Pedro Martín will not have to wait for the PSOE congress in Tenerife – which will be held next March – to revalidate his position as general secretary. He has already exceeded the maximum number of endorsements and the probability of an alternative candidate is, more or less, equal to zero. But his success isn’t exactly epic. Martín will be secretary general again due to the non-appearance of alternatives, due to the resignation of public officials and party cadres, because the Tenerife PSOE – fifteen years ago the most powerful political organization in the Archipelago – is a logo taking over a desert lot. What has happened in the PSOE of Tenerife to reach this situation? How is it that the recovery of important quotas of political and institutional power –including nothing less than the Island Council– has not served to galvanize and project the organization?
The most immediate responsibility falls, as is obvious, on Pedro Martín himself. He was a magnificent mayor of Guía de Isora where –according to some socialist mouths– he should never have left. But that was precisely the problem. After twenty years of good management and absolute majorities, Martín was bored like a pearl in an oyster. He first tried to escape by applying for (and obtaining) a seat in the Parliament of the Canary Islands. He resigned after two and a half years and settled back in the South. He arrived in 2017 at the general secretariat supposedly representing the most critical sector with Ángel Víctor Torres, the defender of the interests of Tenerife – which many understood to be neglected – against the regional leadership, and won the game over Gloria Gutiérrez. But surprisingly, Martín showed in a very short time a creepy allergy to leadership and its commitments. Even in the face of a crisis as acute and explosive as the one that occurred in the Arona town hall, he preferred to absent himself and let the regional management take charge, which incidentally did the same in favor of the federal authority. He, too, has not known how to build a leadership through the presidency of the Cabildo. As mayor, Pedro Martín worked a minimum of twelve hours; Since he has chaired the Cabildo, he rarely arrives at the office before half past eight in the morning and at six in the afternoon he sets out on his way back –in an official car– to Guía de Isora. He has always ignored the convenience of having a home, no matter how temporary, in the island’s capital. He does not maintain regular or systematic contact with local groups and with the socialist mayors, he mainly uses the telephone and WhatsApp. No one knows his political and social project for Tenerife and his government is an inefficient set of Taifa kingdoms and a pan of jumbled egos, with a vice president, Enrique Arriaga, who looks like a butler suspected of all imaginable symbolic crimes in a serial film b.
The party offers a flat encephalogram in the last four years. Partisan activity, indeed, is miniscule and erratic. The Tenerife PSOE suffers from a paralyzing fragmentation and public office is understood as a dead end for political promotion. The mayors are concentrated in their municipalities; the smartest, most timely or opportunistic have run towards the broad and comfortable and silky regional government. No one wants to practice the old cursus honorum whereby you started out as a councilor and ended up as a councilor to the Executive or bigwig of a Town Council. It’s all quite poor and threadbare and with very little interest for young people and above all, for professionals willing to invest time and sacrifices in public life. A weak and agoraphobic leadership, a rickety partisan apparatus, exhausted and without ideas, a fragmentation of wills and interests: that is what, and not a successful career, has ensured a second term for Pedro Martín. No one wants that purple scrubby. Perhaps the president of the Cabildo de Tenerife either. The first resigned is him.
