We have a Canarian Government that we do not deserve, or perhaps we do, because we voted for it. Coalición Canaria came in a not-so-undecorous second place in the last regional elections, only surpassed by the PP. In the Canary Islands, in case anyone doesn't know, ideology is a separate issue, and the parties move in an apparent confrontation of electoral speeches that are locked away in a place far from memory as soon as it's time to sit at the table to divide the cake, giving way to pacts and alliances of, a priori, antagonistic forces, which disguise their common love for the violet color of 500 euro bills with arguments such as it being the best for the stability of the municipality, island council, government... and well, there will be time, at the dawn of new elections, to re-edit our enmity.
This anomaly would be enough for a doctoral thesis, a rather extensive one, but today I want to write about our Canarian Government and its latest actions.
The Canary Islands are in a rather complicated social, political, and economic situation, just like practically the entire planet, some due to the advent of the crisis and others because the crisis never arrived, because it never left; I would almost say that the Canary Islands are in the second group in historical terms; in any case, this abstract concept called crisis has facts, actions, and therefore reactions.
One of the basic pillars that fuel the fire of the crisis in these seven rocks in which we have to live is the Government of Spain. From Madrid, an attitude towards our community is gestated, sometimes directly attacking our wills and other times plunging us into the deepest of oblivions.
Of all of them, we have some flagrant ones such as the violation of our sovereignty in the issue of oil exploration, the disadvantage of the Canarian citizen compared to the rest of the communities in the General State Budgets, the omission of the opinion of the Canarian executive on the privatization of AENA, the non-inclusion of the evident Canarian specificities in the Coasts Law or the reform of the Local Administration, the lack of respect for the residents of Ojos de Garza by AENA, the absence of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and La Palma in the Cádiz-Canary Islands route, and a long and painful etcetera that is sometimes seasoned with snubs from the Minister of Industry to the President of the Canary Islands, explicit insults to the Canarians like the idiot of the deputy Fernández, or that the Minister of Development speaks of a port in the south of Lanzarote referring to Fuerteventura.
Due in part to this not-so-flattering panorama, the results are none other than topping most of the rankings of negative things and closing the one for positive things, whether it's unemployment, poverty, salary/hours worked, or school failure. It is paradoxical that, however, the Canary Islands are one of the destinations, if not the first, for tourists worldwide, breaking records, and that, among other things, we house four airports with rich and succulent benefits of which we see practically nothing.
As soon as we generate skill for analysis, we will realize that something is not working correctly in the Canary Islands and the need for a defense of the failed interests of the Archipelago seems evident; with an autonomous executive of autonomist cut (I refuse to consider that nationalism), it would be expected even to jeopardize the stability of the central Government with countermeasures of frontal rejection to the implementation of its policies and a rethinking of the Canary Islands-State relations. On the contrary, our President of the Government, Paulino Rivero, and his cabinet have displayed a timidity never remembered in moments of such tension as the current ones.
They have focused on the reform of the Economic and Fiscal Regime that has already proven in these years not to be an element of true expansion of the inter-island business fabric, and I refer to the data. Along the way, Rivero has spoken with a small mouth about the co-management of the airports, and has been absent on many other occasions where a public representative of his caliber must demonstrate without palliatives the respect that this neglected people deserves. The manifest inability has prevented him from even reaching the reform of an ankylosed Statute of Autonomy.
The height of servility and lack of vision was the presence of our President of the Government in the act of commemoration of the Spanish Constitution, a celebration attended only by representatives of Autonomous Governments governed by the Popular Party (and not all), showing the rest their rejection of the policy of cuts in rights and freedoms, as well as evidencing the great separation of positions with respect to Madrid and in a veiled way the need to reform a Constitution that seems to be starting to fall short, including for us. However, Rivero presented himself there in a typical picture of Stockholm Syndrome, paying homage to the Magna Carta and Madrid.
Not only did things stay there, but through emails to Mariano Rajoy and the King of Spain, Rivero showed concern that the supposed ideology of his party, nationalism, would grow in the Canary Islands (?). In a total lack of political vision of the matter and at a time when the disaffection of the citizens with respect to the Royal House grew gigantically as a result of corruption and ostentatious expenses, Rivero puts the King in the foreground as if he were a valid interlocutor in a Canary Islands-State relationship that he does not seek to redefine or change, but to strengthen as they are, and that respond to the metaphor of authoritarian father-complexed son.
The recent meetings with Rajoy and Juan Carlos I fall within that same dynamic of begging; and let it be noted that far from being against dialogue, I believe that it should be fostered more, by both parties, what I am really against is that the content of said dialogue is for Rivero to become a pawn in the maintenance of the unity of Spain, and to bring forward a REF, which is not, by far, the main concern of a citizenry orphaned of a firm political body that puts its foot down to the abuse and ostracism in which it is immersed.
Would the reader imagine what the response of other presidents with whom Coalición Canaria intends to compete in the European elections, such as Íñigo Urkullu, would have been if the Basque specificities had been forgotten in the legislative promulgation or their political sovereignty as an autonomous entity had been ignored? It would possibly be very different from the yielding and benevolent policy of our President.
Paulino Rivero also dissolves into the state scene at the moment when it is necessary to position himself, as when the autonomous and local competences seem to falter in the centralizing whirlwind and even the Catalan issue begins to be a reality, which directly or indirectly affects everyone, and which is consecrated with the silence or the intermediate discourse of a President adrift.
I do not know the reasons for this, but I tend to think that they are more the result of the inability or the lack of a defined ideological strategy, than of a set of policies taken conscientiously, since if the latter were real, Mr. Rivero would be portrayed in a very bad place in the photo of the democratic history of our people.
I have always been against the discourse of the professionalization of politics, because it can become a technocratic argument, however in this case I will make an exception, and openly expose the need for the President of the Canary Islands to take a qualitative and quantitative leap in his actions and in all the areas on which it is projected, especially in his relationship with Madrid, and in the formula in which he manages the archipelago reality and the defense of our interests in relation to the policies of the Central Executive.
I believe that we Canarians deserve that the person who represents our designs abandons the secondary and follower role that has relegated a territory like ours to the delicate situation in which we find ourselves.
By Borja Rubio
