That Ada Colau was the mayor who plunged Barcelona into misgovernment from which it is still recovering is an opinion shared by a legion of residents of the Catalan capital. That she abandoned professional politics forced by two consecutive electoral defeats, and not moved by that desire for institutional renewal that she proclaimed in her beginnings, is an irrefutable fact. Just as it is also true that he returns on the back of the unbeatable political opportunity offered by the most high-profile eviction in the history of Spain, because, thus, stopping evictions, he jumped from activism to the carpet of the Barcelona City Council.
But the election of Colau as an unofficial candidate of the Frente Amplio and the decision for her to run for the presidency of the Government as the head of the list for Barcelona, instead of leading the candidacy from Madrid, as usual, invites us to emphasize that the leader of the Commons is also a leader with a recognized sovereigntist profile, who encourages a confederal model of Spain and who has made the demonization of the "regime of '78" and the Crown the main lines of her political creed.
Colau voted "yes-yes" in the independence referendum on 9-N. That is, he answered affirmatively to the following questions: «Do you want Catalonia to be a State? And if so, do you want that State to be independent?
The able leader of the Commons defends the existence of a "plurinational" Spain, but, even so, she arouses visceral hatred among secessionists, for several reasons. The first is that it rejects unilaterality and embraces the concept of the "right to decide", in which the fact of being able to vote for the secession of Catalonia prevails over the true will to separate from the "brother peoples" of Spain. A concept that the PSC came to embrace in its years of greatest ideological confusion, which coincided with the start of the process, and which, in any case, is too tenuous for the most coffee separatists.
Furthermore, during the illegal 1-O referendum Colau chose to vote blank and delegated to the Generalitat the opening of the polling stations in Barcelona so as not to get involved in the vote and not be able to subsequently be incriminated, as happened to the members of the Government of the Generalitat and many senior officials of the autonomous Administration who participated in the preparations for the 2017 independence vote.
The second reason is that Colau did not hesitate to ally with Manuel Valls to retain the Mayor of Barcelona in 2019, despite having lost to the ERC candidate, Ernest Maragall, nor to vote against the PP in 2023, in order to prevent Xavier Trias from recovering the position that he had lost in 2015 precisely to Colau.
Where there are no fissures between the independence movement and Colau is in the aversion of both towards the Crown. As soon as he took over the leadership of Barcelona City Council for the first time, Colau launched a plan to "de-bourbonize" the city, which led to the elimination of all traces of the Spanish Monarchy from both the urban fabric and the Town Hall itself. All the streets that bore the name of one of the members of the Royal Family were renamed and such high-profile gestures were carried out as removing the bust of King Juan Carlos from the plenary hall of the City Council. At the head of all those maneuvers was Gerardo Pisarello, then first deputy mayor and now candidate for Mayor of Barcelona, after his time in the Cortes Generales. The writer witnessed how Pisarello ordered the municipal worker designated to remove the bust of the now King Emeritus to repeat the action up to two times to ensure that the television cameras captured the affront to the Crown in detail.
Six years later, forced by a ruling from the Supreme Court, Colau had to return the effigy of the King to the plenary hall of the Consistory, but she did so reluctantly, placing an image of Felipe VI only 30 centimeters high by 40 centimeters wide on one side of the room.
But Colau's insults to the Monarchy did not end there. As mayor of Barcelona, she refused to participate on numerous occasions in the formal greeting to the Monarch that took place on the occasion of the opening of the Mobile World Congress.
Mother of the "new politics", she also strenuously defended the need to promote an institutional change that would tear down the pillars of the two-party system and the constitutional order forged in the Transition.
