The Balearic Parliament yesterday approved the Law of Urgent Measures for the Sustainability and Circularity of Tourism after hours of debates and almost thirty votes on both the amendments presented and its articles. The new Tourism Law passed the proceedings without, as requested by the PP (and supported by Vox), a prior request for an opinion from the Consell Consultiu. The Popular Party considers that the endorsement of the Consultiu is necessary to guarantee the legality of the four-year moratorium established for the tourist vacancies and to ensure that the competences of the island councils are not invaded.
The Balearic Minister of Tourism, IagoNegueruela, assured that the law is the result of the “generous” and “enormous work of communication” with all the sectors involved, from the hoteliers to the political parties (although he said that the PP was self-excluded), the complementary offer and the unions: “We will not ask if we are in full agreement, but only if we are on the same path”. This is the quote from Goethe used to illustrate the consensus reached: it has not been achieved on each and every article, he acknowledges, but he believes that, in the end, no one is totally opposed to the substance of the law. “Everything in it makes sense,” he says.
For Negueruela, the law “is now a benchmark” which is praised by the Spanish government and “Andorra and Catalonia” are wanting to follow in the same footsteps. “There is a paradigm shift in the leisure industry,” he stressed: “Our positioning as a destination should not be based on intensity,” but on a commitment to quality. Hence the freezing of vacancies for four years: “The debate on the limits is necessary and urgent (…) It is time to focus on quality, not to grow more,” he said, although the spokesman for El PI, Josep Melià, warned him that all he has done is “postpone” that discussion. Negueruela also boasted of having “incorporated the workers” into the law: “We owed it to them as a society”. The new legislation “dignifies” the work of chambermaids, he says.
“I wouldn’t want to crash your idyllic world,” Melià told him shortly after, who despite having managed to incorporate some amendments, wagged his finger at the Minister of Tourism for how he had initiated this process in February, through a decree law: “That’s not how things are done”.
PP will revoke the Tourism Law
The PP councilor Salomé Cabrera warned during the session that the party will revoke the Tourism Law and will present another one that will be “comprehensive, participatory and innovative”. She described the one approved yesterday as a “law of moratorium and tourism decline”. Cabrera called Negueruela a trickster for playing with “the little ball” of the raised beds and the circularity, when “what really mattered to him was the decrease and the moratorium”, which for the PP is “an attack on market freedom and free competition”.
PP: “We have already said that we would not patch up this law. We are working on one of our own”
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