family ties, networks, who-you-know count for more than merit, talent and what you know. Nepotism and "amiguismo" are regularly cited by younger Spaniards as being reasons why they all but give up on finding decent employment and so help to fuel the brain drain heading abroad.

The hierarchy is everywhere. It exists in different types of business - from multinationals to the small business - in government "companies" (albeit the number of these are being reduced) and in political parties. Along with the omnipresence of the hierarchy comes the nepotism and the power of the network, and there is an example of just this which has seemingly been at work in Mallorca, an example right at the heart of business innovation.

The IDI is a Balearic Government "company". The acronym stands for Institute of Business Innovation. It should, therefore, be an agency for good in pursuit of a goal of greater economic diversification. But the IDI has been savaged by cutbacks under the current government. Jobs have gone, but there are also accusations flying as to the basis upon which job elimination has been made. They centre on political bias, i.e. employees with sympathies for parties (most obviously PSOE) were let go in favour of those who are supporters of the Partido Popular.

There may well of course be very valid reasons unassociated with political affiliation for employment decisions having been made, but if affiliation was a real factor then it confirms the power of the network being commanded by the hierarchy, in this instance one political party and that party's leadership.  

Mallorca has a disadvantage in the technological stakes which comes from its less than satisfactory educational system, but this cannot be wholly blamed for a lack of innovation. After all, for any group of underachievers there will always be one overachiever and potential business genius. Mallorca also has a history of entrepreneurialism. It is not as if, therefore, there aren't elements in Mallorca which could make a success of a new technological age. But paramount to this success is the need for a change in culture at governmental and corporate levels. The eradication of hierarchies and the doffing of the cap are as necessary as the elimination of the network and the nepotism.

Brent Hurley believes that Silicon Valleys can be replicated anywhere. If the talent exists, then maybe so. But they won't be if the culture doesn't allow them to flourish. The state of mind that needs to alter is that of the keepers of the hierarchies - the political parties and the corporations. Alter minds, and the entrepreneurial spirit in Mallorca might just fly.

Keeping It In The Family

Have you ever been having a chat with a Mallorcan business owner and someone wanders past and causes your chat to be put on hold while the business owner and passer-by engage in embraces and friendly conversation? I have. Several times. And more often than not, the passer-by, when introduced, turns out to be if not a brother, then a cousin, an uncle, a second cousin ... a member of the family, even a fairly remote one.

The family is considered a strength in local society. Its strength, though, is also its weakness. The family breeds its own tyranny, and it is a tyranny that is a Mallorcan and Spanish weakness.

Political and corporate favouritism in Spain is endemic, and this favouritism, be it in the form of employment, contracts or "smoothing" arrangements, owes much to family ties. Everyone knows this to be so and everyone, therefore, indulges in the practice. Even those who complain about it. Yet it is a harmful, destructive practice that causes a reduction in incentive, an inhibition of the talent pool, an absence of meritocracy, an abuse of position, a lack of questioning, scrutiny or correct governance and a fertile source of potential and actual corruption. It also causes there to be what exists, a division within society that is predicated on the knowledge that this society revolves around nepotism, a division which acknowledges what "they" are up to, be they politicians or businesspeople. It can be accepted with the resigned shrug and smile and the expression that "well, this is Spain" but, because of its endemic nature, it isn't resisted but aped, and so a vicious circle of favouritism constantly revolves, no one being capable of breaking the circle. 

The UPyD party, a relative newcomer to the political scene, is attempting to do so. It wants a new type of politics, a new culture within society too, one that is stripped of "amiguismo", favouritism and nepotism. But just look at what it is up against. At the very highest levels of national government family members have senior posts at the ministries of agriculture, food and environment and of industry, energy and tourism; at the Spanish Embassy in Washington; and within the team of the Secretary of State for Commerce. When the party asks for an explanation, what response does it get? These people all have the necessary skills for the jobs and to not employ them because they happen to be related to ministerial or other senior Partido Popular politicians would be discrimination. Orwell would marvel at such doublethink.

Favouritism is ingrained into the local culture. It is an historical phenomenon, one institutionalised by King Philip III. At the time that he did so, at the turn of the seventeenth century, Spain was in decline, and by disregarding the wider interests of Spain and placing his own interests above them, Philip legitimised favouritism and helped to contribute to further decline.

Come nearer to the present day, and favouritism was the basis of the system of the cacique in the late nineteenth century. The cacique political bosses rewarded favourites in what was a total sham of democracy. It is a system that has never truly gone away. Hence why, in 1996, the author Howard Wiarda concluded that Spain had moved only partly to democracy, as this new "democracy" was "still shot through with family favouritism and nepotism" and as practices in both public and private sectors often fell short of being democratic. Hence also the revelation that local banks, at the centre of Spain's economic collapse, were populated at board level by political favourites, family members and cronies.

Families can be problematic for business. Think of two non-Spanish examples: Maxwell and Murdoch. Think of just one Spanish example, one that is quite close to home in some respects to Mallorca: Nueva Rumasa and the offspring of Ruiz-Mateos who are now trying to drop each other in it as they seek to save their respective necks.

The trouble is that families can't be avoided. Idealistic localism in Spanish politics was designed to combat the centralist monster of corruption under Franco, but it has unleashed its own monster. Shove responsibilities so far down the food chain to small communities which are populated by relatives, including remote ones, and what do you get?

Not all families can be tarred with the same brush, of course they can't, but at political level in particular, perceptions are as important as realities. It is no use claiming that family members are up to the task when everyone assumes they have been given the tasks because of who they are. It has got to stop but it is very doubtful that it ever will.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.