Unió Mallorquina, the Mallorcan party that was key in Balearic politics for 30 years, is refounded 13 years after agreeing to dissolve itself, plagued by serious corruption scandals. Several former leaders, led by Víctor Martí as president of the management company, want to recover a group that disappeared in 2011 after a judge imposed a bail of 1.6 million euros to face possible financial liabilities for cases of corruption.
The announcement has coincided in time with the death of its founder, Jeroni Albertí, a UCD leader who created the formation in 1983 without knowing that he was building a political tool that would end up installing and removing presidents in the Balearic Islands for three decades. UM defined itself as a center regionalist party and was very close to Convergència and the PNV, and with a national ideology of defense of the language and culture of the Islands.
Albertí was the founder of the formation, but the other great figure of this party was Maria Antònia Munar, a woman who accumulated enormous political power with just three deputies of the 59 in the Balearic Parliament. Munar agreed alternately with Francesc Antich (PSOE) and with Jaume Matas (PP), which allowed him to maintain the presidency of the Consell de Mallorca between 1995 and 2007.
Many see Munar’s hand in the refoundation operation since among its promoters are former leaders of the party who were direct collaborators of the former president, such as its general secretary, Damià Nicolau. The promoters of the new UM deny that she is behind this operation and sources close to the former president of the party insist that she is not in the reconstruction process and that she remains far from political life.
The appearance of the party represents a shake-up in the political center space of the Balearic Islands, although the result of this process remains to be seen. This space is now occupied by Proposta per les Illes (PI), a party inherited from UM in which many of its former leaders are active. The PI was left without representation in the Balearic Parliament in the last elections and that is one of the reasons given by the new leaders of UM to defend the need to re-found the party. They consider that the acronym is already stripped of the negative charge left by numerous cases of corruption in the last stage of formation.
The main person accused of these cases was, precisely, Maria Antònia Munar. She was president of the Consell de Mallorca in 1995 thanks to the fact that she obtained three deputies out of 59. The PSOE and the PSM, a left-wing nationalist party, offered her the Presidency of the institution to prevent her from making an agreement with the PP, which was then directed by Jaume Matas. Ella Munar left the position in 2007 to be the president of the Parliament, a position from which she had to resign after being accused of serious cases of corruption that will cost her 16 years in prison. Her two direct collaborators, Miquel Nadal and Bartomeu Vicens, also served prison sentences for collecting bribes from the construction company owned by businessman Ramon Sanhauja, among other cases.
Throughout the last stage of UM, more than 1,000 militants of the party ended up being investigated in various cases and a dozen of them ended up serving sentences, but the party had experienced moments of success since 1983, the year in which the party was founded. autonomous community. Their votes were decisive for Gabriel Cañellas (PP) and not Félix Pons (PSOE) to be the first president in the history of the community.
From then on, practically during all the legislatures, UM was key in the formation of majorities but always chose to agree with the left. Maria Antònia Munar supported the socialist Francesc Antich against Jaume Matas in 1999 and did so again in 2007, despite the fact that in the previous four years, Matas, who had returned to the Balearic Islands after leaving the Ministry of the Environment with José María Aznar allowed him to govern the Consell de Mallorca alone to guarantee future support from UM.
The new president of the management company, Víctor Martí, assures that the objective of the formation is to run for elections in 2027 and be able to be key again to decide the majorities on the islands. In principle, it does not seem that they are going to have it easy in a community that has undergone a profound social and demographic transformation caused by an uncontrolled increase in the population in the last 30 years.
In any case, whatever happens in the elections, if they are presented, the new provisional president says that it will have been worth it and specifies that, if they fail, at least it will have been the citizens of the Balearic Islands, and not the judges. , who decide the end of the training.
