At the beginning of the sixties, the Son Sant Joan airport was inaugurated in Palma, replacing the one at Son Bonet, and the Majorcans welcomed tourists right on the runway with bouquets of flowers. The gateway to the island was just that, a door. Today, that door has turned into a machine that is largely, if not entirely, a shredder. It is not a very exaggerated metaphor. Because Aena is no longer satisfied with managing an airport: it expands it, fills it, sells it, rents it, exploits it, and squeezes every bit of juice it can out of it. Let us never forget that Aena is a majority-public company. That is to say, this big business is very much public, but very little of it is ours.
Aena is also a formidable collection entity. The more revenue Son Sant Joan generates, the more money is sent to the rest of the State. From exploiting us comes the money to pay for the loss-making airports, which in Spain are the majority. Meanwhile, we are told that we cannot decide to what extent this door can be opened or how this machinery should be operated. Co-management? Aena has already warned that it will challenge it if one day, in one of those improbabilities of Spanish politics, it were to be approved. The reason, it says, is that it would make it lose the income it extracts from the island. It is a curious explanation, to put it mildly: they deny us the possibility of (co)deciding on a business that does business with us.
The language it uses is also curious. Aena does not expand the airport, it says. It only opens new areas, makes us pass through new spaces, and explains to us that it is not an expansion. It must be a semantic issue. Like that person who claims they haven't eaten more, they have just been opening more and more packets of cookies. In any case, no matter what it says, the bigger the airport gets, the bigger the gateway is. It is an obvious point, but it is worth repeating: if you widen the door, more people will fit through it. And if more planes fit, they will sell more tickets to fill them.
Then there is the advertising. There are few airports in the world with so much propaganda, and such crude propaganda, about the country on the other side of the controls. Mallorca is presented there as a big amusement park, car rentals, house buying, and consumption without end. Aena not only opens the door to millions of tourists, it also helps to sell them the Mallorca that we later suffer.
Now, furthermore, it wants to tile Son Bonet with solar panels. It wants it hard and fast. Neither the Parliament nor the opposition of the neighbors have managed, for the moment, to stop the project. Aena has become an insatiable monster. A monster that, alas, wouldn't even notice a boycott by the residents of the Balearic Islands if we decided to carry one out. That is why it is not enough to ask it to be a little friendlier. It must be told enough, it must be set limits, and it must be assumed that the airport too, like so many other things in Mallorca, must degrow.
The PSOE currently has the possibility to hit the brakes. It seems to me, however, that neither the socialists, nor much less the conservatives if they come to govern the State, will stop this crusher. They will drive it.
