"There's not enough room here for everyone" (but there is room for 19 million tourists)

Palm"There's not room for everyone here" has been the political mantra of the week. The Prime Minister, Marga ProhensThis was proclaimed on Tuesday in the plenary session of the Balearic Parliament, with the approval of the right-wing and far-right parties. There is no room for migrants—especially if they are Muslim—nor for democratic memory, but there is plenty of space for the more than 19 million tourists—an Olympic record for 2025—hundreds of thousands of cars, and vacation rental properties. There is so much space that the Council of Mallorca declared on Thursday that it is no longer necessary to reduce the cap on tourist accommodation on the island, while the Balearic Government proclaims the miracle of containment and deseasonalization without having implemented a single measure. Are more tourists arriving than ever before? We should be happy, because the summer season isn't spiraling out of control and business is booming in the months that weren't previously full of visitors. It's well known that an empty month is not economically productive. Since there's room for so many visitors, we won't raise the ecotax either, because we mustn't upset the hotel owners. And yet Prohens has announced it a couple of times. In its defense, it can be said that the cart of announcements is full of initiatives, from this and other legislatures, whose trace can only be found in the newspaper archives.

It's bad luck, but when it comes to housing, there hasn't been a single miracle yet. The waiting list for public housing is already almost 10,000 people, and the government's solutions have been useless. Calling it an emergency no longer suffices, with more and more people living on the streets and in caravans—those who are luckier. However, the Housing Minister, José Luis MateoHe remains unfazed and repeats the same answer over and over: we do a lot of work. Perhaps the difference between short-, medium-, and long-term measures should be explained. Because people's vital needs are very short-term, and it doesn't seem that the work is effective in this area, no matter how angry Mateo gets at the criticism and says that the others, those in the Pact, did nothing. It's a bad student's excuse: if you fail a lot, you can always say that the others in the class didn't do well on this assessment either.

Goodbye to the Memory Law

We can describe this week as destructive on a democratic level, because the Historical Memory Law is about to disappear thanks to the PP's compromises with Vox. On this point, the PP has behaved like a disloyal lover, promising fidelity only when the wind blew. Do we need to invest Prohens as Prime Minister? Goodbye to the Law. Do we need to untangle a legislative mess that would cause us many problems? Long live the Law and a left-handed embrace. Should we approve a few pending items, like opening the doors to a private university? Back to the Law again. The PP already said that this law didn't matter to them, more so than the small handful of far-right deputies who haven't yet opted for defection. "The problem isn't remembering, but imposing what we should remember," said the PP deputy on Tuesday. Salomé CabreraIt seems the narrative that there was a coup against a legitimate government in Spain in 1936, and that thousands of people were executed by the Franco regime in places like the Balearic Islands, is an imposed memory. It would be interesting to know what Ms. Cabrera, who obediently took to the podium and said what her supporters and everyone else expected to hear, chooses to remember. She also spoke of understanding history "neutrally." Is neutrality even possible when it comes to human rights abuses? Perhaps this discourse wouldn't be very welcome in places like Ukraine or Gaza, if it's a matter of demagoguery.

If there's one thing to be grateful for about the far right, it's their reliability. There are no surprises. Vox is like an old car that never breaks down, that, even if it takes time, always gets to the same place. Perhaps someone has grown a little tired of the antics of the party's deputy spokesperson. Sergio RodríguezHe has done so many things that he has numbed the capacity of other deputies and journalists to be outraged, who every week think that, like in the movie, they are trapped in Groundhog Day.

To begin with, Rodríguez used iconic businesses as a pretext to lament the proliferation of kebab shops. He railed against the loss of cultural identity in Castilian Spanish, as is customary for a good Spanish nationalist. Meanwhile, the Minister of Business, Alejandro Sáenz de San PedroHe didn't miss another opportunity to demonstrate that, even though Parliament isn't exactly the agora of Athens, he doesn't even meet the minimum standards required of an institutional representative. Another one who never disappoints.

Regarding the Historical Memory Law, Rodríguez didn't deviate from his usual script, as if reciting a Catholic prayer at the cross in the Valley of the Fallen: historical memory laws are an opportunity for revenge by the losers of the Civil War; citizens are concerned with other things; democratic memory represents Sánchez's policies; the war wasn't about good versus evil; and Franco built many houses and reservoirs. End of the sophisticated argument. But the left had already been defeated, with grandiloquent lamentations that made it clear this was a lost battle.