The duty-free DJ explains better than anyone what is happening at Ibiza airport

IbizaIt turns out that the influencer Mercè Molinas arrived at Ibiza airport one day in July and found a DJ playing in the middle of the duty free. Since she is an influencer and does this, influencing, the girl made a video that has gone viral and has accumulated more than 210,000 views on her Instagram account alone (@mercemolinas). The publication is from last July 13th. This DJ thing has stirred up some dust. Ibiza airport has been sold to nightclubs in the form of advertising for days now – if you think I'm exaggerating, visit the arrivals or baggage claim area – but to put a DJ there on top of it!... I want to assume that the event will have caused some perplexity, discomfort if nothing else, among the politicians and Ibizan prominent figures who, just a couple of days before, were receiving Aena's explanations about the Codolar expansion; a project that, virtually, could almost double the airport's capacity.

Indeed, on July 9, Aena, the Consell d’Eivissa, businessmen, hoteliers, and some other Eivissan entity, had staged consensus and almost brotherhood in a meeting that the airport operator convened to report on the expansion of the island's airport. “Satisfaction in Ibiza after Aena's explanations on the airport's modernization,” headlined Periódico de Ibiza. For an entity as opaque as Aena to inform you of something must greatly inflate your ego. This would explain, at least from the perspective of Freudian psychology, why those who criticized Aena's project the day before, then welcomed it with an understanding smile. Local and Balearic politicians, as well as entities as diverse as Pimeef and UGT, bought into Aena's discourse with little resistance. Practically everyone. As a dissenting note, only the Eivissan architects issued a statement recalling that they are the “technicians in urban development” and that “an expansion of this magnitude increases the pressure on an island ecosystem that is already at its limit”.

The sudden change of opinion of politicians, businessmen, etc. is difficult to explain. If psychology does not convince us, we can try the hypothesis of political calculation. We are in full election year, only ten months before the next municipal and regional elections, and the issue of the Codolar expansion has a very high probability of becoming the next Eivissan hot potato. Ibiza is famous for its potatoes, the gastronomic and the political ones; when an Eivissan gets angry, they get really angry. When the works really begin, we will hear about it; let someone explain to us how the daily collapse at the airport access will be resolved, if the aerodrome's capacity increases even further.

But here comes the calculation: between procedures and red tape, it is unlikely that the works at Codolar airport will be noticeable before May 2027, the date marked in fire on the electoral calendar of the Islands – in Ibiza, the PP is risking the comfortable majority it currently enjoys. So, it's better not to stir up the issue too much until the time comes. If, after all, Aena will do as it pleases...

But, what is Aena?

A difficult question. Aena is neither fish nor fowl. It is neither white nor black. It is not inside or outside the Matrix. It is private, but fundamentally it is public. It decides our way of life, but it does not have to ask us how we want to live. It governs one of the State's critical infrastructures, it is a product of democracy, but nothing obliges it to practice it. It does not have to give us explanations. If, in the end, Aena's directors have informed us in person of what they intend to do or undo, it is only because they have wanted to; they could have not done so. The meeting between Aena and institutions and entities could not have taken place, and nothing would have happened. In fact, nothing will happen as a result of the meeting either: the execution of Dora III (Airport Regulation Document) will proceed as planned. Only if political or popular pressure were to reach a great magnitude, would someone who truly has influence (someone in the State government) consider intervening.

Aena's logic is profit. Just like the rest of the companies listed on the Ibex 35. With a couple of peculiarities. The first is that Aena's main shareholder is the company Enaire, a public company that depends on the Ministry of Transport and controls Spanish airspace; 51% of Aena is owned by Enaire; the remaining 49% is owned by investment funds such as BlackRock and Vanguard, among others. Therefore, even though it is a public limited company, there is public control over Aena (acronym for Spanish Airports and Air Navigation); we must understand that the State reserves the final say in decisions.

The second peculiarity is that, despite operating based on business logic, Aena – presumably – registers significant losses in many of the airports it manages, infrastructures that were created more for political than business reasons. And they are bad investments that it cannot divest itself of, as any 100% private company would.

I say presumably because the operator stopped publishing data broken down by airports when privatization occurred. The latest I've managed to find, on Aena's website, are from 2013. That year, only a dozen airports out of the 48 managed by the operator made money, including Ibiza (12.17 million in profit) and Palma (97 million). And this is the crux of the matter: Aena cannot afford to lose money on airports that bring it profits, because it has to cover - presumably - the losses of dozens of deficit airports.

If Aena loses money on the dozen airports that have always made money, the house of cards collapses. That's why airports like Ibiza are exploited with the most ruthless business logic. That's why Dora III will virtually double the capacity of Codolar. That's why the well-being of residents, or ecological considerations such as the lack of sufficient water resources in Ibiza, are not even factored into Aena's accounts. Aena is public for some, but for us, it has turned out to be private.