Popular Party: saturation manual

In a country and a territory like ours, pushed economically by the tourist machinery of the Mediterranean summer, the Human Pressure Indicator is ideal for calibrating the saturation levels of what we call, in a broad sense, infrastructures and facilities: airports, roads, parking lots, buses, trains, hospitals, beaches, squares, streets. Last May in Mallorca, a new record for human pressure was registered, with almost 1.4 million people in a single day. By August, this figure will have been far exceeded, on an island where the resident population is about 971,000 inhabitants. The reader will perfectly understand that this enormous demographic pressure implies an accumulated sum of demands for the consumption of goods and services: more water that we do not have, more cars that we do not want, more electricity that we will need, more waste that we will produce, and ultimately more of everything and bad. This is a totally unsustainable burden for an island that is overcrowded to the maximum.

The fact is that in the last three years, this Party, which has everything of a demagogic and populist nature, and only has a fake name of 'Popular', has refused to acknowledge the overcrowding, even when a desperate social majority of Majorcans has raised the alarm. Faced with the loss of our quality of life, the Popular Party responds that we must get used to this new normality of saturation and weariness with obedience and resignation.

The image of Mallorca has ostensibly worsened, and, meanwhile, the Popular Party refuses to accept that tourism, mobility, and waste treatment must be planned and reorganized under the premise of a friendly degrowth. Even today, a man who was Minister of Public Works between 1983 and 1993 makes such irrational statements as these: “It is clear to me that traffic is not pacified, it is what it is”. This is the typical mentality of the obtuse and rancid right of the Popular Party, for whom pacifying vehicle traffic is unnecessary, because, he says, “it is what it is”. This is, in fact, the way of thinking and acting of these politicians of growth without limits: if the collapse of the roads or the tourist saturation “is what it is”, why should we want to degrow and test solutions for improvement? In the eyes of the Popular Party, overcrowding is not a problem, and enduring it is a matter of sacrifice, conformism, and renunciation of our lifestyle.

Against this retrograde idea, it has always been socialist and environmentalist policies that, luckily, have made this country advance in the form of decisive progress—social, environmental, and protectionist—which today no one questions—let us remember, if not, the ecotax. Social democracy, political environmentalism, or humanistic socialism are called progressive precisely because in their proposals and actions there is always a progress of improvements, never of setbacks. The welfare state that we now enjoy—public healthcare and education, pension systems, and social services such as dependency care—is born from the indisputably progressive ideology.

Behold, another gentleman from the Popular Party, Llorenç Galmés, staked an entire electoral campaign on the hyperbolic promise to “unclog” Mallorca. A simplistic and populist promise to the extreme, which obviously he is not fulfilling nor will he ever fulfill. His voters will have good reasons to feel deceived. In times of massification everywhere, in terms of mobility and tourism, the orders in the populist party are as follows. First, dismantle a Bus-HOV lane that has benefited the thousands of citizens who travel daily on a public bus or in a taxi. Second, spend the astronomical figure of 350 million public euros on a macro-project—section I of Palma’s second ring road—which had been announced for 110 million euros. That is a 240 million increase that will not be invested in expanding and improving the train and bus service, but rather in laying more asphalt than necessary and having more cars. Third, destroy the tourism degrowth policies initiated by the socialists, with which pools of new places were suspended and tourist capacity was corrected downwards, implementing a 2×1 model according to which a new tourist place could only be authorized if two places were decommissioned.

Addressing saturation politically is done by taking degrowth measures that are sustained over time. That the Popular Party, when it governs, is dismantling them is part of its inseparable and old manual of saturation and environmental degradation. In the agreements it has signed with the far-right, the reader will find, among other gems, the following: “We will propose the modification of Law 13/2018, of December 28, on public paths and hiking routes of Mallorca in order to allow PAVING”.