Now that it has been confirmed by the Mossos police that the car of the People's Party city councillor and head of the party list for Barcelona, Josep Bou, caught fire due to an unfortunate mechanical problem, and, as the Guàrdia Urbana had already stated, foul play has been ruled out, he needs to give his immediate apologies and resign. He has used the position he occupies to sow hatred when it is now known that before the fire, the chauffeur of the vehicle had already talked to police officers about the car's problems.
Not only did Bou act with remarkable irresponsibility in spreading information that was false, but the forcefulness of the statements he made in a tweet - "they have just burned my car in Barcelona" and "nothing will stop me from complying with my duty and my job" - and the reaction of prominent pro-Spanish union leaders who gave an ideological interpretation of what happened, were far from the truth. We are not talking about some member of the public who had a fit of rage, but about the PP candidate for the mayoralty of Barcelona in the last municipal elections, with the consequent huge impact of a tweet such as the one he made.
Those who then joined the media fray to support him included the former Catalan interior minister and now member of the PSC, Ramon Espadaler, the PP's highest representative in the European Parliament, Dolors Montserrat, and her party colleagues Toni Cantó, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo and Xavier García Albiol, Ciudadanos leaders Inés Arrimadas and Carlos Carrizosa and those of far-right Vox. Their messages on social media referred to acts of vandalism or the fact that the violent perpetrators would not get away with it. The press sympathetic to their line categorised the fortuitous fire with the other invented violence that the pro-Spanish politicians continually claim to suffer in Catalonia, and thus one of its representatives gave the following reaction: "All my support. This is totalitarianism and terrorism, and it will not win."
No one set fire to councillor Bou's car and he knew it. He just had to talk to his driver, that simple. The politicians who stepped into the ring based on the PP representative's lie are also irresponsible, because the facts were not proven and the Barcelona police had spoken with great caution on the matter. Before putting on a performance like the one they did, whose only purpose was political, they should have thought it through and, once they saw the mistake, apologized immediately. And that, by the way, is something they haven’t done.