The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, has a major problem on her hands arising from the summons she has received to testify on March 4th as a person under investigation for crimes of abuse of authority, fraud in contracting, misappropriation of public money, influence peddling and prohibited negotiations. She has this difficulty even though she must be granted the presumption of innocence, which any citizen is entitled to and which she has always denied her opponents, hurdling over any barrier that might be present if in return she can obtain a benefit from it. This is how she reached the mayor's office in Barcelona in 2015, when she had no problem in jumping aboard a big lie, such as that of the Swiss bank accounts of Xavier Trias, if by doing so she would be able to remove the then-mayor from office. That was an indecent act that marked a political race and showed the dimension, also human, of the person who became mayor of Barcelona and still is.
But Colau's problem, until she makes her statement to the judge, is not with the summons received from investigational court number 21 of Barcelona, which, in any case, will become a problem of different dimensions and much more serious if the judge then maintains her as part of the investigatio after her March 4th statement. The conflict she has now is with the code of ethics of her political party, Barcelona en Comú, whose reading yields but one interpretation: her resignation is obligatory and immediate. No matter where you look, no matter how you read it, she should leave the post even though that decision is very tough. This will obviously not happen, as her political family has immediately rushed to shield her, ruling out that she will do so, and reinterpreting the code of ethics, adding that only in cases where there is alleged personal gain should the resignation be carried out.
Several reflections on this. Colau has shown that she applies varying criteria and that the haste with which she dishes out accusations and demands resignation from others is transformed into the most absolute bunkerization when a case affects her. She has already made use of this double standard to hold on to the mayoralty, after an election that she had lost, although for that, she had to make a deal with the reviled Manuel Valls and with a political group as right-wing as the platform he led. Secondly, does it make any sense on the part of parties to draw up codes of ethics that end up in the rubbish bin when you are the one who has to apply them? Is this the so-called new politics, arising after the Indignados and from a base of citizen activism, that was set to blow fresh air into the Barcelona city council? Is there any penalty for hoisting your political colours on the assertion that, if the eventuality should arise, you will act differently if summonsed as a person judicially investigated and then, when that ends up happening, you act as if you were referring to something else together?
Some time ago I wrote about the arbitrariness of the power that judges have in their hands to end the career of political leaders, and whether with something as simple as a summons to testify under investigation or the opening of a trial they should resign. The judicial offensive that has taken place against the Catalan independence movement, and which still rolls on despite the fact of having slowed down, has the effect, in my opinion, of forcing a postponement in this resignation until the end of the trial because it is not correct to give judges such absolute freedom of action to amputate political careers at their own discretion. And that opinion holds true for everyone: including Colau. But this reading of the current situation of judicial persecution is one that Colau has never made, and I wish very much she had been on the right side of the argument. Far from that, she has always jumped over the presumption of innocence that she claims for herself and that her party's code of ethics does not grant her. She has also been caught out by this. Snagged by the same measuring stick that she has applied to opponents of all kinds with that moral superiority that has always, always, been shamelessly used and exhibited from her political space.