Is
this the world’s most radical mayor?
When
Ada Colau was elected mayor of Barcelona, she became a figurehead of
the new leftwing politics sweeping Spain. The question she now faces
is a vital one for the left across Europe – can she really put her
ideas into practice?
by Dan Hancox
Thursday 26 May 2016
06.00 BST
It was the early
evening of 5 February 2013, and seated among grave-looking men in
suits, a woman named Ada Colau was about to give evidence to a
Spanish parliamentary hearing. “Before saying anything,” she
began, “I’d just like to make one thing clear. I am not an
important person. I have never held office or been the president of
anything … The only reason I am here is that I am a momentarily
visible face of a citizens’ movement.”
Colau was there to
discuss the housing crisis that had devastated Spain. Since the
financial crisis, 400,000 homes had been foreclosed and a further
3.4m properties lay empty. In response, Colau had helped to set up a
grassroots organisation, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH),
which championed the rights of citizens unable to pay their mortgages
or threatened with eviction. Founded in 2009, the PAH quickly became
a model for other activists, and a nationwide network of leaderless
local groups emerged. Soon, people across Spain were joining together
to campaign against mortgage lenders, occupy banks and physically
block bailiffs from carrying out evictions.
Ten minutes into
Colau’s 40-minute testimony she broke from the script. Her voice
cracking with emotion, she turned her attention to the previous
speaker, Javier Rodriguez Pellitero, the deputy general secretary of
the Spanish Banking Association: “This man is a criminal, and
should be treated as such. He is not an expert. The representatives
of financial institutions have caused this problem; they are the same
people who have caused the problem that has ruined the entire economy
of this country – and you keep calling them experts.”
When she had
finished, the white-haired chair of the parliament’s economic
committee turned to Colau and asked her to withdraw her “very
serious offences” in slandering Pellitero. She shook her head and
quietly declined.
The “criminal”
video became a media sensation, earning Colau condemnation in some
quarters and heroine status in others. A poll for the Spanish
newspaper El País a few weeks later revealed that 90% of the
country’s population approved of the PAH. The group’s work
continued. In July 2013, Colau was photographed in Barcelona being
dragged away by riot police from a protest against a bank that had
refused to negotiate with an evicted family.
Two years later,
that image went viral, powered by the extraordinary news that the
same T-shirted activist had just been elected the new mayor of
Barcelona.
On the day of her
inauguration, Colau addressed supporters of all ages gathered on the
cobblestones in Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona’s old town, thanking
them for “making the impossible possible”. Some waved the
tricolour of the Second Spanish Republic, which was declared in the
very same square in April 1931; its egalitarian ideals buried in the
rubble of the civil war five years later.
The date of Colau’s
victory – 24 May 2015 – was to be, in the words of one
spray-painted graffiti slogan, “a day that will last for years”.
Colau had been elected mayor on behalf of Barcelona en Comú, a new
“citizens’ movement” backed by several leftwing parties. She
became the city’s first ever female mayor, and BComú the first new
party to gain power after 35 years dominated by the centre-left PSC
and centre-right CiU.
The date was not
only significant in Barcelona. BComú was one of several new groups
that had defeated the established parties to win power in eight major
Spanish cities, including Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza. These new
“mayors of change” became symbols of hope for what progressives
in Spain sometimes call la nueva politica.
It has become
commonplace across the western world to talk of “new politics” in
response to voter apathy, economic crises, corruption and the decline
of established political parties. In Spain, however, the phrase has a
ring of truth to it. After years of social upheaval following the
financial crisis, widespread uprisings against political and business
elites have transformed the country’s political landscape. Just as
the Indignados, who occupied Spanish squares in their millions in the
summer of 2011, inspired the global Occupy movement, it was in Spain,
too, that this energy was first channelled into political movements
capable of contesting elections, such as the leftwing populist party
Podemos.
Colau has been
involved every step of the way, and as mayor of the country’s
second-biggest city, she now possesses real political power –
arguably more so than Podemos, which came third in the Spanish
general election last December. The question Colau now faces is a
vital one for the left across Europe: can she put her radical agenda
into practice?
When I first met
Colau last autumn, she was in the middle of an unusual transition,
adapting from grassroots activism to life as an elected politician.
Having started out at BComú’s spartan office, populated by young
people hot-desking on laptops, she was now installed in Barcelona’s
14th-century city hall, with its marble columns, stained glass and
Miró statues.
Her calendar had
been taken over by a succession of official mayoral duties:
gladhanding, exchanging gifts and small talk with dignitaries –
death by a thousand micro-ceremonies. The demands on her time are
especially intense, since it is central to BComú’s principles and
media strategy that the organisation’s figurehead stays on the same
level as her supporters, taking public transport and attending
neighbourhood BComú meetings where possible.
She cut her own pay
from €140,000 to €28,600 and replaced her predecessor’s Audi
with a more efficient mayoral minivan
In the weeks
following her victory, Colau signalled what might be new about the
new politics, with a series of headline-grabbing reforms. “This is
the end of a political class removed from the people,” she
announced, cutting expense accounts and salaries of elected
officials. She reduced her own pay from €140,000 to €28,600,
slashed the budget for her own inauguration ceremony, and replaced
her predecessor’s Audi with a more efficient mayoral minivan. She
suggested withdrawing the annual €4m subsidy to Barcelona’s Grand
Prix circuit, restored school meal subsidies to the city’s poorest
children, and levied fines worth a total of €60,000 on banks that
owned vacant properties. (At the posturing end of the spectrum of
political action, she removed a bust of the recent King of Spain,
Juan Carlos I, from the city hall’s council chamber.)
She also spent a
night out with a homeless charity, helping to count how many people
were sleeping rough in Barcelona (almost 900), met mobile phone
company workers who were on strike, joined a demonstration against a
controversial immigrant detention centre in the city, and returned to
speak at the very same local assemblies that had brought BComú to
power in the first place.
These initial moves
encouraged Colau’s supporters, but the challenge most likely to
define her time in office will be taming Barcelona’s tourist
industry. In its transformation, since the 1992 Olympics, into the
self-styled capital of the Mediterranean, and the fourth-most-visited
city in Europe, Barcelona has become a victim of its own success. In
the old town, evictions are common – a direct result of rents being
driven up by tourist apartments – and residents complain that their
neighbourhoods have become unlivable. “You really can’t walk down
some streets in the summer,” one local told me, “as in, you
physically can’t fit.”
The scale of the
problem is made clear by a few simple figures: in 1990, Barcelona had
1.7 million visitors making overnight stays – only a little more
than the population of the city; in 2016, the number has risen to
more than eight million. In the intervening period, infrastructure
and accommodation have been improved and expanded – pavements
widened, signage increased, tour buses rerouted – but the problem
is a fundamental one. Barcelona is a relatively small city. It is not
London, Paris or New York. Major attractions such as the Sagrada
Familia and Parc Güell are located in the middle of residential
neighbourhoods, not surrounded by the open space they need to
accommodate millions of visitors.
Tourism has grown
enormously in Barcelona. In 1990 there were 1.7 million overnight
visitors; in 2016 there more more than 8 million.
As tourism has
exploded, radically reshaping the city, the question of who Barcelona
is ultimately for has become increasingly insistent. “Any city that
sacrifices itself on the altar of mass tourism,” Colau has said,
“will be abandoned by its people when they can no longer afford the
cost of housing, food and basic everyday necessities.” Everyone is
proud of Barcelona’s international reputation, Colau told me, but
at what cost? “There’s a sense that Barcelona could risk losing
its soul. We need to seek a fair balance between the best version of
globalisation, and keeping the character, identity and life of the
city. This is what makes it attractive – it is not a monumental
city, and it is not a world capital like Paris – its main feature
is precisely its life, its plurality, its Mediterranean diversity.”
“We want visitors
to get to know the real Barcelona,” she said – “not a
‘Barcelona theme park’ full of McDonald’s and souvenirs,
without any real identity.” Even in the last few years, the change
in Barcelona’s old town is noticeable. The area is no longer
dominated by locally owned restaurants, decked with laminated
pictures of sangria and tortillas, or little shops selling matador
costumes and Gaudí tea towels. Now its narrow cobbled streets are
watched over by American Apparel, Starbucks, H&M, Disney and Foot
Locker. Every now and then, as you stand in the Barrio Gotic and
wonder whether the locals who refer to Barcelona as a “tourist
theme park” are being hyperbolic, a bike tour – if you’re
particularly unlucky, a Segway tour – will spin around a tight
corner and you will have to jump to avoid being body-slammed into an
oversized paella dish.
While visitors come
for the Gaudí mosaics, al fresco drinking and tapas, there is
another side to Barcelona’s culture – a history of barricades,
pitched battles with police, and deeply held local neighbourhood
identities – that long predates the rise of the tourist industry.
In the early 20th century, this rebellious side of the city earned
Barcelona the epithet la rosa de foc (the rose of fire). It was there
that the radical trade union, the CNT, was founded; by 1919, it had
more than 250,000 members in Barcelona alone. That same year, a
44-day-general strike held in the city secured for Spain the world’s
first national law on an eight-hour working day.
Colau is not shy
about expressing her respect for this heritage. She was born in 1974,
in the twilight months of Franco’s dictatorship, only a few hours
after the execution of the prominent Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig
Antich – an event that Colau has described as formative. Last
autumn, she laid a wreath in honour of the anniversary of the
execution of Catalan anarchist and educationalist Francesc Ferrer i
Guàrdia. It was, she said, thanks to the legacy of figures such as
him that she, as an “activist, rebel and Catalan”, could become
mayor of the city.
Colau grew up in
Barcelona’s Guinardó neighbourhood, playing in the streets with
her three sisters and other local children – the idealised
Mediterranean upbringing where public space is everyone’s living
room. She grew up in a politicised household and participated in her
first protests, at the age of 15, against the first Gulf war. She
went on to earn a degree in philosophy at the University of Barcelona
and never considered becoming a politician. Later, she studied
theatre for a year. When she was 27, she even appeared in a
short-lived sitcom about three sisters called Dos + Una – she was
the “una”, the eldest of two twins.
It was at the turn
of the millennium, as the post-cold-war radical left began to
coalesce around a series of anti-globalisation protests in the US and
Europe, that Colau became more actively involved in politics. She
recalls speaking on the telephone to friends in Genoa during the 2001
anti-G8 protests, after a police raid had left 63 protesters
hospitalised. It is this period, she believes, that laid the
groundwork for Spain’s new wave of leftwing politics. “I got
involved in 2001 with anti-globalisation movements, against the war
in Iraq and the World Bank, and global warming,” she told me. “For
hundreds of thousands of people, this was the beginning of their
involvement with politics, and I still see the influence of this
period at work today.”
Colau spent the
first years of the new millennium embroiled in activism, protesting
and campaigning against wars, poor housing and gentrification. While
working for the PAH, she developed her distinctive style of speech,
which rests on a sincere, if carefully crafted, populism. She has
said that she wants to “feminise” politics and avoids macho or
old-left rhetoric. It is hard to imagine her saying, as the Podemos
leader Pablo Iglesias once did, that “Heaven is not taken by
consensus – it is taken by assault.” Instead, in speeches and
interviews Colau returns again and again to a few central themes:
human rights and democracy, participation, inclusion, justice. When I
used the word “radical” at one point, she challenged it, “But
what is radical? We are in a strange situation where defending
democracy and human rights becomes radical.”
A key part of
Colau’s appeal is that, unlike many politicians, she is not afraid
to show emotion. The famous 2013 parliamentary hearing was by no
means the only time she has cried, or been close to tears, on camera.
At rallies during the mayoral election campaign, she used the whole
stage, gesticulating and speaking passionately about the city’s
most marginalised residents – women and children and pensioners and
migrants and the unemployed – only letting herself uncoil from the
performance once it was over and the BComú supporters were on their
feet.
In person she is the
same, speaking quickly and seriously, not seeming to pause for breath
– then, when the message is delivered, she relaxes, often breaking
out in laughter. When I met her on BComú’s symbolic 100th day in
power, it was the middle of the Merce, Barcelona’s week-long autumn
cultural festival. That week it genuinely felt as though the doors of
the city hall had been thrown open to the people: normally protected
by security guards, the courtyard inside was thronged with festival
performers and their families, in traditional Catalan folk costumes
of red shirts and white trousers; there were piles of rucksacks on
the floor, excited children darting about, and a baby being changed
on an ancient oak bench.
From the moment of
her election victory, Colau had echoed the Zapatistas by promising to
“govern by obeying the people”, and that night she delivered a
speech of studied humility. “Never trust in our virtue or our
ability to represent you completely,” she told her supporters.
“Throw us out if we don’t do what we said we’d do ... but be
conscious that we can’t do everything on day one.” It was a
response to the paradox at the heart of Spain’s new leftwing
politics, which depends upon a small number of charismatic leaders.
In Barcelona, for instance, the remarkable collective victory against
the establishment by a crowdfunded citizens’ platform, formed only
11 months before the election was built around the appeal of the one
woman whose face was on all the posters
In one of her most
high-profile speeches of the election campaign, at a rally in
September 2014, Colau addressed the grey areas in Spain’s new
populism. “They will ask us: ‘Who are you?’ Let’s not be so
arrogant as to say we’re ‘everyone’. But we are the people on
the street. We’re normal people. We’re simple people, who talk to
our neighbours each day, who, unlike professional politicians, use
public transport every day, work in precarious jobs every day, and
who see how things are every day.” Colau still lives in a modest
flat near the Sagrada Familia with her husband Adrià Alemany –
with whom she wrote two books about the housing crisis – and her
young son Lucas. With Gaudí’s gargantuan basilica at its heart,
and three million visitors a year filling the pavements of an
otherwise quiet, residential neighbourhood, it is an area that
exemplifies Barcelona’s identity crisis.
As Colau has found
out, the problem with being the people’s champion, is that not all
the people want the same things. In one part of Barcelona’s old
town, tensions over tourist excess have spilled over into outright
hostility. Tucked away from the sea, Barceloneta’s narrow streets
are lined with blocks of flats displaying the barrio’s blue and
yellow flag, with a crest featuring a lighthouse and a boat. These
days, they are often accompanied by another popular flag, bearing the
stencilled Catalan slogan “Cap pis turistic” (No tourist flats).
For centuries,
Barceloneta was a traditional working-class fishing district, until
the beach on its perimeter underwent extensive regeneration for the
1992 Olympics. The area is now lined with expensive surf shops,
rickshaw drivers, sellers of tourist tat and beach volleyballs.
Locals complain that the cost of living has shot up and the hordes of
tourists often make for bad neighbours.
Tourist misbehaviour
peaked in Barceloneta one Friday morning in August 2014, when three
exuberant young Italian men spent several hours wandering around the
area naked. Photographs of the streaking holidaymakers quickly
circulated on social media and a series of anti-tourist protests
followed. When I visited last year, the area was plastered with
posters put up by the city hall, asking in several languages “Do
you know if you’re in an illegal tourist apartment?’ Another in
the same series instructed: “Don’t use the street as a toilet.”
As Colau has found
out, the problem with being the people’s champion, is that not all
the people want the same things
Colau’s stated
priority is to move Barcelona away from what she considers “massified
tourism”, with no thought for sustainability, strategic planning or
input from the public. “Until now, all we have had were private
initiatives doing what they wanted,” Colau told me. “This has led
to a model that is out of control.” She added: “We suffered the
same short-sighted model here with the real estate bubble. We are
trying to prevent the same mistakes happening again with tourism.”
Soon after her
election, Colau announced a year-long moratorium on new hotels and
tourist apartments, disrupting over 30 planned hotel projects. In
March 2016, the city hall extended the ban, and is proposing to
direct any future expansion to the periphery of the city, away from
the over-burdened old town. City hall has also fined Airbnb and its
rival Homeaway €60,000 each for advertising illegal tourist
apartments – ones that had not been registered and were therefore
not necessarily paying taxes or fees. In April, city hall announced
it was looking into a specific tourist tax levied on those not making
overnight stays: cruise ship passengers and day-trippers. Many of
these initiatives have come from Ada Colau’s new tourism council,
which features input from ordinary Barcelonans, as well as the
industry.
Even so, many locals
are still unhappy. On the first day of the Merce, as the crowds
gathered in Plaça Saint Jaume for Colau’s ceremonial opening of
the festival, the Barceloneta neighbourhood association staged a
protest. The locals, many of them accompanied by young children,
faced the city hall waving blue and yellow flags, banging drums and
blowing whistles. “Life in Barceloneta has become unbearable,”
Kico Casas bellowed to me above the din. He and his fellow activists
are campaigning for a total abolition of tourist flats in Barcelona.
“Speculation has led to so many rent rises,” said Casas, “and
now we can’t afford to live in the neighbourhood our grandparents
lived in. Meanwhile, the drunken tourists and their parties make
ordinary life unbearable.”
On a demonstration
the previous week, the Barceloneta neighbourhood association had
marched to the city’s Airbnb offices, wheeling a cannon alongside
them – a theatrical homage to the area’s marine heritage – and
fired a fake shot at the apartment rental company. On that occasion
they had singled out Colau, too, with a homemade banner reading:
“Mayor: three months without solutions. Well?” It was the first
time Colau’s core supporters, or at least one strand of them, had
faced up to their champion.
On the other side of
the old town from Barceloneta lies the Raval, another area with a
long history of poverty and strident working-class solidarity. One
afternoon, I attended a community discussion event here, which took
place on ground where a factory once stood. The empty plot was due to
have a luxury hotel built on it – instead, the site was occupied by
local activist groups who had turned it into a “social space”,
covered in graffiti art decrying police brutality and city branding
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But the difficult
truth is that for many Barcelonans – not just a wealthy elite of
cruise ship owners, hoteliers and landlords – the tourist economy
has been a source of salvation. “For the majority of people sharing
their home, it’s about making ends meet,” Ricardo Ramos,
spokesman for the Barcelona Association of Neighbours and Hosts,
explained over lunch near Sagrada Familia. “We have pensioners who
are trying to pay the mortgage, or the rent, and live on €400 a
month – and that’s impossible in Barcelona. Some of these people
would be on the streets within two months, without that extra
income.”
Ramos’s
organisation, which was founded in April last year, is supported by
Airbnb. Its members have organised their own protests – with
slogans, written in English, such as “Tourists come home!” ,
instead of “Tourists go home”. Ramos explained that, as well as
helping home sharers, the type of tourism encouraged by companies
such as Airbnb generates income for small shops located outside the
obvious tourist centres, and provides a more local and authentic
experience than a fleeting walk around La Rambla and a night’s
sleep in an international hotel chain. Airbnb points to a 2014 study
that found that more than half of the company’s Barcelona hosts had
used the platform to help pay their mortgage, rent or bills – in
the process, generating €128m and creating more than 4,000 jobs in
the previous year.
Like his opponents
in Barceloneta and the Raval, Ramos argued that if Colau were really
of the people, she would be supporting them: “Given that Mayor
Colau comes from a socialist background, I don’t understand why
empowering citizens to take action to avoid being evicted from their
homes is so difficult to understand. We should be on the same side.
Home sharing and tourism has been stigmatised in Barcelona – some
groups of neighbours have been out on patrols, at night, to see where
the tourist flats are. And Mayor Colau doesn’t stop it.”
“I think Mayor
Colau doesn’t understand the difference between being in an
election campaign, and being in power,” Ramos continued. “When
you are in the campaign, you talk to your audience, that’s fine –
but once you are in power, you rule for all citizens, regardless of
whether they voted for you or not.”
With a minority
government of only 11 of 41 councillors, Colau and BComú have
required support from other parties to get new legislation passed.
They have also faced hostility from the business community and media
– not to mention an intransigent local bureaucracy. The threat that
BComú’s enemies posed to stable governance was clear from the
outset – even before the mayoral inauguration, several senior
police officers resigned in protest at the election of Colau. “For
them, there are no decent police,” said one spokesman. “We’re
all torturers.”
BComú has
encountered substantial opposition in the council chamber from
established parties keen to block its more radical reforms and expose
its inexperience. In October, two parties which were nominally allied
with BComú – the centre-left PSC and the leftwing Catalan
nationalists ERC – voted to reverse Colau’s moratorium on new
hotel building (it was renewed in March nonetheless). The following
month, the PSC leader Jaume Collboni described the measures as
“indiscriminate”, accusing Colau of ideological purism and
“profound ignorance of the terrain” in “a complex city like
Barcelona”. He proposed that the novices in BComú would benefit
from his party’s governing experience, and that only a co-governing
pact with the PSC would stabilise the “extreme weakness” of
Colau’s administration.
On 10 May, Colau
finally relented, and announced just such a pact. BComú will be
bolstered by the PSC’s four councillors, and Collboni will become
deputy mayor. Perhaps more importantly than votes in the city council
chamber, the PSC will give Colau’s administration access to a
network of contacts, which includes influential bureaucrats, union
officials, commercial and civil society associations.
As with any
governing coalition, behind-the-scenes politicking and media spin
will be vital in determining which party is judged to have been the
“winner” from the deal; in the short term, it is hard not to see
it as a defeat for Colau. In January 2015, four months before the
election, she had ruled out just such a pact with the PSC, whom she
called one of the “parties of the regime”, and as such, “part
of the problem, not the solution”.
Some activists are
sceptical about what this compromise will do to BComú; according to
an article published last week in the leftwing newspaper Diagonal,
the PSC pact is “like getting a dominatrix into bed, with the hope
they will assume a submissive role”. Events in Barcelona in the
last few days risk further alienating some of Colau’s core
supporters. The eviction of squatters from a former bank that they
had turned into a social centre led to violent clashes with riot
police. She angered some people by refusing to get involved in what
she said was a private dispute (although she has also offered to find
the squatters an alternative site).
These kinds of
setbacks raise a bigger question for BComú supporters and those of
other new parties such as Podemos: was it all worth the effort? Might
they just have been better off lobbying for change from outside their
various parliaments?
For some experienced
observers, taking activist politics into the institutions of power
was always going to be a challenge. Oriol Nel·lo is professor of
urban geography at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and a
former PSC representative in the Catalan regional parliament. In last
year’s municipal election, he backed Barcelona en Comú. Grassroots
activists should not think of city hall “as a fortress”, he told
me over coffee in a cloistered square in the Raval. “It’s better
to think of it as a very complex arena, in which you can manage to
conquer certain positions – knowing that these institutions are
more likely, a lot of the time, to give way to other pressures,
coming from the economic sector or from business. But that doesn’t
mean you can’t do anything within the institutions,” he smiled.
“You can change plenty of things.” For Nel·lo, Colau’s
determination to rebalance the effects of tourism in favour of
Barcelona’s citizens is one example of a reform that is both
essential and achievable.
In the summer of
2016, Spain’s political scene is in a strange purgatory: the old is
dying and the new cannot be born. The rise of new parties on the left
and right culminated in an inconclusive general election in 2015,
without a decisive victor. Six months of coalition talks resulted in
stalemate, and so Spain will go to the polls again at the end of
June; the results are likely to be equally unclear. In the meantime
it is Ada Colau, and her fellow mayor in Madrid, Manuela Carmena, who
remain the most powerful proponents of ‘the new politics’ in
Spain – a country where, despite a short period of economic
recovery, unemployment remains above 22%.
Even after the
compromise with the PSC, there is a sense among her supporters that
Colau’s experience fighting for housing reform, occupying banks and
blocking evictions with the PAH has given her the confidence and
perseverance to see the project through. It is, she told me, “a
collective made up of the poorest people in Spain, people who have
lost everything – not just their homes, or their money, but their
hopes for the future.” With nothing left to lose, they got
organised, formed close bonds, supported new friends, joined in civil
disobedience together, fought and kept fighting – and they won.
“It’s an experience I will never forget in my entire life,”
Colau said, “because it taught me the most valuable lesson I have
ever learned, which is that we will be whatever we want to be. To
have a society that is more just truly depends on us, and on whether
we get involved or not.”
Main photograph by
Dave Stelfox
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