It was a disturbing scene that unfolded in Santanyi over the past weekend: graffiti bearing slogans like “Germans out”, stickers on cars, hateful messages scrawled on walls. Locals have vented their frustration – in a manner that is not only wrong, but also highly dangerous. What has happened here is not some harmless act of protest, but a hostile act directed deliberately at people. People who live and work on the island, pay taxes – and have long since become part of Mallorca.
Yes, the problems are real. The housing crisis is urgent, and property prices have become unaffordable for many locals. The mass tourism boom is placing a strain on the environment, infrastructure, and the social fabric. In many places, residents already feel like strangers in their own land. To ignore this is to turn a blind eye to the consequences of the unchecked sell-off of the island – above all, to us Germans.
But to distil hatred from this social imbalance is, and remains, unacceptable. When cars with German number plates become targets, when people are, for the first time in their lives, met with hostility simply for being “foreign” – then a red line has been crossed. The shift from frustration to xenophobia is no trivial matter. It is a dangerous fracture in social cohesion. Particularly shameful is that even those affected include people who have long been part of the Mallorcan community – individuals who have lived on the island for decades, who create jobs, who have found a new home here – and are now being met with outright rejection.
Mallorca must confront this debate. But not with vandalism and exclusion – rather with dialogue, political solutions, and the courage to regulate. The problems plaguing the island cannot be pinned on German number plates – and certainly not solved with slogans that evoke darker times. The roots of the crisis do not lie with newcomers, but with years of political failure to regulate the housing market in a socially just and sustainable way. Anyone who wants to take responsibility must first keep to civilised standards. For where anger dictates the language, all that remains in the end is division.