Does Prica believe that Coalición Canaria in the south of the island is only thinking about alliances with them, ruling out Nueva Canarias? It seems so. The economic heart of Canarian tourism, San Bartolomé de Tirajana, is not only grappling with major construction scandals (see the Lopesan case) and ALSA's assault on transport, but is also suffering from entrenched political instability that jeopardizes the nationalist bloc's management capacity in the municipality. The legal battle between Nueva Canarias (NC) and its former councilors is less a partisan dispute than a symptom of local politics drowning in its own conflicts, unable to focus on the real challenges facing the Canary Islands' economic engine. And that's even though NC and Prica aren't governing.
The municipal secretary's decision not to declare the councilors who abandoned NC to join the Primero Canarias (Prica) project as defectors is a technical setback for Román Rodríguez, but NC-BC's response has been to increase the political cost of the dispute. It has not been confirmed whether the resolution was signed by Manuel Mateo Pérez Ojeda, a career civil servant in the Special Administration Scale, Technical Subscale, Group A, Subgroup A1. The fact is that NC has complained that no deadline has been given to submit objections. NC has turned San Bartolomé de Tirajana into the testing ground for its fight against the internal disbandment within the party throughout Gran Canaria. By invoking Addendum III of the Anti-Defection Pact, NC is not only seeking a local victory, but also to establish political precedent. The argument that abandoning the party that nominated you within a coalition makes you a defector is the legal weapon designed to stem the flow of public officials fleeing to new projects.
But this internal struggle has a very high opportunity cost: The time and resources devoted to this legal and political war are hours not invested in managing crises such as migration pressure, regulating vacation rentals, or overseeing major urban development projects. For major tour operators and investors, a local government mired in defection battles and with no deadlines for objections projects an image of fragmentation and low administrative capacity, the opposite of what a highly competitive destination requires.
While NC and the local government (PP-AV-CC) are locked in a dispute over council seats, the PSOE opposition has focused on the municipality's growing social vulnerability, an area that the glamour of Maspalomas always tries to hide.
The PSOE's complaint about the lack of a Comprehensive Social Services Plan and the alleged violation of the fundamental rights of the homeless (a group that the municipality estimates at at least 81) exposes the gap between the economic engine and social reality. The closure of projects such as CAIPSHO, which facilitated the registration of homeless people, is a symptom that the problems of "kilometer zero"—registration, social care—are being ignored or outsourced.
The political news in San Bartolomé de Tirajana is no longer written in party offices, but rather in the urgency of everyday social and economic problems. The political elite in southern Gran Canaria is risking its legitimacy by allowing the war of acronyms to consume its energy, while the resort model generates exclusion and the PSOE positions itself as the useful opposition that proposes real and tangible solutions to the poverty that grows under the shadow of large hotels. Defection, in this context, is a luxury that the tourist heart of the island cannot afford.
