Ada Colau already has someone to accompany her on her adventure in Madrid. The Comuns have validated the lists for the general elections, which hid a last-minute surprise: Aina Vidal, the current deputy spokesperson for Sumar in Congress, has been excluded. This Wednesday's national council was not exactly smooth sailing, with several voices dissenting from this decision, which also provoked a significant protest vote. The lists for the four Catalan constituencies were approved with 66% of votes in favor, but with 34% against and 20 blank votes. Vidal was the head of the Comuns list in the 2023 elections.

I read in ARA that the Donald Trump administration “has blocked Ada Colau from entering Puerto Rico, where she was going to participate in an event alongside the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani”. The official reason, it seems, is the "suspicion" that the former mayor of Barcelona "wants to migrate illegally to the country". The President of the United States and current shadow press secretary for Ada Colau does not know what he is saying.

Donald Trump's government prevents Ada Colau's entry into Puerto Rico. As reported by Eldiario.es and confirmed by Comuns sources consulted by ARA, the US administration has denied the permit for the Front Ampli candidate for the 29-N elections to enter the US-associated state, where she was invited to participate on November 3rd and 4th in an event alongside the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. The official reason, according to the same sources, is the "suspicion" that the former mayor of Barcelona "intends to migrate illegally to the country," but the party denounces that "she has been blacklisted due to her activism and for ideological reasons."

Ada Colau returns to X. After five years of having left it, the presidential candidate of the left-wing coalition Front Ampli does not want to waste any platform and has resumed her activity on this social network to publicly accept the interview offered to her by YouTuber Jordi Wild. Sources from the Comuns explain that the former mayor chooses to return to these channels because she does not want to leave the "field open" to the right, even though she is aware that the algorithm is "biased" and "favors the noise and lies" of conservative and far-right parties.

The facts are as follows: the Broad Front, which wanted to recreate the 2023 Sumar formula, has not been possible on a general scale, so both Irene Montero and Ada Colau will formally be candidates for the presidency of the Spanish government. Neither of them, however, is the preferred candidate for the bulk of Spanish left-wing voters, who prefer (oh, surprise) the republican Gabriel Rufián. And now let's recap.

Gabriel Rufián considers the possibility of a unitary agreement to the left of the PSOE as practically buried, both in Catalonia and in the State, and admits that he has even thought about quitting. This is how he explained it in an interview on RAC1, with only a few hours left before the deadline to present coalitions for November 29th ends at midnight. The leader of the republicans in Madrid, very critical of his party's leadership, revealed that this Thursday he was about to step aside, but ended up discarding it because they "stopped" him, and also out of responsibility. Even so, he has acknowledged that he has not succeeded with his plans in favor of a unitary candidacy: "I have failed, we have failed. There are hours left, but it is very likely that it will not happen," he said.

This Friday night marks the end of the legal deadline to register coalitions, and the left-wing parties at the state level still have not reached an agreement to run together in the upcoming Spanish elections. A critical situation that various Comuns sources believe Gabriel Rufián has brought about by reaching a pact only with Podemos, giving it more bargaining power against the parties of the Broad Front.

While the space to the left of the PSOE is still debating leaderships and negotiating in extremis a formula to achieve unity, the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) has predicted an improvement in the result of the progressive bloc as a whole. According to the public body to which demoscopy experts have long attributed a bias towards the left, the PSOE and the Broad Front –without counting the rest of the plurinational majority– could add up to a higher percentage of the vote than that of the PP and Vox. However, beyond this preference for a progressive government pointed to by the CIS –unlike what other private polls indicate–, the October barometer published this Wednesday also places some proper names as the favorites to reach the Moncloa.

The day has begun with a protest by farmers, who as I speak to you are heading down towards Barcelona in columns from various points in the country with the idea of meeting at the capital at noon, specifically in Plaça Sant Jaume. It is not an isolated protest, but the continuation of the farmers' revolt, now justified by the rise in diesel prices, which is eating into their margins. But they are not only protesting about the price of fuel or phytosanitary products or fertilizers. They are complaining, as they have been for decades, about bureaucratic procedures, which can outlast different governments without anything changing. A farmer said this morning on TV3 that at the moment “profitability is zero, it is impossible to live off it”. At today's protest, a variation of “Either farming or death” was seen, which is “Either farming or fire”, in the sense that the country will burn due to fires if no one can stay to live off the land and look after the landscape. Certainly, if the farmers fall, everything falls. And then, the question: who has the capacity to satisfy their demands? If we would have enough with sovereignty, imagine with autonomy.

Polls are stubborn. Both the CEO and the CIS point out that the left of the PSOE would lose support in the upcoming elections compared to 2023 and, therefore, representation in Congress, especially if they run separately. In this context, Ada Colau is not giving up and insists on calling for unity. The former mayor of Barcelona has even offered to step down as the Broad Front candidate and, if necessary, to change the name of the candidacy to reach an agreement with Podemos, although this very Wednesday the coalition officially presented its new electoral brand.

Friday is the deadline to present coalitions for the upcoming general elections and, at this moment, negotiations between the parties to the left of the PSOE remain open. In 2023, the agreement to form Sumar arrived at the last minute (with Podemos inside, despite the veto on Irene Montero) and, this year, it is on its way to being resolved for better or worse at the last minute as well. In fact, the stumbling block remains how to unite the parties that make up the Broad Front – Moviment Sumar, United Left, Más Madrid, and the Comuns – with Podemos, which right now would run alone. The purple party, however, has sought an alliance with Gabriel Rufián and ERC, wanting it to be a catalyst and a way to put pressure on the Broad Front in the negotiation. Are there possibilities for a joint candidacy? What would happen with ERC if Podemos integrates into the Broad Front?

There is probably no historical reference further removed from what the Spanish left claims to represent than Louis XIV. The Sun King, the grandfather of Philip V, is the primary icon of absolutism, centralism, and a lack of respect for minorities. His power in France – and beyond – became so great that, to define it, a phrase is attributed to him that he probably never said: "The State is me".

After announcing that Gabriel Rufián will be their candidate in the next general election, ERC held a press conference this Tuesday to rule out any collaboration with state-wide left-wing parties that goes beyond incorporating members of Podemos into their lists. In fact, the party spokesperson, Isaac Albert, avoided answering the Comuns' criticism regarding the alliance with the purple party and once again shut the door on being part of the state-wide Broad Front coalition currently being negotiated by Sumar, Comuns, Esquerra Unida, and Més Madrid. However, the republican leader's words were contradicted by Rufián himself in a post on X: "ERC and Comuns must talk, listen to each other, and understand each other to unblock the situation. Beyond vetoes and hatreds that matter to no one. And I am on that. And I will do it until the end." "What cannot be is that the way to respond to the extreme right is to dilute the ERC acronym. ERC will run in Catalonia as ERC," replied Albert at the press conference.

Two Catalans, Ada Colau and Gabriel Rufián, come to the rescue of the Spanish left. 

The day after Gabriel Rufián's agreement with ERC to become the party's candidate for the Spanish elections, with an understanding with Podemos included, there have been movements on the Spanish left. Specifically, the four parties of the Broad Front –Sumar, United Left, Más Madrid, and Comuns– have issued a joint statement in which they propose the former mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, as a candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government.

The alliance between Gabriel Rufián and Podemos "is a front open to anyone who wants it," explain sources from the environment of the ERC spokesperson in Madrid. Translated, this means that if Ada Colau and her Broad Front want to join –paying the price demanded of them–, the door is open for them or, even more clearly, that if they run in a different candidacy it will be because they wanted it that way. Obviously, it is not as simple as that, but in the battle for the narrative, the signing of Rufián by Podemos makes it easier for this to be the interpretation when the moment of truth arrives.

The path for Ada Colau to be the presidential candidate for the Broad Front is becoming increasingly paved. The day after Més Madrid—a key player in this left-wing coalition—proposed her as a candidate for the upcoming Spanish elections on November 29th, the former mayor confirmed that she is willing to head the list. However, the founder of the PAH continues to put pressure on Irene Montero, the leader of Podemos, to join the Broad Front, to the point that she has set it as a condition to take the decisive step at the head of the coalition formed by Sumar, Més Madrid, Esquerra, and Comuns. "I have been asked, and I have said that if we are all there, I will be there too. But we must all be there," Colau said in an interview with TVE.

In September two years ago, Ada Colau put a full stop to her institutional political career. A full stop because at that moment, despite leaving the Barcelona city council one year after losing the mayoral staff that she had held in her hand for eight years, she did not close the door to running for re-election in the 2027 municipal elections. During the last two years, and having also formally abandoned the leadership of the Comuns in Catalonia, her political role has taken a back seat: she has led the Sentit Comú Foundation, the think tank of the Comuns, and has combined it with an incursion into entities and parties of the international left.

Following Junts' vote against the two housing decrees, Rufián asserted that he would strive to ensure that Junts ends up in "the greatest political ostracism." Later, on social media, he considered them "fucking classists" and Turull retorted by saying that everyone knows that Rufián is "an invention of the State's sewers, infiltrated first in Súmate and then in Esquerra." And yesterday, on TVE, Colau said that Puigdemont "will have problems walking through Catalonia because he will encounter a very angry citizenry" due to Junts' opposing vote on the decrees.

The Spanish legislature is running out and the left is not prepared. Whether in the summer, when four years will have passed since the last elections, or at the end of November in case Pedro Sánchez presses the electoral button this Monday, Comuns, Sumar, IU and Més Madrid have not yet defined the structure or the candidate. The failure of the housing decrees has shaken the political board and this Saturday Ada Colau activated the electoral mode with an urgent call. "It is the moment for great alliances. The citizenry would not understand if everyone went their own way," she exclaimed at the inauguration of a conference of the School of Political Imagination organized by the Sentit Comú Foundation, which is presided over by Colau herself.