What is behind the return of Ada Colau

The figure of Ada Colau emerged in the fight for dignified and affordable housing for everyone. A youthful activism that ended up leading her to become the first female mayor of Barcelona when she was 41 years old. From that position (2015-2023), despite two terms in power, the progress in housing policies was limited, frustrating. It remains the great problem in the Catalan capital and in all large cities. One only needs to look at the promises that have led to the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Elif Eralp in Berlin: access to housing is marking the emergence of a new progressivism. The phenomenon is making its way in the urban world, where the problem is bleeding and where the left-wing vote tends to carry more weight. Madrid, so tilted towards the populist right, is a global exception.

Colau closed her stage as mayor with a bittersweet aftertaste. She was the subject of very harsh personal smear campaigns and could not carry out the radical policies she longed for. She felt the weight and the impotence of power. Without legislative support at the Catalan level and, above all, the state level, she was left lacking the legal tools to make a leap in housing. All of this led her to a withdrawal from the public arena. Even to an escape to Italy, Maragall style.

But she has politics in her blood. It was only a matter of time before she decided to return. And she aims to do so at the state level, to recompose the mess that the space to the left of the PSOE has become, to try to end the fratricidal struggle between Sumar and Podemos, and the peripheral left-wing parties. It was impossible for the free verse of Rufián from ERC to achieve this; perhaps she can. Perhaps. And maybe she will also try in the Maragallian way, with a grassroots movement beyond the parties. That is the idea. We shall see. Of course, it is about having the left-wing majority join forces with the socialists again. It is about stopping the PP-Vox wave.

Colau's return is born, therefore, from a double impulse: to confront the Spanish and global reactionary wave and to access the real power of the State to be able to execute effective policies of change, of course above all in housing, which today is the element that most marks social inequality. If you own an apartment or can access public housing, you don't live suffocated. If you depend on market prices, you simply survive or, in the worst case, you end up on the street, as happened to Maricarmen at 87 years old.

But if in Barcelona-Catalonia the Colau who was a newcomer to politics from activism generated many antibodies, in Madrid, a just as tough or even tougher welcome awaits the Barcelonan-Catalan Colau. In the Spanish capital, the polarization is Cainite. It is true that PP-Vox already have a top-notch enemy in Sánchez. But a Colau who presents herself as the other side of the coin to Ayuso will also awaken the drums of ideological war, with all the personal consequences that may entail. She will need thick skin.

And meanwhile, in Barcelona, her former number two, Gerardo Pisarello, will seek to make a mark at the City Council. Pisarello trusts that Colau's appearance in Madrid will also boost him in Barcelona. He hopes that in some way they will form a tandem again. He is an atypical politician, with an intellectual profile, who generates sympathies beyond his ideological environment, a friendly and cultured face, someone who is willing to talk; an integrated, Catalanized immigrant. He is not a strong leader, which, paradoxically, may work in his favor. Nor can it be said that there are great leaders among his rivals. In fact, there are none.

Colau, even if many here do not understand it, is an international figure. What Mamdani represents today from New York and what Elif Eralp may come to represent from Berlin, at the time were symbolized by Ada Colau in Barcelona and Anne Hidalgo in Paris. With this global credit, with the ideological commitment to curb the far-right, with the specific banner of housing and with the profile of a non-nationalist Catalan is how she will present herself in Spain.