In the 2019 electoral spot, Mayor Ada Colau met activist Ada Colau and they had the “most demanding face-to-face of the campaign.” Are you sure you are more useful where you are now? the founder of the PAH asked the mayor. “We came to return the city to whom it belongs, the people,” responded the one from Barcelona en Comú, after acknowledging doubts. A month later, Colau took the reins again thanks to a pact that he found difficult to explain and that involved an investiture with the votes of Manuel Valls.
Ada Colau (Barcelona, 1974) said goodbye this Friday to Barcelona City Hall, which has practically been her home since 2015, especially during the eight years in which she was mayor. He did so with praise for the “rebellious” city, that of the neighborhood struggles from which it comes, and with a severe reproach to the Barcelona elites, whom he called “provincial and greedy.”
His farewell, although it may hide a brand new return in 2027, extends to the political space that he founded and has led in the last decade, that of the Comuns, where everyone knows that it will take time to find a replacement of his caliber.
The departure leaves a feeling of a profound change in the cycle when ten years have passed since the launch of Barcelona en Comú, the mixed candidacy of activists and left-wing politicians who managed to reach the mayor’s office of the Catalan capital propelled by citizen unrest as a result of the crisis. .
During the last decade, Colau has been a symbol for the Catalan left, for the so-called municipalism “of change” that broke out in 2015 in cities such as Madrid, Zaragoza, Valencia or Barcelona itself, and also as a reference for some policies of its own stamp. , as a pioneering anti-eviction unit, the curb on tourist apartments – including the persecution of illegals – or pedestrianization through the so-called superblocks, which have changed the face of the center of the Catalan capital.
But, at the same time, the former mayor has always been a politician in the minority and, therefore, prey to the need to compromise her political objectives with those of groups contrary to her ideas. Starting with the PSC, a so-called “caste” party that he incorporated as a government partner before completing his first year in office. Or the unnatural convergence of interests that led her to tie up the mayor’s office in 2019 at the hands of the former French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. A point-blank vote that four years later was repeated together with the PP, this time to give the mayoralty to the PSC.
Eight years of Colauism in the City Council
Of Colau’s two mandates, the first was the most ambitious, although he did not always achieve his goals. Surrounded by friends and activists such as Jaume Asens, Gerardo Pisarello and Gala Pin, she approved the hotel moratorium, promoted the first housing cooperatives on municipal land and created a public babysitting service to facilitate conciliation. But he did not manage to approve the municipal funeral home or the tram along Diagonal – due to the rejection of ERC and PSC –, he saw how the courts struck down the public dentist and the possibility of municipalizing the water.
The second term was more peaceful politically, with the sustained support of the PSC – without the process breaking their relationship as in 2017 – and the flag pedestrianization project. But it also coincided with the barrage of complaints he received from vulture funds and other business agents.
Colau also had to manage another piece that has never been comfortable for him: that of combining his exclusively Barcelona political aspirations with the need to articulate a movement in the whole of Catalonia and with relations also in the rest of Spain. However, the figure of Colau was a fundamental part of the successes of the Comuns in the cycle that led them to win the general elections in the Catalan demarcations, in 2015 and 2016, just as now with his resignation he has recognized himself as co-responsible for recent results. far from what was expected.
One of the most important contradictions that Colau has faced is Barcelona’s candidacy to host the Copa América. The Comuns were never enthusiastic about the event, which was promoted by their PSC partners, together with the Barcelona business sectors. But Colau, who had already paid a heavy toll among the circles of economic power for his opposition to hosting a branch of the Hermitage Museum, chose to put his face in the race to host in the city a competition that he now says he regrets.
After losing the mayor’s office, Colau joined the opposition, but the decompression that came with leaving that responsibility took her away from the day-to-day life of the institution, assuming from those around her that sooner rather than later she was going to leave the role of councilor. Freed from the institutional corset, she focused her agenda again on activism, whether it was the war in Gaza or the demands of the LGBTI community. And the confirmation of goodbye came with the start of this course.
A farewell that is not definitive, but that closes a cycle
Colau is leaving, but he has always threatened the possibility of returning in 2027, when the municipal elections will once again test the candidacy he raised a decade ago. Definitive or not, the departure of what has been the maximum reference for the Comuns underlines the moment of transition between cycles that the whole of Catalan politics is experiencing, where all the parties – except the PSC – are in a phase of reconfiguration.
Along with Colau’s departure, at the congress that his party will hold on November 16 and 17, the departure of Jéssica Albiach, leader of the party in the Parliament, from the coordinator, the highest body in the Parliament, is also expected to be made official. game. The one who will be promoted is Gemma Tarafa, a councilor with Colau and a person of the former mayor’s greatest confidence, who, however, does not have a public profile comparable to that of either of the two outgoing leaders.
Albiach, however, will remain in a newly created position, as an institutional representative alongside the Minister of Culture Ernest Urtsaun.
The Comuns know that from this next congress they must come out with a new program that strengthens them at the local level, where they have lost a good part of the momentum with which they arrived a decade ago. At the same time, all the agreements that both the central government and the Catalan Government can reach to continue governing go through the formation. A sure wave in which they will miss an address as undisputed as that of Colau.
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