The former mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, is preparing to leave Barcelona City Hall. It is a matter of days or weeks, and sources close to her predict that she will announce it on the 14th, during the tenth anniversary party of Barcelona en comú, the party she founded and with which she won the municipal elections in 2015. Asked insistently over the last year about her future, the former mayor has maintained that she would stay “in Barcelona”: sometimes without specifying where, other times assuring that she would stay at City Hall as a councillor. What is gaining more and more strength are the voices asking her to stand again as a candidate for the mayor of Barcelona in 2027. Her party, whose ethical code only allows two terms for elected officials, made an exception when she stood in 2023.
Colau had offers to join the Sumar wing of Pedro Sánchez’s government but she rejected them for a personal reason: not to distance herself from her family after eight years of intense dedication to the mayor’s office. Now her entourage places her in some international project linked to cities and some sources say that she is going to Italy to teach at the Feltrinelli foundation in Milan and has been invited by other international cities. She speaks perfect Italian. Asked by this newspaper, the former mayor responds that whatever she has to communicate she will do so in front of her people. The same has been communicated to the governing bodies of Barcelona en comú and Cataluña en comú, via chats. But in the City Council there are administrative staff who know of her decision to leave.
Internally, the departure of its leader from active politics, announced this week by The Confidentialcoincides with key dates: the celebration of the tenth anniversary of Barcelona en comú, and the National Assembly of Catalunya en comú (which has a three-way leadership between Colau, Jessica Albiach and Candela López) in November. In both cases, the future of their leadership is on the table. A giant melon in a political space where Colau is everything: founder, leader and a political asset whose replacement has not yet been addressed.
The Comuns are coming off a major electoral setback and are self-critical of it. They lost the mayoralty of Barcelona, but facilitated the investiture of Jaume Collboni. The presence of Colau in the council is an obstacle for the PSC, if it ever wanted to, to integrate the Comuns into its minority government. In the Parliament, in the last elections the Comuns only kept the deputies for Barcelona. But the big blow was the last European elections, when Irene Montero’s candidacy obtained more votes than Jaume Asens’s.
At the City Council, the person with the best chance of leading the municipal group is the number two, Janet Sanz. At an organic level, Gemma Tarafa, who is part of Colau’s personal core of trust, has also gained a lot of strength in recent times: she was in the founding group, held a technical position in the first term of the Commons Government in the City Council, and a political position in the second. Several sources see a greater role in the future.
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