A few days ago, we were reminded of what has been our daily bread since the end of the economic crisis was declared: that only a few can call it a recovery.
This time we were told that almost 9 out of 10 new contracts signed in Lanzarote in January were temporary contracts. Or, in other words, there are hardly any permanent contracts in newly created jobs.
This information, which does not even reach the category of news due to the lack of surprise of the fact, is framed within the supposed economic recovery of the tourism sector that Coalición Canaria has been selling for a couple of years now. A phantom recovery whose flag they are waving now more than ever, on the eve of municipal and regional elections that already smell of change.
These data, which constitute a true social catastrophe, coexist magically with the best numbers remembered in the tourism sector after 3 consecutive years of around 3 million visitors.
We could make the easy reading of blaming our problems on the fact that the people who visit us come with less money in their pockets and that the increase in tourists does not imply a proportional increase in the sector's income, but it turns out that this is incorrect.
According to the Cabildo Data Center, the average expenditure per tourist per day has already exceeded 137 euros after an unstoppable climb since 2010.
We face a huge question. If more and more tourists come and spend more money, why don't we live better and better? Why don't we have better and better jobs? Why do we have the worst public services in the state? Where are the benefits?
These questions, which are only answered in the offices of some big businessmen, are especially painful for a generation like mine, which was caught studying or taking its first steps in the labor market at the worst of the crisis.
A generation that had to establish itself as 'the most read' as the only way to survive. It hurts us a lot that, after suffering the fierce youth unemployment and seeing our parents juggle to make ends meet, they snatch away our illusion of living with dignity, seeing how our small piece of reality becomes a theme park packed with cheerful and rosy tourists who, we were told, would end our thirst.
The equation posed on the income of the tourism sector is nothing extraordinary.
It is no longer surprising that a party that has been governing our homeland since 1993 and that has not been able to resolve a single social issue, that has signed the biggest environmental disasters and that has starred in not a few cases of corruption; is totally indifferent to the precariousness to which this economic system centered on enriching a handful of powerful people condemns us. Their priority is another and, as they say out there, they are not going to change after they are old.
Although out of sensitivity, the quality of life of my people is what hurts me the most, we cannot ignore that this unfair distribution of wealth affects us at many levels.
The lack of infrastructure, for example, which turns us into a third division island and reminds us once again (it is the most recurrent theme in the pre-election periods) that we are forced to call a dilapidated and dirty tent a 'fairground'.
Or the collapse of the José Molina Orosa Hospital in each flu season. Or the more than deficient public transport service. Or the evident lack of investment in island socio-health care policies. And it is that with Coalición Canaria and the businessmen it shelters, there is only money for self-promotion and speculation.
If you have reached this point of this reflection as obvious as intentionally silenced, you will better understand why the Government of Fernando Clavijo has been preventing the debate on the so-called 'ecotax' or Sustainable Tourism Tax throughout the legislature.
Coalición Canaria knows very well that, if the long romance it maintains with the business class at the expense of the well-being of the people who sustain the system based on early mornings and miserable wages ends, it would mean the end of its institutional hegemony.
Fortunately, May is just around the corner and we have another opportunity to bet on projects that put above all those who get up early, those who leave their backs making beds, those who fall from the scaffolding and, in short, all the working people of this blessed island.
Yurena Corujo
Candidate of Podemos Canarias to the Cabildo of Lanzarote