As Ada Colau tries to win a third and final term as mayor of Barcelona on Sunday, there is one thing her opponents have in common: that she is personally to blame for all the city’s ills, from bag snatching to traffic jams.
The attacks on her are so insistent and so personalised that her campaign has even produced a T-shirt with the ironic slogan: La culpa de todo la tiene Ada Colau (It’s all Ada Colau’s fault).
Catalan politics is a clubbish affair and Colau, with a background as a militant housing activist, is not a club member. She is a leftwing, bisexual feminist who prioritises the needs of working people over those who treat the city as a cash cow and whose first act as mayor was a moratorium on building hotels. From the old guard’s perspective, what’s to like?
“I’m not just the first female mayor – I’m the first from a working-class background, and I’m not connected to the families that have always run Barcelona,” she told the Observer. “I’m reminded of this often, sometimes implicitly, at other times in a more explicit and disagreeable way.
“There are politicians on the right who constantly question my appearance, my hair, my clothes, my ability, my lack of culture, who say I should be cleaning floors or selling vegetables or fish. But I’m here to change things. It’s true that there’s extra pressure because I’m a woman, but I see this as a part of what has to change.”
Colau is active on social media but she really comes into her own as an old-school street campaigner. In 2015 her direct style and plain speaking won over voters weary of cronyism and nationalist rhetoric.
Her communitarian platform Barcelona en Comú won by a whisker, and there was an initial period of transition from Colau the activist who fought the police to Colau the mayor who was responsible for them.
It’s been a difficult eight years encompassing the political turmoil in Catalonia, the terror attack on La Rambla in 2017 that left 16 dead and 130 injured, and the pandemic.
“I’m proud that in spite of all this we’ve changed the city’s agenda and that we have not only withstood these crises but we’ve also been able to build thousands of units of public housing and carry out an urban transformation to make the city greener, healthier and less polluted,” she says. “This is both an environmental and a social policy.
“We’ve invested a lot in schools; we’re leaders in social investment – these are structural changes that won’t be easily undone. I want a third and last mandate in order to finish what we’ve started.”
Under Colau, Barcelona has become a role model for urban renewal, with planners from around the world visiting to see what the city has achieved – which is basically giving people priority over cars.
This began with the so-called superblocks – groups of nine city blocks closed to through traffic – and has now been extended to the “green axis” in the Eixample, the grid system of streets designed by the engineer Ildefons Cerdà in the late 19th century.
This has entailed pedestrianising 18 blocks of a crosstown, four-lane road as well as four intersecting streets with the creation of several squares.
The car lobby hates it. Colau’s political rivals accuse her of parochialism and of treating the city like a village; architects say she is vandalising Cerdà’s design, though cars were not invented when he drew up the plan.
“Certain elites don’t think we should touch the city centre without their permission because it touches on their privileges,” Colau says. “We’re simply applying common sense – 75% of journeys are made on foot or on public transport.
It’s not that we’re going too fast – on the contrary, we’re coming to this late because climate change is already here, and too many are talking about independence instead of doing what needs to be done,” she says with a nod towards the Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government, on the other side of Plaça Sant Jaume.
On Catalan independence, she has moved from being opposed to taking a more neutral stance, describing herself as equidistante. Nevertheless she treads carefully, as many of her supporters are also pro-independence. For example, she rarely refers to Spain by name, calling it “the state”, a separatist formulation.
She accepts that street crime is a continuing problem but denies that it has increased during her mandate, pointing out that “in all the international rankings we are one of the safest cities”. (Barcelona is 26th in the 2023 World’s Safest Cities rankings.)
She also denies that the city has lost the battle against mass tourism, but most citizens would disagree. After the two-year Covid lull, Barcelona is already saturated and it’s not even high season yet.
Colau argues that the key is to diversify the economy, as the pandemic revealed how dependent the city is on tourism.
“We’re the technological capital of southern Europe. We want to keep the talent we have and attract more. That’s the future.”
Polls have Colau in a three-horse race with the conservative nationalist Xavier Trias, 76, whom she ousted as mayor in 2015, and the socialist Jaume Collboni, who abruptly quit her coalition in February in order to run against her.
Both are willing to swallow their differences and join forces to keep Colau out. However, if she wins one more seat than either of them, she gets to call the shots.
No one is indifferent to Ada Colau – people either love her or hate her. On Sunday we’ll know who has the upper hand.
