Ten thousand people spoke out for change in 2015: 4,175 people did so in the Arrecife polls, 1,734 in San Bartolomé, 1,584 in Teguise, 753 in Tías, 723 in Yaiza, 558 in Haría and 315 in Tinajo, adding up to 9,842 votes that are now needed to enable change. To this figure we add the people who opted for abstention and the young people who are now voting for the first time.
And to achieve improvements we need to unite, to bring together the people who in the last elections of 2015 voted to change the parties that were -and still are- in the administrations, in order to focus on the needs and also to cut off the development model that leads us to social, environmental, economic and political ruin.
We need to say goodbye to corruption and looting, to the succession of occurrences of those who administer the public, in order to attend to the real needs and truly sustainable and responsible development.
To continue identifying needs, it is necessary to establish meeting spaces that allow us to identify the shortcomings and formulate solutions, taking into account that as citizens we must incorporate analysis into each proposal.
Meeting spaces like those of yesteryear.
The power of my memory reaches back to 1978 when there were pronouncements, negotiations and citizen concentrations to prevent the installation of the garbage dump in the Caldera de Zonzamas.
In 1983 the Coordinator for the Defense of the Malpaís de La Corona was created to prevent construction in the Caletón Blanco area, in the municipality of Haría, which was encouraged to start its particular tourist offer.
I remember when the Asamblea de Estudiantes Conejeros was constituted in La Laguna, Tenerife, almost on par with the Asamblea de Estudiantes Majoreros, to give a social response to the barbarism that was beginning in Lanzarote.
The Platform for the defense of the beaches of Papagayo was organized, which appeased the tourist expansionism during the 80s of the last century, managing to introduce Los Ajaches in the first Law of Natural Spaces of the Canary Islands.
From 1985 it was Cesar Manrique and the Moment to Stop, which is the synthesis of his thought and the intelligent action of this artist against the savagery that happened in the surroundings of the beach of Los Pocillos, which is specified in the document of urban tourist decrease of the PIOT of 1991. To this I add the opposing front headed by El Guincho, which provides social content to Manrique's thought.
Another decisive chapter was what was mediatically called the social intifada against the urban-tourist barbarity of the south of the island led by the collective meeting space Foro Lanzarote, from 1998-2003.
And, finally, the social movement against oil exploration that is activated from 2001 until the end of 2014.
The last stops of this itinerary are detailed by the movements for the defense of public health -active since the late 80s-, the coordinators for public housing, the Kellys -revolutionaries against labor precariousness in the tourism activity-, the Animalist sensitivity and the local and universal movement of women, of all of them.
These living, active and courageous people make La Graciosa and Lanzarote an extraordinary society that clamors for political change, that the inadequacies are satisfied and the sustainable and responsible transition begins.
And now people ask me what to do. What is the challenge.
The desire for change is universal since it does not live captive under the acronyms of a political party, nor of Podemos with its exceptional birth in the social impulse of 15M, because it is the constant social flow that expresses its will to materialize the right to have its needs recognized and satisfied.
The work of the coming months is to constitute solvent teams with the capacity to manage the public from humility and joint work, to open the doors of the administrations so that citizens enter and stay to socialize decisions and move away from occurrences paid with public resources, the tendencies to create new centers that have nothing to do with the cultural reality of the islands, because the same can be in Mexico as in Australia, and much less has to do with the needs.
Moreover, materializing these occurrences moves away the possibilities of considering and taking care of social scarcities.
The work necessary to amend the present is developed beyond political organizations, incorporating organized civil society, active but also bored citizens, those who know what it is to live in a few square kilometers next to 200 political, technical and business positions accused and / or convicted because they wanted to have everything, including public goods, because it did not occur to them to think that the people below, not those on the left or those on the right, but I insist, those below; were going to arrive because we have been walking for many years and now, we are here.
The citizens' desire for change will not be paralyzed because some people need to satisfy their egos in another scenario, in another political framework characterized by urban illegalities and corruption.
I am aware of the enormous difficulty of combining sensitivities to propose the best work teams that are capable of executing the citizens' will for political change.
For four months we have worked intensely in the attempt to bring together the views and concerns, and I wish not to exhaust myself and that we do not exhaust ourselves, I aspire to be responsible and responsible, honest and honest with the collective will.
But I must not hide the enormous difficulties that exist, although I have the absolute certainty that we arrive on time, because this work team experiences affective communication, since it looks at the citizens and they observe us producing, as I have already expressed previously, the principle of intersubjectivity, similar to when a mother looks at her daughter, looks at her daughter who looks at her.
I think of lighthouse people who guide us, for example in Santiago Medina Cáceres in the resistance to urban corruption and abuse; in Miriam Barros against the labor exploitation of women and blood tourism; I am served as an example by Gloria Moreno regarding honest and professional work against environmental crimes and animal abuse, as well as Angy Guisado in the defense of the right to housing.
Nona Perera
Candidate of Podemos Canarias to the Presidency of the Cabildo de Lanzarote
