Ada Colau will be re-elected on Saturday as mayor of Barcelona with the votes of the PSC (Catalan Socialists) and Cs (Ciudadanos). Maybe an agreement with ERC (Republican Left) would have been more coherent and above all more functional for the Commons, but then Ada Colau would not be mayor, and what Ada Colau wants is to be mayor. She seeks power in order to have it, like any other politician. So there's no need to admonish her for an ambition which is so typical in her profession. However, there is a need to insist that she tells the truth. Why bother inventing stories about impossible tripartite agreements to justify herself? Where's the need for her hooligan supporters to rant about how progressive this move is? Colau wants, above all, to be mayor, and everyone understands that, except for a few indignados who are naive or just out of the loop.
The indignados - remember them? - made Ada Colau mayor of Barcelona in the 2015 elections when she stood up as a representative of the "new politics". She was different and was here to change everything. But, oh dear, human nature... Now it seems that she's the same as everyone else. She must have ripped through the Barcelona "caste" like a tornado, the very group which has now been mobilized to enable her to come back for a second term as mayor. Why did they do it when it's obvious that they detest her? They've even said why. Because she is "the lesser evil”. Because Ada Colau, who was going to change everything, has, four years later, become the guarantee that nothing will change.
Colau will be re-appointed as mayor, and according to her, it will be without agreeing to anything with the PSC and Cs, parties opposed to her until now who have decided to select her so as to avoid Ernest Maragall taking the mayoralty. It may be true that on the 15th she won't have agreed to anything in advance, but on the following day, the 16th, she will only be able to go ahead with political initiatives approved by the PSC and Cs, the parties that gifted her the position. And in no way will she be able to carry out her political project at all, because neither the PSC's Jaume Collboni nor Cs candidate Manuel Valls have ever tired of saying both directly and indirectly that Colau's ideas would lead Barcelona to disaster. And she knows that at the slightest sign of strain, they'll propose a motion of censure. So, most likely, Barcelona will have four years of unstable government in City Hall, long enough for the Socialists, those who concocted this operation, to cook her over a slow fire and then make a meal of her. Of her and of the Commons party, right across the metropolitan area, as they did once before with the old PSUC.
Sure, Colau will be legitimately re-elected mayor, but please, hooligans, don't waste time claiming how much left-wing credibility there is in the way she is clinging to office
Maragall was a real option for change because he shares certain ideas with Colau which, if they had governed together, could have been put into practice. But, above all, because an ERC pact with the Commons would have turned the Catalan political map inside out like a sock and the sovereignist parties - those supporting the right to decide - would have become leaders right across the territory. It is this which made the establishment tremble... the Spanish establishment, that is, and also all the Catalan unionist lefties who have mobilized via politics and media in defence of their own preferences. Legitimately so, but there was no need to disguise it with a thousand-and-one pseudoarguments about how progressive it is to cling to power. However you look at it, Ada Colau will on Saturday become the dike that is holding back Catalan sovereignty. It's for this reason and no other that she will be mayor. This isn't a reproach. It's the way things are. But this is her main political capital and we will see how she manages it.
According to people who were present at a social event in Catalonia on the eve of the elections, Saturday, May 25th, the most distinguished members of the Barcelona establishment took it as a given that Ernest Maragall would be the next mayor of Barcelona. Some, not all, accepted it with resignation as preferable to the re-election of Colau. “A Maragall is a Maragall", they comforted one another, as if to say that the illustrious Barcelona surname was a guarantee against the "horrors" that, in their view, Ada Colau was trying to push through. Many of these leaders of the Ibex35 business community were then present on Tuesday, after the elections, at another event, this time in Madrid, presided over by king Felipe VI. On the trip back to Barcelona, they had changed their minds. “Better Colau than Maragall, eh? Yes, yes. Colau, Colau”.