Hit rock bottom completely
If you look at the press in this country, especially the main newspaper, you'll see how a certain type of news has intensified in recent weeks: news announcing that this year will be a bad tourist season. I'd say it's subtle, but it's anything but. It consists of a constant stream of "bad" news that, taken together, creates the feeling that we are in real danger of losing our main source of income and becoming even poorer. The theme is a recurring one, but it never ceases to surprise how the fear of losing the (little? Not much?) we have challenges any attempt to have a serious conversation about the importance we want tourism to have, what kind of tourism we want, etc. In short, it's business as usual.
The debate on tourism, we could say, rests on three pillars: a left that is discursively critical of saturation, a right that is unempathetic and defensive, and a media context that oscillates between amplifying the ideology of tourism entrepreneurs and the feeling of citizen saturation.
Surely what I'm saying is an oversimplification, because the massive citizen mobilizations against tourist saturation were met with some gesture of empathy and consideration from Prohens. But when the protests came from Arran, more minority and extravagant, it was when the government threw caution to the winds, harshly criticizing their methods and, while we're at it, their "tourism-phobic" ideas.
This habitual attitude of the PP has given shelter to initiatives to counteract the negative international press that these protests are allegedly giving us as a tourist destination. At the same time, restaurateurs, transport companies, and other sectors are spreading their concern in the media for apparently having less business compared to previous years. Overall, this delegitimizes any protest or debate about what to do in the media. How should we demonstrate or debate in favor of our poverty? Fear immobilizes. And it seems we must choose between degrowth, with the predicted poverty that we are supposedly already beginning to glimpse, or more tourism, with unlimited growth that would also impoverish us.
In my opinion, to get out of this impasse, two things must be done, perhaps impossible. The first is to try to build a consensus, politically transversal and stable over time, on an economic transition agenda that includes a legislative and investment plan to stimulate sectors considered strategic. This would be a good way to approach the debate on the decline of tourism, offering an alternative for economic growth with greater added value that would reduce the weight of tourism in our GDP. Similar to the Roundtable promoted by the Catalan government, but with greater integrative capacity.
It is true that we live in a time when political consensus seems a thing of the past. We do not see the possibility of reviving anything similar, such as minimal consensus around the social model, self-government, or the language of our autonomy statute. This dynamic is akin to trench warfare, where incentives push people to support the opposite idea to their political rival, dragging voters along with them. The difference is that, once a certain point of economic decline and social tension is reached, there will be no choice but to approach this issue from the perspective of a founding or constituent moment. A time when ideological concessions have a low electoral cost.
The other thing that should be done is to move the public conversation away from the absurd dichotomy between declining tourism without an economic alternative and continuing to grow without limits. We must be clear about several things in this regard. The first is that we cannot do without tourism. The alternatives discussed must include tourism for several reasons, but the main one is that many people live there, and we cannot do without those jobs. From there, we can discuss what we should do to reduce its relative weight. Eventually, this could lead to a decrease in its weight in absolute numbers, and that would be wonderful. But today, we must commit to economic transitions with low or zero social cost. It's also essential to get everyone on board.
Another essential thing to clean up the public conversation is to de-dramatize or not give so much media space to the complaints of tourism entrepreneurs, who have always complained and will continue to complain about their poor results. We already know this. But they don't take into account the overall social balance. The Hegelian Totality, if you will. And paradoxically, pursuing their own individual benefit would lead us all, including them, to absolute ruin.
Perhaps some might consider me an idealist, but I believe there may be electoral gains for parties that wholeheartedly want to participate in a similar project. But perhaps we haven't quite hit rock bottom yet.