June 11, 2015

From Occupying Banks to City Hall: Meet Barcelona’s New Mayor Ada Colau

"A longtime anti-eviction activist has just been elected mayor of Barcelona, becoming the city’s first female mayor."

On June 5, Democracy Now! aired an excellent report on the victory and its meaning. Host Amy Goodman:

"...in Spain... a longtime anti-eviction activist has just been elected mayor of Barcelona, becoming the city’s first female mayor. Ada Colau co-founded the anti-eviction group, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, and was an active member of the Indignados, or 15-M Movement, the protest movement that inspired Occupy Wall Street. Ada Colau has vowed to fine banks with empty homes on their books, stop evictions, expand public housing, set a minimum monthly wage of $670 per month, force utility companies to lower prices, and slash the mayoral salary.Colau enjoyed support from the Podemos Party, which grew out of the Indignados movement that began occupying squares in Spain four years ago. She’s been arrested repeatedly for her protests. I spoke to Ada Colau last week."

See the video report and full transcript of this eloquent woman's history of activism and the meaning of the social movements' victory in Barcelona.

Ada Colau, an excerpt, translated by Democracy Now!:
"What is happening in Spain and in Barcelona is not an isolated event, rather there is a crisis in the way we do politics, there is a political elite which has become corrupt and has ended up as accomplices of a financial power which only thinks to speculate and to make money even at the expense of rising inequality and the impoverishment of the majority of the people. Fortunately, there has been a popular reaction, here and in other parts of the Mediterranean, for example in Greece, to confront the neoliberal economic policies, which are not only a problem in Spain but in Europe and around the world. We see very clearly that the city councils are key to confronting this way of making policy, meaning, that is where the everyday policies are made and where we can prove there is another way to govern, more inclusive, working together with the people, more than just asking them to vote every four years, and that you can fight against corruption, and you can have transparent institutions. So we think the city governments are key for democratic revolution, to begin governing, with the people, in a new way, but on the other hand we are very aware that the real change must be global, that one city alone cannot solve all the problems we are facing, many of which are global because today the economy does not have borders, that big capital, and the markets move freely around the world, unlike people."