According to a study conducted by Regio Plus Consulting on behalf of the Més party, 26.4% of Majorcans feel more Majorcan than they do Spanish, while 52.8% feel as Majorcan as they do Spanish. The co-director of the consulting firm, Jaume Garau, says that “we haven’t made distinctions between those who feel specifically Majorcan or Balearic and those who consider themselves Catalan, though it indicates that they feel more associated with here than with there”. Garau adds that “this sense of Majorca-ness or Balearic-ness is on the increase”. In fact, the 26.4% consists of 10.4% who feel themselves to be only Majorcan (or Catalan), to which are added the 16% who are more Majorcan than Spanish.
In addition to the 52.8% who are even when it comes to being Majorcan and Spanish, 8% believe they are more Spanish than Majorcan, while 7.5% say they are only Spanish.
Garau, who was behind the Més campaign for the regional elections, explains that “it should be taken into account that there has been a great deal of immigration into the Balearics over the past twenty years. At the same time, the number of people identifying with ‘here’ has gone up”.
The study was undertaken at the start of September via 1,011 telephone interviews and has a margin of confidence of 95.5%.
It reveals a move towards the left among Majorcan society, with 25.2% saying that they are left-wing, while 10.1% suggest they are centre-left. 18.3% of the population place themselves in the centre, with 9.3% centre-right and 11.2% right-wing. Both extreme left and extreme right sentiments are shown to be almost completely irrelevant.
A further finding of the survey is that 25% of voters were swayed during the election campaign in the spring, while 59% were not persuaded to change. Those who voted for Més, it would seem, were ones most influenced by the campaign. Més received 6,700 votes from those who had previously voted for the Partido Popular, 6,000 for PSOE and 3,000 for the United Left. PSOE, meanwhile, benefited from 14,100 PP voters switching to it, while 6,000 former PP voters opted for Podemos. Ironic though when according to the 2014 report into the use of the Catalan language, more than a third of the population in the Balearics doesn’t know how to speak it.