Mayors In The Dock

This is a bizarre case involving a horse-riding club, and the officials include four mayors, five former mayors, one former mayoress and two other representatives, one of whom is still in position. All the officials come from one party - the Partido Popular (PP). They are all due to take their places in the dock today as the "caso caballistas (case of the horsemen)" is heard.

What on earth is going on? The mayor of Llucmajor is facing a three-year stretch for another scandal, the Andratx case has claimed not only the former mayor but other officials, and at the regional government level there is the "money-in-the garden" case, to name but one. The last Balearic administration (PP) is one that seems to have been ripe with less-than-fully-legit procedures.

The hope is that the succession of scandals will finally bring to a head and to an end the corruption that appears to bedevil or to have bedevilled local Majorca politics. One expresses the hope, but then one receives a knowing look. Scratch the surface, and the fear is that it is all around.

Why is that some mayors, and it does seem to be mainly mayors, appear to be incapable of acting with propriety? Are they out of control? I am greatly in favour of local mayors and local democracy, but when all trust in such a system evaporates in a collusion of false documents or some fraud, what is the point of it? It is not just that trust is destroyed, it sends out a rotten message, and believe me there are any number here who will willingly receive that message and enact it accordingly.

One can search for different reasons. Perhaps it's to do with competence, or the lack thereof, or with weak personalities, or with nepotism and the influence of "networks" and families. Maybe it's all these things. What qualifications do many of these mayors bring to their position? Is there any such thing as a fit-and-proper test? And where are the checks and balances? The town halls could do with a dose of external audit or of some monitoring body comprising people from outside the municipality. Except that would succeed only in slowing up decision-making and adding to bureaucracy and costs. But maybe something like this is necessary in order to create confidence in a system that at times is open to ridicule. Perhaps some areas of town hall responsibility also need attention. Anything to do with land, and so often these cases are to do with land, should be hived off and placed with an independent island commission. The particular sadness of this current scandal, however, is that it was island-wide; it was not a case of one rotten borough, and the common link is that of a political party.

While the history of the Civil War is always told as a narrative of the clash between left and right and of Republican and Nationalist, it should not be overlooked that one of Franco's key aims was the destruction of what he saw as an unworkable party system. There were plenty, once democracy and the monarchy were restored, who argued that Spain could never operate a democratic system. I daresay such voices still exist. But they were and are wrong. Nationally, the democracy has matured, but it is at local level that it remains in an infancy of pettiness and occasional petty or grander theft that seems to refuse to want to grow up. One hopes that all the rottenness has been rooted out. Otherwise those old voices are likely to become louder.

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