Pact-Out: Reporting on government

The Pact, in case you hadn't noticed, is back. It is now in its third Balearic incarnation, its elements having changed but its moniker having not. Previous pacts had been led, as this one is, by PSOE, aka PSIB, but they had not had a singularity of leftist purpose. Past pact members had come from the not-left-wing Unió Mallorquina. The Pact Mark III comprises PSOEPSIB and Més. But this doesn't paint the full picture, as it is a pact with its vitally important hangers-on: Podemos, not actually a part of the government but a pact member in the background, an anything but sleeping partner.

The Pact of parliament is by no means the only pact. Palma has a pact, Calvia has one. Indeed, mostly all local government - island councils, town halls - is now pact-out. There are pacts within pacts - Més is one, as it was already a coalition of parties - and then there are pacts that were specifically created before the elections. Hence, for instance, there are Junts for this or that. Junt means together, a pact, and these Junts (or whatever else they might be called) have subsequently established wider pacts, über-pacts, through which they can govern town halls.

Reporting on this lot is a nightmare, made more terrifying by the existence of offshoots or derivatives. Podemos is the chief offender. As it barred the use of the Podemos name at municipal level, formations at town halls needed related names: Som Palma, Sí Se Puede Calvia and so on. One is faced with the question of whether, whenever there is mention of a governing unit, there has to be an explanation as to its components. In Calvia, for instance, is it always necessary to amplify the meaning of its Pact and so constantly refer to PSOEPSIB, Si Se Puede Calvia (the local wing of Podemos) and Esquerra Oberta, another damn pact within a pact of which Més, its own pact, is a part?

Explanations are, from time to time, required. But they have the propensity to turn reporting of an already confused situation into one of such convolution that the person doing the reporting, so tangled up by explanatory requirements, loses the plot while the poor recipient of the explanation - the reader - loses the will to live.  

Consequently, one hankers for the days when things were a lot less muddled. With the Partido Popular enjoying majorities in government, at the Council of Mallorca and in many municipalities, life was much more simple. PP it was and nothing more. Except for the fact, and this is especially observable in the Spanish media, of an obsession with explanation. The PP would frequently come with the note that it was "centre-right", a description that some might, in any event, take issue with: "right" would often be more accurate. 

Mission to inform and all that, but does this explanatory obsession betray a  patronising tendency, an assumption of ignorance/lack of knowledge on behalf of the reader? Moreover, within the stylising of ruling groups at different levels of  Mallorca's local government, is there a further tendency to reach for a pejorative, an underlying expression of disparagement? When, for instance, Palma's council is referred to as "the left", does this imply some contempt or is it merely a statement of fact? A different statement of fact would be to describe the ruling body as just this - the ruling body, the administration. This is, after all, what it is. Whether right, left, in-between, pact or no pact, why the need for embellishment?

There was, though, a similar process when the PP was in government. Many were the references to the "centre-right", as though the readership were in any doubt. And there was also a tendency to style the government under the PP initials. The party and government were obviously distinct entities, but reporting was such that the regional administration was often the Partido Popular, as though government itself was indeed something separate.

So now we have the Pact, a convenient shorthand perhaps but one which appears to deny this coalition its rightful title: that of the government. And within this Pact there exist the elements, always seemingly necessitating some explanation: Podemos, the party of Pablo Iglesias, a grouping forever to be cast in the image of its leader; Més, the "ecosoberanistas", eco-sovereigntists, a title that can be construed as being loaded with insinuation as much as it might be deemed necessary as an explanation.

The point is, though, that by now we surely know what these parties are about. Don't we? Perhaps we don't. But whether we do or we don't, is it not adequate and also respectful to merely refer to government or to administration or to ruling group? It would seem not, and so the Pact it will be, with its veiled implications that are somehow remote from government.