Ada Colau said goodbye to Barcelona City Council this Friday. Supported by her municipal group, of which she has been an undisputed pillar for almost a decade, accompanied by her family, and applauded by the majority of the municipal plenary session – including the mayor and former government partner Jaume Collboni –, Colau has said goodbye to a council in which he burst into activism in 2015 to govern the city for eight years.
With the Palestinian kufiya on her shoulders, which accompanies her wherever she goes since the Israeli war in Gaza, Colau began with a speech of gratitude to the City Hall workers, with special mention to the cleaning workers – “until now I have not “I have seen no man” in that task, he lamented, and he recalled the hardest moments in office, such as the attacks on La Rambla or the management of the pandemic.
Despite not wanting to delve into his government balance, of which he has highlighted having made policies that many told him were impossible, he has mentioned the anti-eviction unit, the superblocks and street pacifications and the participatory budgets as traces of his project of city. With a human team that in 2015 was, according to her, “an anomaly in the system,” she managed to become the first female mayor and from a humble class. “Only in a magical and rebellious city can things as incredible as this happen,” he celebrated, while praising its neighborhoods.
At the other extreme, Colau did not want to leave without reproaching the elites for their role. “What has disappointed me most about the city are its elites: provincial, mediocre and greedy, who think too much about short-term benefits. “It is time for democratic institutions to stop them,” he declared, after recalling that they have had to face twenty complaints during these years that have ended up being archived.
As the speech came to an end, the former mayor has already warned that emotions would take over her words. Thanks then came to his mother, Tina, present in the room, and to his family and children. “They have had to put up with too much crap and smear campaigns,” he lamented, closing by saying that they are a “united, happy and proud” family. And dedicate the last word to her friend Vanesa Valiño, former housing advisor of the council, who is sick with cancer: “She is an example of light, love and courage.”
Town Hall Gold Medal
Both the PSC, which was his minority government partner, as well as Junts and ERC have wished him luck in the new stage and have thanked him, with more or less doses of criticism, for some aspects of his legacy and his esteem for the city. PP and Vox, for their part, have only had reproaches for her.
At the end of the plenary session, and after thanking and praising his career, it was Collboni’s turn, who highlighted his “work, coherence and values.” “Not enough has been said about the complicated political and economic context that it faced, and despite everything the city made its way,” he stated. As with Trias, he has proposed that she receive the City Council’s Gold Medal and, as tradition dictates, he has given her a replica of the mayor’s staff.
An expected goodbye and an uncertain future
After a year in the opposition, Colau cleared up doubts about his future in mid-September with a letter to his militancy in which he announced that he was leaving not only the City Council, but also the leadership of the Comuns. This Friday, the former mayor formalized her resignation from her position as a councillor, during her last Municipal Plenary Session, and in November she will leave the leadership of Catalunya en Comú.
Although in his party no one closes the door on his being able to return for the 2027 elections, Colau has closed with his resignation a period of exactly ten years on the political front line. A journey that began with the launch in 2014 of the Barcelona en Comú candidacy, with which it won the mayor’s office a year later, driven by citizen unrest resulting from the economic and mortgage crisis.
Colau managed to win the position again in the 2019 elections, with the votes of the PSC and Manuel Valls, but she was removed from the mayor’s office in 2023, even though she always remembers that she was a few votes away from the socialist Jaume Collboni, whom she decided to support. in extremis so that he could take the mayor’s seat instead of the convergent Xavier Trias. Since then, she has led the Comuns from the opposition, aware that Collboni did not want her as a government partner.
In this sense, departure also closes another chapter, which is the withdrawal of Collboni’s main rivals in the electoral race and in the plenary session. Before her, Ernest Maragall, from ERC, and Xavier Trias, from Junts, made the same decision.
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