The General Budgets of the Canary Islands approved last December 20 thanks to the support of the parliamentary groups that support the Government of the Canary Islands, that is, CC, PP, ASG and AHI, with the invaluable help of the extreme right of Vox, will come into force on January 1, 2024. These budgets, as we have been denouncing from Nueva Canarias-Bloque Canarista (NC-BC), are imprudent, antisocial and fail to comply with territorial balance. Imprudent because they increase 1,111 million euros by rigging the spending rule; antisocial because they cut in such sensitive areas as equality policies, public education and culture; and unbalanced because there is a preferential treatment to the so-called "green islands" (El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma) to the detriment of the "yellow islands" (Fuerteventura and Lanzarote).
It goes without saying that for the people of Lanzarote these accounts are the confirmation of a lie and a return to the mistreatment that the governments presided over by CC had already accustomed us to. The words of the current president of the government, Fernando Clavijo, and the leaders of CC and PP on the island, who day after day criticized the progressive government of the PSOE and NC for an alleged mistreatment of Lanzarote, still resonate, when the truth is that, removing the last two years of 2022 and 2023 where our island was positioned fourth in investment due to the exceptional event of the Tajogaite volcano in La Palma, in 2020 and 2021 we recovered the third position that corresponded to us. But what has happened in the budgets for 2024 is a blatant discrimination never seen before to the third island in population and contribution to the wealth of the Canary Islands, since they have not positioned the fifth behind La Palma and Fuerteventura.
And Lanzarote is the only island that loses territorialized investment. To be understood, territorialized or insularized investments are those that are directed to projects, groups, works, etc., specific to the island regardless of the investments of the Autonomous Community. Well, we lost around 10 million euros, and that the deputies of CC when seeing the grievance of the first draft of the government, and at first justify it, rushed to try to disguise it in the process of amendments. Not even for those they got it.
When verifying that the mistreatment was consummated and the correction is impossible because islands like Fuerteventura or La Palma also saw their investments improved, the deputies and leaders of Lanzarote of CC and PP have taken out of the hat that of "what do we want dogs if they are not executed". That speech hides a half-truth. On the one hand, it is true that the levels of execution of the Island Council of Lanzarote are derisory. Comparatively, it is an inefficient administration with its own competences and drags bureaucratic, political and planning problems. However, it is not the only Cabildo in these circumstances, since all present levels of execution below administrations such as the town halls or the Government of the Canary Islands. If that is a criterion to budget, why do not the other islands lose investment?
On the other hand, renouncing to "paint" items in the budgets is dangerous because you generate a precedent by breaking the territorial balances. Budgets are not only tables of income and expenses, but forecasts, projections and rights. Renouncing to be treated equally is renouncing to the development of Lanzarote, and what is worse, renouncing to politics as an exercise of management and solution of existing problems.
When the president of the Cabildo Oswaldo Betancort justifies himself in the budgetary non-execution of the administration he presides over, what he is doing is hiding his inability to project into the future and manage. In the background, what hides his renunciation to fight for territorialized investments is a null capacity of planning and a resignation to do politics in favor of the mere management of the day to day. Saving the oceanic distance, it is the doctrine of Milei in Argentina, renouncing to the political activity so that it is exclusively the market that regulates the socioeconomic activity. And this is the opposite of what prestigious economists such as Mariana Mazzucato recommend when she talks about the "Entrepreneurial State", that is, the capacity of the public to innovate, plan and incentivize spaces of economic development that generate added value.
Another of the confirmations that these budgets are at the antipodes of the social and public impulse is the great satisfaction that the ultra-right of Vox has shown in the Parliament of the Canary Islands. To give you an idea, the conservative government of the CC and PP has accepted more amendments to the ultra-right of Santiago Abascal and Ortega Smith than to NC-BC, which have only accepted 1 out of 200. The same spokesman of Vox in the Parliament has expressed his satisfaction for the good understanding with CC, and highlighted his close relationship in the City Council of Teguise. A whole declaration of intentions that clarifies, even more if possible, the profile of CC, a party without principles or nationalist values.
Finally, I want to highlight two issues that also highlight the mistreatment of Lanzarote. First, with the discriminatory treatment in the fuel bonus as it will be implemented in the "green islands"; second, with the rejection for Lanzarote to have a medicalized helicopter with permanent base. In these two initiatives both the deputies of CC and those of the PP of Lanzarote have voted against. And it is curious because they are initiatives that defended being in the opposition, such as the fuel; or that joined once started the collection of signatures that I myself made, such as the helicopter.
In short, we finished the year 2023 with CC and PP governing the Canary Islands and Lanzarote in a passive attitude to the problems of the people of Lanzarote, and submissive to what their bosses in Tenerife dictate. In addition, thrown into the hands of Vox without even hiding it. As a councilor of Teguise told me in a television talk show regarding the councilor of Vox, "he has the same ideals that I have".
With everything, from NC-BC we have to organize the progressive resistance to this pact of the Canarian rights that is paving the way to inequality, to the reactionary policies of the extreme right, to neoliberalism and to the rupture of equity between Canarians. As that saying from La Gomera says, "the worse it gets, the better it gets." Happy New Year.
