A ruling by a Barcelona administrative disputes court has just set off all the alarms and brought to the surface the enormous damage done by ex-mayor Ada Colau in the eight years she governed the destinies of the Catalan capital. The judge, in a harsh sentence, has ordered the removal of the Green Axis established on Carrer Consell de Cent and the restoration of this Eixample district street to its former state. I will stick my neck and affirm that it will never be carried out, since the reconstruction works - which cost around 40 million euros - have already been completed and the pedestrian artery is already part of the life of the city. But, having said that, Colau was warned both actively and passively that the works she was carrying out were illegal, that it was necessary to follow the procedure established for the modification of Barcelona's General Metropolitan Plan and that she should not push the law, as she has also done in Via Laietana, and without the slightest rigour in adhering to current legislation.
I know that Colau and the rest of her municipal team do not like to hear it, but they will have to put up with it: in the two mandates that she was directing the fate of the city, neither was legality respected, nor was any help given to the business fabric, the associations sphere, retail, the tourism sector - in short, any wealth-creating agent. Everyone knew that the works on Carrer Consell de Cent, quite apart from the view of them that one might have, were illegal. The position of mayor does not give the office holder free rein to do what they want, and if that were the case, someone would now have to provide compensation from their own pocket. She paid no attention, with the pride and arrogance of those who love not listening because they believe they have right on their side. Her statements after learning of the ruling saying that there is a kind of campaign in favour of climate denialism were, in addition to being weak and infantile, the response of someone who has simply not understood things, even though she was warned. For another reason, the former city planning director during the Olympic era, Josep Acebillo, had already filed a complaint against the ex-mayor for a crime of urban planning and misuse of public funds.
Colau is not being pursued by justice, as she is at pains to show every time a judge accepts a case against her or, as now, when there is a judicial resolution contrary to her interests, in an attitude seeking to demonstrate to people that she is defenceless in the face of the city's powerful interests and lobbies. This is not so, nor has it been so. What's more, if during the time she was mayor, the private and public media silence had not been so deafening, helped, of course, by juicy advertising spending, the current situation would not have been reached. It's a lesson you don't want to hear, but here we have it. Now it is too late and the current mayor, Jaume Collboni, has said that he will appeal against the sentence and, surely, he can do nothing else considering the cost it would have for the city, aside from the logistical problem that would be created by returning everything to the state it was in before the rebuild.
Nobody knows, at the moment, how the politics of municipal pacts will evolve in the Barcelona council. The minority council that is governing the fate of the city is well known, with a single party, the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), occupying the governmental places, and holding only ten of the 41 seats on council. Collboni, who was elected after a pact between the Socialists, Barcelona en Comú (Comuns) and the People's Party (PP) that denied power to the election winner, Xavier Trias, moves with leaden feet before making up his mind. Meanwhile, Colau's Comuns keep knocking insistently on their door to join the government team. There does not seem to be an imminent solution and everything points to the fact that any political alliance that might occur will be delayed for some time. Colau's defeat in the municipal elections last May 28th may find a solution in the offices, you never know. But if you want to reverse the previous stage and put Barcelona back on the list of benchmark cities, it's hard to understand how it can be done with those who have led its retreat and loss of image.