The square is Jaime's

Palma“la piazza è mia! La piazza è mia!”, was the phrase that the village idiot, one of the characters that populated the Giancaldo of Cinema Paradiso, repeated over and over while life followed its course frame by frame. When I saw the mayor of Palma, Jaime Martínez, proudly announcing that he had evicted the encampment from Plaça d’Espanya, I thought of the village idiot. Jaime also believes the square is his. Unlike the character in Giuseppe Tornatore’s film, the mayor can use the Police to remind us that the square is his and that it is he who decides who can be there. And he does so by overriding the Spanish Government Delegation, the competent authority regarding this matter.

Jaime strolled through the space that the tents used to occupy and played pedagogue on social media, because we citizens are dim-witted and need to be taught how life works. “Palma has ordinances that must be complied with,” he reminded us. “I have an obligation to defend all the rights of the citizens,” he added. This slip-up would not even have been made by the village idiot. The right to housing and the right to protest are not on the mayor's list of concerns, as he is more focused on the right to speculation and luxury, as often happens with provincial politicians.

Jaime likes his square to be clean and pretty. There should be no one protesting, or begging, or sleeping on the ground because they don't have a home – that is no excuse. There should be no ugly things or people. That is why he has placed benches with armrests in the middle, so that people cannot lie down on them. There are people who are like trash, who bother and stink, and must be removed as soon as possible. That is why the campers were also evicted with an Emaya truck.

“We want a civic city, a city where rules are respected,” Jaime says in his triumphant video. More than saying it, he orders it. And he presupposes that we all have the same idea of civic duty as he does, a narrow vision in which protesting is equivalent to not respecting the rules of his square, of his city. Someone might think at this point that in reality, Jaime has a problem with people who do not think like him. There are also those who await the day he announces that he has joined the ranks of that far-right green party which is very clear that its rules must be obeyed without question. Jaime knows he is a hero, a man of order. The square is his.