BarcelonaIn 2019, an election announcement from the commons made a fortune in which an Ada Colau, already mayor, faced the questions of Ada Colau, spokesperson for the PAH. “Surely you are more useful where you are now?”, he asked himself then. A dilemma – between the politician and the activist, between reality and expectation – that has conditioned the trajectory of the leader of the commons, who this Friday will leave the City Council nine and a half years after entering it through the big door, turned into the first female mayor in the history of the city. A journey of almost a decade in which Colau has managed to drag the debates on housing and tourism to the center of the city’s agenda, but which has been very far from resolving them.
The exercise of the position was modulated by that mayor who, with the arrival of movements in defense of housing, in her first days traveled by subway in Nou Barris to stop evictions or went to support Telefónica workers who had closed at the headquarters of Mobile. A time when his government opened some of the measures that will end up being his legacy. Loud battles such as the ban on opening new hotels in the center of the city or the increase in inspections to close illegal tourist flats, the promotion of social measures such as the municipal dentist or the public funeral home – finally buried – and the bet for major mobility projects such as the superblocks and the definitive tram connection along Diagonal.
Along the way, Colau had to face several crises – the attacks, the pandemic or the judgment of the Process – and gradually softened some stances. He parked the belligerence against Mobile until he made it his own, found a way to build bridges with some voices in the business and financial sector and ended up endorsing projects like the America’s Cup. The transformative impulse of the first months – “We wanted to change too many things at once”, admit leaders who shared those beginnings with her – also ran into the reality of the City Council’s bureaucratic machinery, of the lack of support in plenary and, above all, of the aggressiveness of its enemies, who fought it by land, sea and air. Also, and above all, through the courts, where his government managed to accumulate twenty complaints that the justice system ended up filing. The confrontation with the de facto powers exacerbated the polarization of the city around the figure of the mayoress, to the point of turning any debate about the city into a plebiscite about her.
The Valls operation
The same de facto powers, however, were the ones that fueled the Manuel Valls operation which, to block Ernest Maragall’s way, ended up making it easier for Colau to have a second term. The votes of the PSC and the three councilors of the former French prime minister allowed him to revalidate the position in a vote that showed how the will to exercise power prevailed in the debate about the activist. In addition to wearing it down, that day opened a virtually unhealable wound with independence, with whom until then it had made balances during the Process and the months before the 1-O referendum.
Jaume Collboni had a lot to do with that play, a name without which Colau’s passage through the City Council cannot be explained. Together they ruled for two years in the first term and almost all of the second. In 2023 it was Colau who, like the PP, gave his votes to Collboni to block the way for another pro-independence mayor: Xavier Trias. Now it is the same Collboni who, closing the door of the municipal government, has ended up pushing her towards the exit door of the City Hall.
The question about the future
Colau leaves the City Council to recover an activism that now focuses on the international side, with the idea of teaching for a season in Italy and rethinking a left that, he says, has lost part of the connection with the street that made it successful in 2015. The first female mayor in the history of Barcelona will go down the steps of the City Hall this Friday without knowing if she will go up them again. It does, however, leave the door open for a return in the face of the 2027 elections. Even now, the beginning and end of everything that happens in the commons, the decision will, as always, be theirs.
