When a year before the pandemic, the friend Àlex Dioscórides directed the magnificent documentary ‘Overbooking’, which already highlighted some of the indicators that make us a collapsed island, I believe that neither he nor all the people who saw it were able to imagine that a day would come, just like this start of the season, where not only would politicians have done nothing to reverse the situation, but we would find ourselves with a situation of overbooking of overbooking.If the concept of overbooking refers to overbooking of overbooking I mean the conversion of this over-selling into a permanent strategy, thanks to which collapse is no longer the exception, but the norm, even beyond the high season, as these days. We are not only talking about airlines or hotels, where business overbooking used to occur, but also about tourist rental houses, car rentals and a long etcetera of tourist services and products – also cycle tourism, and how! –, which indirectly generate saturation in the services that we residents need – and pay for –: roads, public transport and, indirectly, health and education, pressured by the population growth that the overbooking of overbooking.That the overbooking of overbooking goes beyond the “sensations” or “caprice” of residents was recently confirmed by the Government itself, when the Forum of Civil Society forced it to make public the results of the resident opinion poll, which indicates that the satisfaction level with tourism had fallen from 71% in 2018 to only 42% in 2024. For the first time, the overbooking of overbooking is causing a more than significant critical mass that is beginning to question the idea of ‘tourism is untouchable, because it's what feeds us’… 77.2% of residents directly blame tourism for the increase in housing prices; 55.4% for the rise in the cost of basic goods and services; 65.5% perceive an excessive saturation of streets, shops, and public transport; 62.3% believe that tourism degrades natural resources and the landscape.A few days ago, on a trip to Sóller, I was able to experience firsthand an overbooking that has been exceeded for some time, where the recipes of politicians, both local and regional, are limited to wanting to "manage better" the flow of cars, but without anyone daring to say that what needs to be done is to reduce, limit, decrease... Sóller is the metaphor for the overbooking of overbooking: living in a postcard town and not being able to leave your home. I would like to see in a few years studies on the increase in respiratory illnesses due to the increase in vehicle traffic, as it is quite evident that this must already be affecting the inhabitants of the municipality in terms of public health, as well as other daily headaches.

A few days ago, the parliamentary majority decided to repeal the Democratic Memory Law, which I had the honor of drafting in my final days as a member of parliament. This text enjoyed broad consensus at the time, including the support of the People's Party (PP) on many points, as had previously occurred with the Law on Mass Graves. It's hard to accept that laws that come late, but which nevertheless seek to provide truth, justice, and reparations, as the memory movement has always demanded, can be overturned so easily. I also find it difficult to accept these changes in position by parties that aspire to govern for a social majority, in less than a decade.

In recent weeks, one of the racist mantras of the European far right—often adopted even by some on the left, such as the British Labour Party—of defending "jobs for locals" has been reiterated by the highest authority in our region, President Prohens, in various contexts.

One of the best pieces of news these days has been the state government's announcement, twenty years after the last one, of a new regularization process for undocumented migrants residing in Spain. This is excellent news in terms of human rights and citizenship, even though the denial of human rights, including genocide, has become socially accepted today.

In the debate on the state of the region, the president recently placed the demographic issue at the center of the political debate. Population growth—in practice, a subterfuge to avoid directly addressing immigration—has become the center of the debate because part of the political class specializes in creating new problems instead of providing effective solutions to existing ones. In fact, I'll just remind you that just a month ago, the regional government was exposed when the Civil Society Forum revealed the data from the survey by the same government's Tourism Strategy Agency, which indicated that what really bothers a large part of the citizenry is the number of tourists we have.

A few months ago, when the arrival of boats from Algeria to the Balearic Islands was beginning to intensify, I received a call from Radio Illa, based in Formentera, to interview me on the subject. The first question already defined the scope of the interview: Is the migratory route between Algeria and the Balearic Islands established? My answer was a bit brash: of course! In fact, for almost two centuries, this route has been established.

In these days of tourist and mental saturation, with strikes and canceled flights slowing down the infernal machinery of airports like Palma, a piece of news takes on the status of an explanatory metaphor for who we are and what happens to us: Palma airport now has the largest McDonald's in Europe.