False promises

June 10 2016 (16:35 WEST)

For some parties and candidates, nothing seems to have changed from four months ago to today, on the eve of new General Elections. Impossible promises, subterfuges, if not the most blatant lies, are once again filling communiqués and public statements.

The high rates of abstention, which have affected the electoral support of all political forces - including the one I represent, the Socialist Party - send us a clear message: citizens are tired of the beautiful words in the campaign, which reveal their inconsistency the day after the elections.

It happens especially in the General Elections, when the candidates make real rhetorical and discursive pirouettes to try to bring closeness to a central Administration that is far away.

But understand me, I am not talking about geographical distance or alienation from the problems of citizens. I am talking about local politics, about close, small, everyday situations, those that sometimes occupy us more than the big decisions, those that, despite everything, affect us to a much greater extent.

Because an annoying work at the door of the house, a paperwork in the City Council that becomes eternal, deteriorated playgrounds, what we commonly call "the problems of the island", are not solved in Madrid, no matter how much Canarian accent we exhibit.

The public management and the resolution of its conflicts on the island must be demanded from the politicians of the Cabildo and the local management and everything that entails, from the City Councils. And of course, the Employment policies and most of the public works, the infrastructures and endowments, to the Government of the Canary Islands.

What is really decided in these Elections and why are they so important, also for Lanzarote? Because they will decide if the austerity policies that have impoverished the middle classes of the island and the rest of the country continue; because they will decide if a labor reform that keeps four million Spaniards unemployed, also from Lanzarote, remains in force, and offers precarious jobs of very low quality to all Spanish youth, including ours.

Because whoever comes to the Government will maintain or not the pharmaceutical co-payment of the elderly of Lanzarote, the Canary Islands and the rest of the Spanish State and the Educational Law that enshrines the ideologization of educational content and equates religion (Catholic) with mathematics, also in the schools of the island.

These are very serious matters, which directly affect our lives, despite the fact that they are debated and legislated in Madrid, 3000 kilometers from our daily reality.

I am not going to promise to take the daily problems of Lanzarote to Madrid. But you have my commitment that I will fight to equate the population that lives in the Canary Islands with the citizens of the rest of Spain. I am talking about the expenses associated with the education of our children, which make training unfeasible in many cases; of the transport prices between islands that turn a forced trip into a breakdown of the household budget; I am talking about the infrastructures that prevent our shopping basket from having tourist prices.

And of course, I am talking about the unemployment that suffocates us, the cuts that impoverish us, the austerity that forces the closure of small shops and businesses daily, the response to the deficit before Europe at the expense of the quality of life of those who are not to blame. All that is changed in Madrid. I will raise my hand and say yes to change. I promise.

Ariagona González

 

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