Thousands of people took part this Friday in the May Day demonstration in Palma, which set off from Plaza de España shortly after 11.30 am and wound its way along the avenues to Parc de la Mar under the slogan ‘Rights, not trenches. Wages, housing and democracy’, with opposition to the war in the Middle East also featured prominently.
Before the march, the general secretary of UGT, Pedro Homar, highlighted as the main demands for this May Day the inability of citizens to access decent housing despite wage rises that continue to prove incapable of keeping pace with prices, and the rejection of war. “The world of work must respond with a message of peace,” he said.
CCOO General Secretary José Luis García referred to this year’s chosen slogan and emphasised the decline in purchasing power being suffered by a working class that is “becoming increasingly poorer”. On the issue of housing, García once again called on the President of the Balearic Government, Marga Prohens, to implement policies to curb rising prices and to declare the archipelago a high-demand area. “Prohens is paying more attention to what she is told from Génova than to what working people need,” he added.
For the CCOO representative, the problems faced by working people “are also about democracy”, and he called for youth participation. “Young people need us to be closer to them and to explain the falsehoods of the far right, which seeks to pit worker against worker and wants to go to the trenches,” he stated.
On the political front, the secretary-general of the PSOE in Palma and spokesperson for the Socialists in the Parliament, Iago Negueruela, emphasised in his speech that housing is the missing pillar needed to consolidate improvements already achieved, such as wage and pension increases. Negueruela lamented that in the Balearics, the regional government is leaving 40,000 families who rent flats and are seeing their wages rise.
The demonstration reached the Parc de la Mar, where trade union representatives accused the regional government of governing only for a section of the population and excluding the rest, even going so far as to dehumanise them in the case of migrant regularisation.
Trade unionists have accused the right-wing parties of voting against wage increases, against raising the national minimum wage, against rent controls, and of opposing the regularisation of migrants. “They have dropped the mask,” they stated.
Throughout the march, slogans were heard in support of the working class and against touristification, and on the issue of housing, they called for a major national agreement. During the speeches in the Parc de la Mar, they also called for an agreement on early childhood education. Also in Palma, a demonstration organised by the CNT and CGT marched through the city centre.