By Martin Delfin, Memo from Madrid
Congestion tax, toll fare, road maintenance fee. Call it what you like but the purpose of La Línea de Concepcion Mayor Alejandro Sánchez’s plan to start charging drivers passing through his town on their way to Gibraltar is far from helping to improve Spanish-British relations. This Popular Party mayor says his depressed municipality needs money and this is the one bright way to rake in cash if he charges €5 each way starting in October.
Sánchez’s bright idea has put Madrid on alert. The government, through its Public Works Ministry, has already told Sánchez that he cannot divert traffic from roadway N-351 so that he can charge a toll to the Rock. But Sánchez told Public Works that the detour was needed as his municipality planned on doing some roadworks as well as upgrading the sewer system and rain drains along the distance.
Nice plan if he can get way with it. According to Public Works, about 27,000 vehicles pass to and from Gibraltar each day, 95 percent of them passenger cars. With a €5 charge, Sánchez says that he can pull in at least some €50 million annually – a conservative figure if you only count a vehicle going through once. Of course, he says, heavy trucks with cargo would be charged a higher fee. By the way, he is not calling it a toll fare but instead “a congestion fee” – he is already daydreaming of a gargantuan traffic jam backed up throughout his small municipality, which would do wonders for the town’s local commerce not to mention the street hawkers.
Over at the Rock, they are not happy with this stalwart. The Gibraltarian government said “a litany of illegalities” prevents Sánchez from carrying out his toll scheme and accused the mayor of playing politics at a foreign government’s expense. In Madrid, government lawyers are reportedly preparing a legal opinion that would pretty much shoot down Mayor Sánchez’s plans. One of the arguments they are studying is whether one European Union member state can legally charge a local road fee to enter another EU country. Gibraltar is not an EU member but technicality it is part of the union. Attached to the UK’s south-west constituency, it has representation in the EU parliament.
Sánchez has already begun work on his detour despite the Public Work’s prohibition. As part of his reasoning, he has accused the Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of not doing anything to help his economically challenged municipality. He doesn’t have enough money to pay his 800 town workers, who say they are owed their special biannual pay-out they receive for July. The workers have been holding a series of protests, including setting up barricades on the road leading to Gibraltar. La Línea used to receive a special economic incentive from Madrid of €30 million annually but that was frozen in 2003 by Sánchez’s own PP government, who were governing under José María Aznar at the time. The Socialists say they are willing to work to get La Línea considered a special border town so it can get more money from the central government, but Sánchez wants his road toll and insists on getting it even if it means turning this into an international incident. The mouse who is willing to roar.
PP pricking away
Tensions are flaring from another territory, this time Spanish, where political sensitivities are also being pricked by the Popular Party. Several reported incidents of police brutality in Melilla, the autonomous city Spain holds on a tip of northeast Morocco, has Madrid and Rabat at loggerheads which both governments are trying to play down. It all began when Moroccan government officials asked Spain to explain what it calls a rash of Spanish police beatings and unnecessary arrests of its citizens at the Melilla border crossing. The episodes reached a royal highpoint when King Juan Carlos telephoned Morocco’s King Mohammed VI to remind him that relations between their two nations were good.
This didn’t set well with the PP, which said it didn’t like the king playing the role of “foreign minister.” The Socialist government has decided to send Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba to Rabat this week in an effort to quell tensions. But on Tuesday, in an act designed to make the Socialists look like fools, the opposition PP sent its communications man Esteban Gonzalez Pons to meet with local officials in Melilla. Gonzalez Pons accused the Moroccan government of trying to take advantage “of a weakened” Zaptero government in order “to get something back.”
However, he didn’t say what Morocco’s intentions were. The PP is hoping that the appearance has upstaged Pérez Rubalcaba’s visit later this week, but it only goes to demonstrate how the opposition once again tried to create international incidents in exchange for a couple of cheap political shots.
Martin Delfin writes for the English language version of El Pais
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