Social rights against hate: the failure of Galmés's invisible shield

Global geopolitics has the capacity to shake the most everyday reality of our homes. The consequences derived from the unjust war in Iran that we are suffering in this 2026 are not abstractions; they translate into suffocating inflationary pressure, rising prices in the shopping basket, and difficulty filling the fuel tank. Faced with this unforeseen vulnerability, citizens have the right to expect their institutions to act as a safety net. The clearest example was the Government of Spain, which applied measures such as the reduction for 6 months, on fuels and energy. But the reality of the Consell de Mallorca shows us that, instead of a protective shield, what we have is a wall of propaganda, blame-shifting, and intolerable ideological concessions.Months ago we have been hearing the grand headlines from President Llorenç Galmés. We were promised the mobilization of a historic social shield, which in the case of the IMAS was endowed with 9 million euros to mitigate the effects of this economic crisis. Today, what is the reality? The counter for citizens is at zero. Instead of managing and directly executing the aid, the Council has opted to unload the work and responsibility onto the shoulders of the Town Halls. A decision made unilaterally, without speaking with the mayors, assuming they will take on a new bureaucratic burden when municipal social services are already overwhelmed with their day-to-day. Today, local administrations find themselves having to manage this task without knowing how much, what, or how.But if this dereliction of duty is already serious, the political price paid is even more worrying: the Popular Party has bought Vox's discourse of "national priority" hook, line, and sinker, and has imposed a five-year residency requirement on municipalities to access aid that should be for emergencies.With this hatred, this racism, and this xenophobia that Vox exudes, Galmés's government seems not to see that it is cracking Mallorca's social cohesion. Vox does not hide that it wants to exclude migrants, and that alone is serious enough. But the problem is even greater: this filter ends up excluding anyone who experiences a situation of vulnerability if they do not meet a requirement as arbitrary as having resided on the island for five consecutive years. In short, they are turning a social right into a privilege reserved only for some.Excluded are people who work and sustain essential services, but who have not been able to establish themselves long enough due to precariousness, cost of living, or residential instability. Excluded are families who have had to start from scratch and who, despite making an enormous effort to get ahead, remain trapped in situations of sudden poverty. And also excluded are all those people who need occasional support to avoid falling further down, but who encounter an administrative filter that does not respond to any criteria of social justice. For the Galmés government, need is no longer enough: first, an ideological filter must be passed.The cruelty of this imposition reaches its extreme with the groups that suffer the most. This measure leaves many people in situations of homelessness or with life paths marked by instability, breakdown, and exclusion completely helpless. People who have been left out of the system for multiple reasons and who, precisely because of this, should find an outstretched hand from the administration and not a new barrier. With this ideological filter imposed by the Council, it is materially impossible for many of them to meet the requirement of five years of continuous residence. This social shield does not protect those who need it most: it precisely leaves out those for whom it should exist.The Galmés government has become a voluntary hostage to exclusion. To maintain the stability of the office, they prefer to transfer the pressure to the town councils and apply identity filters to vulnerability rather than confront their governing partner. Conditioning economic support in times of crisis on a count of years is to empty the concept of human dignity of its content.Governing requires broad vision, institutional respect and humanity. Galmés' social shield has turned out to be a propagandistic fiction that has crumbled at the first dictate of the far-right. We need it to be rectified, for municipalities to be heard, and for resources to be made available to people without exclusions. Faced with the cruelty of their national priority, we respond with firmness: social policies; faced with their national priority, social rights always.