More than a year has passed without a call or a message from Jaume Collboni to sit down and talk. Not even a sounding out with the former mayor, so the Comuns are already ruling out the possibility of a pact in Barcelona City Council. “During the first year, important decisions are made, but there has been no interest in reaching an agreement and we have decided to go into opposition to prepare for the next municipal elections,” announced Ada Colau. She is leaving the City Council and leaving the coordination of Els Comuns, although she does not rule out standing for mayor again in three years.
Els Comuns have given up on the possibility of governing and will act as opposition without Ada Colau, who confirmed this morning, first by sending a statement to the membership and then in an interview with TV3, that she is leaving institutional politics. She is leaving for now, without closing the door to a future return for the next municipal elections.
Colau has assured that she will not be giving classes at any Italian university, but that she will travel to this country and others – her next destination is Mexico and then New York, where she plans to give lectures – to “help promote a municipalist international to reformulate the left in a time of crisis and which the right and the extreme right are taking advantage of; it cannot be that they coordinate and dominate fake news and attack democracy and we are there with one hand behind the other; we have to stop these attacks.”
Collboni
“The few things he has done have been to distance himself from our project”
“We have always tried to form left-wing governments; more than a year has passed and they have never proposed a pact to us; the few things that the Collboni government has done have been to distance itself from the projects that we had promoted,” Colau said. “They are not working towards a decrease in the tourism sector, housing policy should be more ambitious and not only maintain the Consell de Cent superblock but expand it,” she insisted.
Colau regretted that the Collboni model is a departure from the policies of previous mandates, “we want to be there to continue doing the things we were doing, not to privatise public spaces such as Parc Güell or bring F1 to Passeig de Gràcia”.
America’s Cup
“It will have to be clarified whether more public money has been provided than agreed”
Regarding the America’s Cup, the organisation of which was agreed upon when she was mayor, she recalled that “we agreed that the municipal contribution could not be greater than that made for the Mobile World Congress, five million euros a year, but I feel bad about the way it is being carried out and what this event has led to, it has led to a management in which public spaces have been privatised,” said Colau.
“It will have to be clarified whether more money has been contributed than has been publicly stated and whether what was signed is not being fulfilled,” she said, and she also expressed her total opposition to the possibility that the next edition of the regatta could be held in the city again.