This is not about crowded beaches

The Less Tourism, More Life action manual is a mistake. It shifts the focus. It has managed to get people talking about violence instead of housing; about hammers, instead of impossible rents, and about activists, instead of a government incapable of offering solutions. Furthermore, it is childish: if you intend to surprise someone, don't hand them the instruction manual beforehand.

It is logical that a young generation wants to shake up inertia and break with forms of protest that already seem like liturgies. What is no longer so logical is to confuse renewal with improvisation. If the third major demonstration in three summers of the Marga Prohens Government gathers fewer people than the previous ones, we will have to ask ourselves if it is society or the movement that is failing. Because repeating a call with the same framework, the same language, and the same staging does not serve to broaden the social base.

The problem begins with what they now call the narrative. ‘Overcrowding’ is a word that only appeals to the convinced. It refers to full beaches, saturated roads, and loss of landscape. It serves to describe a reality, but it is too abstract to mobilize a majority. People do not take to the streets for concepts, but when they feel that life has become unviable.

Violence is smashing the lock of a tourist rental property with hammers. But it is also sharing a flat at 50 years old, working 12 hours to end up handing over your salary to a landlord and knowing that you will have to leave Mallorca to build a life project.

Not finding a place in your favorite cove is the problem of those who have no others. For many, the first thing is not knowing where they will live. Conflicts need names, faces, and stories. Abstraction mobilizes little; shared experience, a lot. No government changes course because the usual people demonstrate with the usual strategies. It will do so when those who have never taken to the streets do so: the service sector worker who lives in a caravan, the immigrant, single-parent families, and those who do not even know who occupies the Consulate today.

As long as the conflict continues to be called “overcrowding”, it will continue to seem like the cause of a very committed minority. The day it starts to be called “the right to live in Mallorca”, the conversation will be different. And so will the political cost of ignoring it.