What Barcelona does the mayor want? Jaume Collboni? Six months after taking office, here is one of the great mysteries of Catalan politics. 180 days of ambiguities, half-made decisions, postponed objectives, leaks with subsequent backtracking, very few facts and, yes, a great desire to look good with everyone. The mayor who was so bold to come to power has turned his government action into a memorable confusion that threatens to degenerate into serious paralysis. The only thing we know with certainty about the new mayor is that he wants to look good with everyone, especially with the lobis who were so belligerent with the previous city council and who seem so docile now. Collboni’s variable geometry, who governs with a starving 10 councillors, has become an uncertain game in which he tries to show that he can agree on left and right: yes, we are beginning to see an increasingly blatant tendency to embrace the reactionism that he has been dreaming of for years. regress everything that Barcelona had advanced in the sustainable mobility. Look, we know few things, but we have already learned that there will be no more ‘superilles’ or more pedestrian streets like the splendid Consell de Cent: they have even spent 12,0000 euros for a ghostly study on the Via Augusta bike path built with European funds just to have an excuse in case it needs to be dismantled, an embarrassment that would put the city on the level of Elche or Valladolid, where bike lanes have been removed due to the unworthy pressure of Vox. At the same time, Collboni presents himself as the mayor of order, but he is incapable of fining the thousands of motorcycles that violate the most basic parking regulations, confirming that for him two wheels are only good if they are motorized. With the tram, neither fu nor fa, it does not dare to announce that it is stopping or to divert it along Provença Street, an outrage that was on the table for a few weeks, and most likely it will simply be postponed. And this turns out to be the infallible recipe for these six months of government: paralyze, pause, postpone, or what is the same, do nothing to avoid offending anyone.
Barcelona’s ecological revolution It bothered quite a few powerful people, but it dazzled many Barcelonans who discovered a new way of living, finally different and healthy, and it fascinated quite a few international institutions, from the UN to great mayors to the CEO of Mobile: despite the brutal media noise, the city found a new flag with which to proudly present itself to the world. Collboni, with his obsession with distancing himself from Colau, seems to prefer to stop that idea just because he does not want to assume its cost and runs the risk of sending the city into a no man’s land, mediocre, without personality, Without ambition, yes, in which no one gets angry. During the electoral campaign, the PSC candidate invented a tightrope walk with which he suddenly demonized the mayor whom he had been supporting for years, trying to make an impossible claim according to which he was the opposition and the government at the same time. Now we are discovering that that conceptual chaos could have been useful to him to gain power, but in reality it denoted an alarming lack of project. In his impossible dilemma between left and right, it is difficult to know which side the ball will land on. Collboni’s particular ‘match point’. What is certain is that, amid so many miscalculated hesitations, Barcelona runs the risk of losing everything it had gained.