Ibi Stages a Coup, and Pays It Out in Flour.

On the twenty-eighth of December, the Valencian town of Ibi hands its government to a group of married men who intend to misrule it thoroughly, and to bill the citizenry for the privilege in flour.

The date is the Day of the Holy Innocents, the calendar's licensed occasion for inversion, and the desk reads the whole affair as a filing whose entire purpose is to be filed incorrectly.

The men call themselves Els Enfarinats, the Floured Ones. Dressed in mock-military finery, they seize the town square, declare a body of preposterous new laws, and levy fines on anyone found in breach of statutes invented that morning.

The revenue is real even where the law is not; the collected fines are given to charity, which the desk notes as a rare instance of a coup with an audited disbursement line.

Order, such as it is, is contested by a faction called La Oposicio, who dispute the new regime with the only instruments available: eggs by the thousand, flour by the sackful, firecrackers, and dense clouds of coloured smoke.

By nightfall the ledger balances: everyone is fined, everyone is floured, no one is spared.

The tradition is held to be some two centuries old, and its choreography is well understood by every counterparty on the square. This is not a brawl that got out of hand; it is misgovernment performed to exact and cheerful specification.

The desk observes that the payload is, at bottom, breakfast, the humblest possible materials elevated for a day into instruments of state.

When the powder settles, the elected authorities are returned their offices, the streets are hosed clean, and Ibi resumes governing itself in the ordinary, less photogenic way.

Compliance verdict: a fully consensual carnival of misrule, throws mutual, injuries trivial, proceeds routed to charity, and power handed back on schedule. The desk finds the coup impeccably compliant, which rather defeats its point, and approves it warmly regardless.