There are victories that aren't celebrated with champagne or press releases. They aren't announced from ministerial balconies or mentioned at CEOE breakfast briefings. They are hidden successes, shrouded in bureaucratic silence, achieved more through inaction than strategy. One of them is Aena's undeniable triumph in aborting—with kid gloves and a poker face—the implementation of the Fifth Freedom of the Air in the Canary Islands.
Yes, the famous intercontinental hub in the mid-Atlantic. The "Singapore of the air" promised by some lobby politicians and half a dozen businessmen with a certain vision, and which today sleeps the sleep of the just in a crumpled folder at the Ministry of Transport.
The Fifth Freedom, for the uninitiated reader, is the right for a third-country airline to operate flights with a stopover in your territory, loading or unloading passengers or cargo bound for another country. It's the principle that has turned airports like Dubai, Doha, and Casablanca into global logistics platforms. It could have made Gando or Tenerife Sur the hub between Europe, Africa, and America.
But no. Not here.
The enemy wasn't in Rabat or Lisbon, but in Madrid. Aena, that semi-public behemoth with the vocation of being an air tax agency, didn't look kindly on the Canary Islands experiment. They didn't say so, of course. Aena never says no. Aena requests "feasibility studies," "load analyses," "reasonable forecasts of airline interest"… And while it orders paperwork and pulls reports from drawers, time passes, and time is the best way to kill an idea without leaving a trace.
Where were the Canarian ministers when this was brewing? And the archipelago's deputies, so active in demanding subsidies for passenger transport but so silent on freight transport? Why wasn't there a single regional state pact pushing for the Fifth Freedom, as is being pushed for the REF or subsidies for bananas?
The answer is twofold: First, because in the Canary Islands, short-termism reigns: governments are governed with their eyes on the next Ryanair flight, not on global logistics chains. And second, because in Madrid there was never any real interest in allowing a peripheral airport to steal the spotlight from the interests of the Barajas-El Prat axis.
Aena has won without firing a shot. The archipelago remains a destination for cheap sun and German retirees, not a hub between continents. The runways are there, as is the location. What's missing is the vision and the will.
The Canary Islands won't have Fifth Freedom. And Aena can continue managing airports as if they were low-cost parking lots. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a success. A success for the State. But not for the Canary Islands. For the same old people.
