The first sign that a democratic city council was not going to be anything like those of the night of Francoism was the campaign for the washing of facades and decoration of the many dividing walls that the ‘porciolística’ speculation left in Barcelona. A phrase was quickly coined that summed up Barcelona’s pride (it was even branded as ‘nationalism’) that led to the municipal slogan: ‘Barcelona, more than mai’. That tricolor ‘B’ for Barcelona (blue, yellow and red) and the letters in capital letters and slightly deformed in height, as if they had been written by ‘El Greco’ became the symbol of maragallismo, of Pasqual, the brother who, year after year, especially seeing how his rivals age, gains a greater category of myth. It is anything but a coincidence that Ernest Maragall has taken refuge in that motto to embark on the pre-campaign path for the municipal elections on May 28.
The motto ‘Maragall, more than mai’, without tricolor but with the same capital letters to ‘El Greco’ has presided over the act that took place this Wednesday at the Casa Rius, in the Eixample Esquerre. A manifesto in favor of Maragall has been presented there, Ernest. The one who was his brother’s squire until he had to leave politics.
Big surprise
The text is signed, among others, by the writer Jordi Amatthe musician Joan Chamorro, the architect Maria Sisternas, the director of Primavera Sound and Sala Apolo Alberto Guijarro, President of the Roure Foundation, llum delàs and the general director of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Eduardo Vallory.
But above all the name of Ramón García-Bragado shines, deputy mayor of Jordi Hereu, that is, like Ernest Maragall, with the PSC. García-Bragado has a professional career that refers directly to Pasqual Maragall, both as mayor and ‘president’. Thus, besides with Hereu, he was Secretary General of the Presidency of the Generalitat (2004 – 2007), Urban Planning Manager of Barcelona (1999 – 2004, that is, with Joan Clos) and technical secretary of the Municipal Institute for Urban Promotion (1988 – 1994), body responsible for the design and construction of the infrastructures of the city of Barcelona linked to the development of the Olympic Games. Maragall’s ‘opus magna’
According to the signatories, Barcelona is “far from what we should demand of ourselves as a collective subject, as a city that wants to be a reference to the world. Barcelona has lost its way, is baffled after years of governments that have failed to understand or guide. The city asks that the sum of pride, confidence and ambition that it longs for today be returned to it. & rdquor;
According to the manifesto, what Maragall is advised is “Not to get caught up in spite or frustration. We don’t want to look back, nor do we want failed experiments or obsolete concepts.”
Polarization
There is also a subtle reference to the polarization that, with the incorporation of Xavier Trias to the panel of mayors, he stars in the convergent with the mayoress, Ada Colau: “It is urgent that we stop pitting one part of the city against the other, that we abandon useless reproaches.”
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The Republican mayor, with his inseparable iPad in hand, made the obvious relationship with the former mayor and ‘expresident’ Maragall: “My brother used to say that to be a progressive you need two things: work and be honest“.
He made a bird’s-eye view pointing out intentions but without developing, beyond claiming that “projects agree and not that people confront each other”, in a veiled reference, again to Colau and Trias.