Unlike failure, success has many fathers, and if the success is great, like the one a few days ago at the Sagrada Família, it even gets uncles, like minister Óscar Puente, who has taken advantage of the unforgettable images from that night to attack the mayor of Madrid and the president of the Community: “What we have seen these days is that Barcelona continues to be the one with the magical Olympics of '92... Almeida and Ayuso, worthy heirs of Botella”; from which it would follow that socialism is modernity and the right is stale.
The mayor of the Games was Pasqual Maragall, who had Oriol Bohigas, first in Urbanism and then in Culture, as the ideologue of the great transformation of Barcelona, and there are few figures like the two of them further from the PSOE's aesthetic. Maragall was one of the poet's grandsons and Bohigas was a student at the institute school.
Modernity comes standard in Barcelona (the first newspaper, the Liceu, the Exhibitions, the first radio, the Palau de la Música, modernism, the GATCPAC, the Fair, Formula 1...) because here any important project is built on the desire to be, to be ourselves and to be Europeans and, if possible, universal. The Games were a success because Barcelona had aspired to them many years before. The eight-hour workday is imposed from the strike of La Canadenca because here there was indeed an industrial revolution. The Mobile comes and does not leave Barcelona because the trade fair identity is not improvised. The ceremony a few days ago was a success because Gaudí already set the first bar of ambition 143 years ago. The broadcast of TV3 was a success because TV3 was already born modern, and not anthropological as the PSOE wanted it. Coincidences do not exist, let alone begin in 1992.
What Puente did not understand (or understood but hides it) is that the difference is not the PP of Ayuso and Botella, but the fact that Barcelona is the capital of another country, with a different, and often better, aesthetic sense.
