Just when the Canary Islands most need the help of the State and when they most require autonomous and island governments that are capable of demanding it, the submission of the "Pact of Flowers" to Sánchez, and of the PSOE-PP alliances in many of the island governments - with no other project for the Canary Islands and each of its islands than to corner the Canarian Coalition and its respective leaderships - it turns out that the three administrations have led us to levels of disregard and contempt for the Canary Islands and Lanzarote only comparable to that dispensed centuries ago by the metropolis to its colonies.
If the response of President Ángel Víctor Torres to the outrage of the draft State Budget Law has been timid, what can be said of the Minister of Finance of the Canary Islands, Román Rodríguez, when he states in Parliament that "there is no statutory precept to be fulfilled in the State Budget Law". Coalición Canaria led a long and hard battle to anchor our REF in the Statute and that therefore it was recognized as a constitutional right that the Canary Islands had an investment per inhabitant no less than the national average, but it has happened again: 168 compared to 258, 35% less. If our president does not defend the archipelago so as not to bother Sánchez; if even Nueva Canarias leaves us more sold than the old Canary Islands, the colonial one; if Loly Corujo is only there to use Covid as a pretext for everything and if Ástrid Pérez does no more than keep her seat, this time the threat of a real state problem is real when hunger and misery plague the Canary Islands, suffocated by the ERTEs converted into EREs and, finally, into a galloping unemployment that will reach 50% in the Canary Islands and I don't even want to think how much in Lanzarote.
While here Loly Corujo and Astrid Pérez, the highest island officials of the PSOE-PP, govern the island and its capital from their personal political interests to the beat of pure propaganda about their magnificent health management, without any competence in Health, and a permanent bombardment of empty press releases that do not articulate a single exceptional aid to any sector as their counterparts do in other islands, capitals, even municipalities, as if the seriousness of the situation was not with them.
These state budgets place the Canary Islands at the bottom of the country in average investment per inhabitant, failing to comply as always with the REF and now also with our Statute of Autonomy. The treatment is even worse than that dispensed before the pandemic, despite the fact that the Canary Islands is one of the most affected territories of the State, and if no one remedies it, it will have devastating and dramatic consequences for our economy and for thousands of Canarians who will be forced into unemployment and extreme poverty.
Budgets that do not respect the Canarian jurisdiction, and that despite incorporating the first annuity of the European Reconstruction Plan, this practically does not reach the Canary Islands and even less to Lanzarote, because the trains perhaps in the capital islands give work, but eating is not eaten, neither here nor there. Budgets in which, instead of supplementing the pre-existing poverty plans to the pandemic, it eliminates precisely now the one that already existed without it and had been extended since 2018. A budget in which the plans for tourist and hydraulic infrastructures disappear, the PIEC linked to educational infrastructures and in which, except in the ports and airports where the State takes economic benefit, in reality it is the Canary Islands that disappears from the political agenda of the central executive, more concerned with pleasing the parties that keep Sánchez at the head of the Government of the State that they want to break, than with being up to the enormous responsibility that it should have with all the territories that make it up.
To all this are added humiliating examples of the neocolonial treatment to which I refer, such as the disastrous management of the serious immigration crisis, in which I will not go into detail because rivers of ink accredit the contempt of the minister of the branch, without Torres, Corujo, or Pérez, demanding the immediate responses that are the responsibility of the State, or the opportunity already lost to have configured ourselves as the best European refuge for safe tourism, when we had such a favorable health scenario and we could have controlled a situation in which logic and common sense indicate that it had to be done in the ports and airports as they are islands; as the governments of Portugal and Italy have authorized and done in Madeira, Azores, Sardinia or Sicily, without the need for any European authorization, which is Sánchez's pretext for not executing the measure, again with the complicit silence of Loly Corujo and Ástrid Pérez in Lanzarote, and a patch designed by the Government of the Canary Islands. All for not offending other communities, as if Spain had other archipelagos than the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands, that is, coffee for everyone when it comes to Covid, but when it comes to budgets, cappuccino for some and coffee grounds for others.
María Dolores Corujo and Ástrid Pérez, architects of the island and capital pact, get to work once and for all! for the inhabitants of Lanzarote and its decrepit capital that are going to waste and heading for an unemployment rate of over 50%, one for not bothering Sánchez and the other for not risking her seat.
Of course, lamenting does not solve anything, nor do we in Coalición Canaria have magical solutions, but these will not come if we continue with our arms crossed looking the other way. Some involve demanding that the State assume its responsibility for immigration once and for all, others protecting the Canary Islands from the pandemic where they have to do it, which is at the entrances to our territory. As for the plans for the reconstruction of the Canary Islands that will not arrive with this state budget, asking the Canarian deputies of all political forces to demand with the forcefulness that the seriousness of the situation requires, respect for our legally recognized rights in our REF and our Statute of Autonomy, as Coalición Canaria will do by presenting an amendment to the entirety.
Unfortunately, after only one year of the "Pact of Flowers" and the antagonistic PSOE-PP islanders, it has been demonstrated how vital it continues to be for the Canary Islands and the islands the presence in their governments of a force of purely Canarian obedience, because the result has been that of a colony submerged and subjected, some for being of the same political color as the president of the nation (PSOE), and others for keeping the position (NC and PP islanders).
As a last note, to the socialist senator for Lanzarote, Manuel Fajardo Palarea, who recently titled an article as "Canarian Responsibility", simply tell him that it would have been better "Responsibility with the Canary Islands".
Pedro M. San Ginés Gutiérrez is spokesman for Coalición Canaria-PNC in the Cabildo de Lanzarote
