In the contradictory south of Gran Canaria, where the dunes struggle between the silence of the desert and the murmur of tourism, a political paradox has taken shape: Nueva Canarias in Tirajana has decided to leave... Nueva Canarias.
The first act of the drama opens not with a breakup or an ideological declaration, but with a legal consultation: the legal services of the San Bartolomé de Tirajana City Council must determine whether the councilors who have taken this step are, technically, defectors. Because there is no modern scandal without its legal opinion, and there is no politics without its calculated ambiguity.
The decision was made at a Bulgarian-style assembly, one of those where unanimity surprises no one, convened by the party led by Samuel Henríquez. It was an act of collective self-affirmation, wrapped in discourses about dignity, sovereignty, and disengagement. And although it may seem like a split, those who participated present it as the first step toward something bigger: the reunification of Canarian nationalism. An old cause in new clothes.
The setting is reminiscent of a family sitting around the table on a Sunday, sharing bread, toasting their shared past, and then one of them stands up, pushes his chair back with wounded dignity, and says, "I'm leaving, but I'm staying." Politics is so strange when it decides to narrate itself as a tragicomedy.
They say in Tirajana that this isn't a betrayal, but an emancipation. That it's not abandonment, but liberation. That they're not breaking with the essence of Nueva Canarias, but with its ways, its silences, its decisions made from offices far from the southern heat. The arguments are emerging like cracks in an old alliance: lack of support, disdain from the regional leadership, decisions that ignore municipal reality. It's the same old story, but this time with an end in sight.
And so, the Nueva Canarias group in San Bartolomé de Tirajana signed its political divorce from the parent party, but not before taking the surname with it. Because they're leaving Nueva Canarias, but they still have the same name. A sort of borrowed identity, or perhaps usurped, depending on which side you look at it from.
The national leadership, for its part, watches from Las Palmas with the expression of someone who doesn't know whether to laugh or complain. What do you do when a reflection decides not to recognize you in the mirror?
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the leader of the Canary Islands Coalition in the south of the island, Alejandro Marichal, has quietly shared with his closest circle an unusual feeling in these times of political earthquakes: tranquility. Some say that amidst the noise, sometimes, silence wins.
In Tirajana, life goes on. The councilors wake up every morning with the same routine, plenary sessions are held, and residents barely notice the institutional tremors. But between the lines, in the halls of the town hall, there is already talk of a new era, of a party that is the same but no longer that, of a rupture that doesn't bleed, but stings.
In the end, perhaps it all comes down to what an island poet once wrote: "There are places that can only be understood when one decides to leave them without moving a step." Nueva Canarias in Tirajana has just done just that.
