Barcelona and the European Medicines Agency: the lessons of failure

In the end Barcelona will not be the headquarters of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Yesterday Amsterdam won the day in a vote by the European ministers. In fact, the Catalan capital fell in the first round, a cut that only Amsterdam, Milan, and Copenhagen survived. Even though the Catalan candidacy was never the favorite, everything surrounding this process left a bitter taste. You only need to see the Spanish government's hurry yesterday to blame the independence movement for the failure, for which if anyone is to blame, it is mainly them.

It is clear that Barcelona was the ideal city, and difficult to argue against from a technical point of view. Equally clear is that decisions of this nature are made according to other parameters, basically division among member states. Barcelona's main handicap is that Spain already houses five European agencies within its territory, and one of these, the European coordination of the ITER project to build a nuclear fusion plant, is already in the Catalan capital. In contrast, the country that was awarded the EMA, Holland, has only two (neither of which is in Amsterdam), the same as France, Italy, and Germany itself.

Let's admit, then, that the bid was difficult from the start. Still, there are reasons to think that the Spanish government didn't commit itself all the way to support a candidacy that it never felt comfortable with. Nor did the images of police repression on October 1st help Barcelona's cause, or the violence committed by the far right at some demonstrations, the flight of companies aided by Madrid’s ad-hoc legislation, the application of Article 155, or the imprisonment of half of the Catalan government. Spain has shown that it is not capable of facing a political challenge using dialogue, and has been publicly criticized by some European partners in a way that made it difficult to obtain the necessary cooperation.

In the end, if you want to obtain support you need to project an image of reliability and stability, and at this moment Spain doesn't appear, in European circles, to possess these qualities. Barcelona, however, must continue to move forward with its project: that of consolidating itself as the most important city in southern Europe, a city that is able to create its own dynamics that overcome the vagaries of politics.