I think I had been repeating the same thing for more than a decade. It's not even good for sleeping well, I swear. Coalition had absorbed Canarian nationalism and nearby Canarianism to form a little monster that seemed to have solidified. All this to fulfill the interests of a few, maintaining a patronage network that was increasingly incomprehensible to sustain.
What few of us could imagine is that to end the monster, you just had to leave it alone. Its leaders would take care of it.
"With Ana Oramas at the helm, with Ricardo Melchior and Clavijo, Coalition's days are numbered" was heard on the eve of the municipal elections and it's going to be true. Oramas fatally indebted the La Laguna city council and Clavijo covered up the disaster. Melchior did the same with the Cabildo of Tenerife, contracting the largest island debt in the Archipelago. It's no use that everything is coming to light now.
During the last four years, Oramas has Spanishized the discourse of Coalition, moving away from the Canarian folklore of the beginnings and from any issue that could be called Canarian nationalism. The damage is done. The damage to all Canarian nationalism, which is going through its worst moment in the face of the rise of Spanish nationalism (whether left or right).
She is satisfied. She has renewed for four years in which she will once again accept that they put an erroneous h on her last name, to feel like "a seagull in Madrid" or that Canarian woman who pronounces godo when she feels like it and lives with Spanish time. Four more years of Oramas in Madrid.
In her crude analysis, she does not talk about the shift to the right of Coalition or the abandonment of the nationalist field, in which they were never properly; but that kept so many people deceived.
The blame lies with the "cha cha cha" says Ana. Not the internal management. Nothing to do with Clavijo, Melchior and herself. The blame lies with other Canarian parties, with the Spanish quartet that will negotiate pacts to perpetuate a multicolored bipartisanship (with luck they will enter into one, it doesn't matter which... they are Coalition). From within that party, no one is heard raising their voice to reproach something, to ask them to step aside and not spoil it anymore.
What I fear is that they will continue to disappoint those who dream of a serious, coherent, firm and proper Canarian nationalism. That they continue to deceive them and more people fall into the well of disillusionment or end up supporting Spanish political parties, for fear of repeating the same mistake they made with Coalition. It is not for Coalition that I fear. No. On the contrary, I hope that inside they continue to replicate "the fault is of the cha cha cha; the fault is of the cha cha cha..."
By Pedro M. González Cánovas (ANC member)
