Lanzarote gave a lesson last Sunday of what it wants but, above all, what it doesn't want. Despite the low participation and the high number of blank and null votes, all the people called to the polls in Lanzarote, ...
Lanzarote gave a lesson last Sunday of what it wants but, above all, what it doesn't want. Despite the low participation and the high number of blank and null votes, all the people called to the polls in Lanzarote, both those who have abstained and those who in one way or another have cast their vote, have left a very clear message this time. A message from a society that has evolved, and that no longer lets itself be convinced with chickpeas, stuffed bunnies or tuned cars.
Lanzarote may have also voted with its heart, as the PIL intended, but above all it did so with its head, and gave a monumental punishment to the parties that have been involved in corruption scandals. And it is that one thing is that any formation may have "black sheep" in its ranks, and another very different thing is that an entire party insists on justifying the crime.
The island has made it clear that it is no longer convinced by victimizing messages. Neither those coined by Dimas Martín, and now continue to be exploited by his heirs, nor those that the PNL has also used for years, to justify the unjustifiable in the municipality of Yaiza.
In the south, the priority of voters seems to have been to give a vote of punishment to the legacy of José Francisco Reyes. To a former mayor who, although he later retracted, confessed in court that he took bribes for granting illegal licenses to hotels in Playa Blanca.
His then Councilor for Urban Planning, José Antonio Rodríguez, headed the PNL list in the municipality this time. And the party, far from distancing itself from what happened, has tried to continue splashing around in "paper theories", with its main leaders at the head. And the citizens have not gone there.
To the debacle in Yaiza, where the PNL has gone from first to third force, being left with only 2 councilors out of 17, is added the harsh punishment that the party has received in Arrecife, where Pedro de Armas has lost one of the two councilors he had, and especially in the Cabildo of Lanzarote. And it is that in the Island Corporation, the PNL has disappeared, losing its two councilors and leaving the president of the party, Juan Carlos Becerra, out of the institutions.
As the PIL requested, in its already traditional and worrying lack of respect for the courts of Justice, the citizens have passed sentence, and they have done so against these two forces. And in the case of the PIL, they have condemned it to the opposition and almost to the disappearance. From the overwhelming victories of other times, it has gone on to be an almost residual or non-existent party in almost the entire island, with the exception of the municipality of Yaiza.
The PIL said actively and passively that it was not going to renounce the legacy of Dimas Martín, but society has shown its clear renunciation of that way of doing politics and the figure of a repeat offender. The greatest punishment has come in its fiefdom, Teguise, where the results have bordered on humiliation, with the overwhelming victory of the CC candidate, Oswaldo Betancort, and where they have even been overtaken by other forces, such as the Popular Party.
And of course, monumental has also been the punishment in Arrecife, where four of the seven councilors that the PIL had in this legislature were arrested, and some even confessed that the taking of bribes in the party was "a custom". And that without forgetting the scandal of the "Solidarity Kilo", uncovered at the time by La Voz de Lanzarote, which raised blisters in society, when seeing how a ton of food that had been collected with the good faith of the neighbors, vanished without a trace.
Faced with this situation, the people who did go to the polls have opted for a change, turning the Canarian Coalition and the PP into the first and second force on the island, both registering a spectacular rise compared to past elections. And all this, also hand in hand with the defeat of the Socialist Party, which has undoubtedly been dragged down by the monumental punishment of the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero throughout Spain.
In any case, the party will also have to read the results on the island. And it is that new bets of the PSOE, such as the head of the list of Arrecife, José Montelongo, have managed to "save the furniture" within the defeat, and surpass in votes other candidates who aspired to repeat in the position.
Of that, all parties should also take good note, because the message that the polls have left is that of a very conscious vote, in which many citizens have supported a party, for example, to the town hall, and a different one to the Cabildo or the Parliament. And above all, they will all have to be clear that it will not be enough for them to approach the citizens in four years, when there are elections again. The elections have shown that votes do not have eternal owners, and that there can be turnarounds as spectacular as those that have occurred in these elections.
Society is going to be vigilant, and has learned from the experience and mistakes of the past. Enough to banish those who have underestimated their intelligence, making fun of Justice, and who have suffered the greatest punishments. Fortunately, despite the message that some have tried to convey, citizens are clear that the bad guys are not the judges, or the prosecutors, or the special units of the Civil Guard and the National Police who have investigated and uncovered authentic scandals on the island. Nor of course the few media that have maintained a firm and determined line against corruption in Lanzarote.
Despite the high abstention, or precisely because of it, the island has made it clear that it wants a new direction, and in the hands of the most voted forces is now to listen to that message.
