It seems that Jordi Hereu Boher (Barcelona, 1965) was much happier during his time as a councilor of the Barcelona City Council, from 1999 to 2006, than as mayor, a position he held from September of that last year until 2011. He inherited the municipal leadership of Joan Closwhen he, as he does now, traveled to Madrid to become Minister of Industry.
Upon succeeding Clos, Hereu assumed an unpleasant fate: being the last emperor of the first saga of mayors of the PSC in the Catalan capital, opened by Narcis Serra in 1979 and taken to its peak by Pasqual Maragall, considered the best mayor of the city. It remains to be seen if Jaume Collboni’s mayoralty, achieved in a minority with more than unforeseen support, opens a second saga.
The tram vote
Hereu had to close an era, and the graphic image of that end could be seen the day when, in visible technological difficulties, he voted before the media in the tram consultation of May 2010. But the machine did not work, as the consultation itself did not, in which the majority, with a low participation, voted in favor of nothing being done on Diagonal. A year later, Xavier Trias became the first mayor of CiU in Barcelona after so many decades of failed convergent attempts.
Affable and approachable, accustomed to a particular tone of voice, loud and a bit whistley, Hereu has a degree in Business Administration and an MBA from ESADE. He has always been a man of the PSC, of which he has been a member since 1987, and that label marked him as mayor.
Pharaoh of the seven plagues
President of the Barcelona Federation (2008-2014) and previously deputy first secretary (2004-2008) and organization secretary (2001-2008) in the Catalan capital, he is considered the first mayor of the aforementioned saga closely linked to the socialist apparatus , in contrast to Maragall’s mandates, very reluctant for the party to have a high margin of influence in the council.
He himself joked about the fact that during his mandate several situations accumulated that turned him into the Pharaoh of the seven plagues of Egypt, such as the great electricity blackout of July 2007, which left the city blocked and caused hundreds of subscribers to be without electricity for four days, and the tremendous drought that occurred in Catalonia, and that conditioned the daily life of the Catalan capital and ended up generating water saving habits, between the summer of 2007 and the spring of 2008.
Green parking area
After being manager of Les Corts since 1997, in 1999 he became a councilor for the same district. From 2004 he was councilor for Security and Mobility, and under this second responsibility he assumed the most delicate management of it: he had to manage the implementation of a complex system, initially criticized and which has ended up working: the green area of the parking lot.
As head of Mobility, he took on a challenge that was not easy: putting an end to the totally free of charge spaces, the unregulated spaces, in which so many Barcelonans left their cars every night for decades.
Hispasat and the kennel
Once out of the city council, which he left after Trias’s term began, Hereu went to a discreet level and became a consultant. Yeah with the cars it went well and with the tram, badly, the next thing was the satellites. In 2020 he was appointed president of Hispasat, position from which he will pass to the ministry.
Related news
Hereu is a character of contrasts, because despite having been identified as a man of apparatus, a member of the partisan political elite, he is remembered as a mayor more humble than despot.
They say that he lived with surprise and tension the day when a few of the most powerful businessmen in the city showed up at his office to warn him that the kennel planned near the school where his children went could not be built there so as not to disturb the training of kids called to be the leaders of the future. And the kennel was not made there.