La Graciosa and Lanzarote serve as our laboratory to analyze the actions of traditional political parties in the face of new challenges. Apart from verifying the effectiveness of these old recipes, we can also see how newly formed parties like Alternativa Ciudadana, Somos Lanzarote, or Podemos confront today's political challenges.
This new wave of political options, born (or reborn) under the heat of the new social policies that took to the streets this decade, all understand and accept that working together and going hand in hand to the May elections is a duty and a necessary condition for the islands to have a new option for life. Social, territorial, economic, and identity survival that will only be possible with a real change from the left. Nobody said it would be easy. Much to our regret, we know and see that on some occasions, there are and will be specific entanglements that hinder the process but do not make it impossible, that specific entanglements hinder, although do not make impossible, this purpose.
In the democratic framework, for more than three decades, options have been proposed to incorporate citizens into political life and integrate them into decisions that affect the living conditions of the majority. Thus, in the heat of the anti-globalization movement of the second half of the 90s, a broad vindictive deployment develops focused on seeking and deciding citizen participation as a mechanism for managing the public, for treating the common good.
In this context, terms such as "participatory budgets" are born, with which in Porto Alegre (Brazil) for the first time in the world, and later in various institutions of the Spanish State and also in scarce municipalities of the Canary Islands, in a very languid way, small economic items are offered for citizens to decide their destination. And this is a revolution.
I insist on these examples so that the scope of what I have been proposing for some months is understood: Institutions not only have to keep their doors open for citizens to join the management of public life, enumerating their needs, following their development and optimally overseeing their culmination, but administrations have a duty to achieve it.
Hundreds of these experiences developed in many countries support the need to overcome the isolation that we allow local institutions, especially the Cabildo of Lanzarote. We coexist with administrations focused almost exclusively on enogastronomic events, elitist inaugurations watered with wine and cheese, and sports races that are not very respectful of the environment (also watered with wine and cheese), as chocolatadas and cruises were in the past.
Meanwhile, public transport stagnates in precariousness. There is not, for example, an efficient bus service that reaches the hospital without us having to leave home at dawn and return late. Every day more than a thousand people go to the hospital and only a small percentage can arrive by public transport. How is it possible that sick people do not have this service? Well, because little can be expected from an island administration that works on the basis of instantaneous and short-term inventions.
This same Cabildo is the one that, to celebrate the birth of the most important island artist, from whom we enjoy an exceptional legacy of incalculable patrimonial and economic value, moves in conflict, revealing that it does not know how to manage its obligations in a framework focused on tranquility and harmony, not even in the most solemn moments. And it is that, absolutely everything they do has its seal of controversy, their language is insult, and their hallmark is the occurrence and disqualification, in addition to the constant and indelible lie. Combating this reality involves guaranteeing the incorporation of citizens into political life and focusing institutional activity on their real needs, which go beyond a tapas fair. It also involves turning the sense of development to face the climate change that visits us frequently and that has come to stay.
In the current political situation, it is urgent to end the long stage marked by contempt for the needs of the population. That the arrogance and looking over the shoulder at a citizenry that cannot arrive by bus to the hospital at the agreed time, that cannot walk through the island capital on a rainy day without 'enjoying' the sewage, be extinguished. The same people who see how rainwater is lost through the sewers while private and desalinated water, very expensive at economic and environmental levels, comes out of their taps and hoses. These people who suffer trying to find a public place in an early childhood education center for children under 3 years and who send their offspring to classrooms that do not have sufficient resources. All and each one of the people, who with their daily work raise and sustain the island and its resources on their shoulders, are disrespected by a Cabildo paralyzed in self-satisfaction.
I can continue listing hundreds of examples, but what has been expressed is enough to understand that the political forces of change have to unite, that there is no other option and that we are going to do it to the misfortune of the parties that carry the acronyms that have been dragging us into the mud for years.
This expectation of real change was already present in 2015, although the different existing sensitivities did not make it possible for the citizenry to mandate the generation of political spaces of confluence. More than 10,000 people cast their vote in a fragmented way and the electoral results could have been different if they had run jointly. Now, we have a new opportunity to respect the thousands of people who yearn for and need a real political renewal, which we are the majority. We must, in the same way, recover the illusion and confidence of those who stopped going to vote because they feel that there is no possible solution in an immobilist panorama like this.
In my ideology, there is no room for frustrating the confluence project and in my family heritage there is no discouragement and fatigue. On the contrary: humility, courage, strength and perseverance in work are concepts that I love and that I have present because they are inherited and practiced. The current situation requires making use of the ability to unite us and to demonstrate that what we say matters because we say what we feel: respect for the numerous people who for months have been working in the different sectoral tables and in the political sphere for the confluence. For them and for the citizens who yearn for change, let us establish the best conditions to associate and form the most capable teams to facilitate the incorporation of citizens into the political life of La Graciosa and Lanzarote.
These islands contributed another model of tourist development led by César Manrique. Let us demonstrate, this time for real, that we are a true Biosphere Reserve capable of innovating in the political, of being avant-garde once again. Lanzarote, La Graciosa and all the people who live here deserve that this great common project becomes a reality.
*By María Antonia Perera, Podemos candidate for president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote
