Pedro Ortega has decided to inaugurate a new leadership category at the Canary Islands Confederation of Employers (CCE): that of the president who has no trace of himself in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands. In statements to Canarias7 this Holy Tuesday, Ortega attempted an almost impossible balancing act by claiming that he is not a "politician," an assertion that clashes head-on with the reality of the archives. Between 2015 and 2019, Ortega not only held a public office, but he also sat every week at the table of the Governing Council as Minister of Economy, Industry, Commerce, and Knowledge under the Canary Coalition banner and the presidency of Fernando Clavijo.
For business owners in the south of the island, who suffer from the paralysis of licensing processes and the lack of infrastructure, this split personality is hard to swallow. Ortega tries to sell an image of "private efficiency" versus "public incompetence," forgetting that he himself was part of the inner circle of that administration for an entire term. His current crusade against the "political figurehead" versus the "real solution" is, in essence, a critique of his own legacy, an exercise in institutional cynicism that attempts to erase four years of wielding political power in order to present himself as the savior of a business class that he himself, from within the government, either couldn't or wouldn't streamline.
It is, to say the least, paradoxical that the person who today rails against "excessive bureaucracy" and "rule upon regulation" was the top official responsible for the islands' industrial and commercial policy for four years, overseeing the renewal of the AIEM tax, which is so damaging to tourism in southern Gran Canaria. His complaint about how the administration "blocks" projects in southern Gran Canaria or ignores the deflation of personal income tax to avoid stifling wages seems directed at a mirror. Ortega now criticizes a system he himself designed and implemented, using the tone of an "external manager" who ignores the fact that many of the administrative hurdles he now denounces as president of the employers' association were created or consolidated under his own signature, while driving his official car.
Ortega's criticism of the "solitaire trap" of raising wages without linking them to productivity is legitimate from a business perspective, but it loses its force when his past is examined. If productivity in the Canary Islands has continued to decline while the public sector has inflated, the question is unavoidable: What did Ortega, as regional minister, do to reverse this trend that Ortega, now a business leader, calls a failure? By now blaming the municipalities and "society" for the housing and investment freeze, the head of the Canary Islands Business Confederation (CCE) seems to be seeking political amnesty for his previous management, presenting himself as a technician who was simply "just passing through" to manage things, not to engage in politics.
