Photographer: Nacho Alegre for Bloomberg Businessweek
Ada Colau
In
2007, Ada Colau put on a black leotard, a yellow cape, and a Zorro mask
and gate-crashed a campaign rally in Barcelona. For two and a half
minutes, Colau commandeered cameras, holding up a cardboard
sign—“Housing Out of the Market, Like Education and Health”—while she
delivered a speech on irresponsible development. “We don’t want to hear
that the solution is to build more,” Colau told the crowd gathered in
the small city square. “We have devastated our territory more than
enough. There are a lot of houses. What we need is that these houses
fulfill their social role.” When she was done, she dashed between a pair
of parked cars and sprinted down the street.
She didn’t know it
then, but her appearance as a superhero was one of the first steps on a
path to city hall. In June she was elected mayor of Barcelona, with the
support of a coalition of leftist political parties. She campaigned on
fighting inequality.
Colau (left) and a fellow protester in 2007.
Photographer: Marc Javierre
The
Spanish economy in 2007 was afloat on an enormous housing bubble, and
real estate was rapidly becoming unaffordable. She had launched a
prescient protest. “The government was making a show of success: ‘The
Spanish Miracle,’ ” says Colau, 41. She’s wearing a long, casual
cardigan sweater and sitting at a small conference table in a corner of
her office. “But the people were already suffering, because the prices
of houses were very high.” Donning the mask and cape—and videotaping the
stunt—was a way to call attention to an issue she felt none of the
candidates for mayor were appropriately addressing. “In a media culture
like ours, you have to find ways to be seen and heard,” she says. “It
worked well. The message was, ‘You have to be a superhero to survive in
this city.’ ”
Colau
rose to local and then national prominence as an activist in the wake
of the 2008 global financial crisis, emerging as one of the most vocal
critics of the government’s austerity policies. She led a movement that
faced down banks over foreclosures and organized protests outside the
homes of conservative lawmakers and was an active member of Spain’s
Indignados, the protest movement that inspired Occupy Wall Street.
Her
election—as the head of her party, Barcelona en Comú, a hastily formed
leftist coalition—puts her at the forefront of a leftward swing in
Spanish politics, along with the recently elected mayor of Madrid,
Manuela Carmena, and the leaders of the insurgent Podemos party. Since
taking office, Colau has shown no sign of blunting her approach.
“Barcelona is a clear example of a global city,” she says. “Billions of
euros circulate in this city every year. But they’re distributed badly.
The inequality here is enormous. It’s out of control.”
Colau’s
office is on the second floor of city hall, an art-packed 15th century
Gothic palace with an 18th century neoclassical façade. She is the first
woman to hold the city’s highest office, and she’s said she’d like to
update the décor in the mayor’s receiving room with portraits of
important women from Barcelona’s history. So far, however, the only
change she’s made is to affix a piece of printer paper to the door to
her office. It reads, “Let us never forget who we are and why we are
here.”
Colau is at once businesslike and engaging, laying out her
arguments as if they were cards on a table. When the subject is
emotional—such as the photographs of a 3-year-old Syrian boy, Alan
Kurdi, dead on a Turkish beach—you can hear it in her voice. When she
wants to stress a point, she smiles or leans towards her interlocutor.
Colau
sees parallels between housing and tourism; she worries the latter’s
growth is hurting citizens and has declared a one-year ban on new hotel
licenses. She has angered the Spanish government by removing a bust of
former King Juan Carlos from city hall’s main chamber; announced her
intention to rein in Airbnb; and taken aim at banks, threatening to fine
those that keep their properties empty, rather than rent them out at
subsidized rates.
“As mayor, I can talk to the banks on a more
equal footing than I could when I was just a citizen,” she says.
“There’s a wide consensus to say, ‘Guys, we need these houses, not to
speculate but for the families that need them. First we will offer you
the opportunity to collaborate and lend us these houses that you’re not
using and that aren’t going onto the market. We’ll improve them and put
them to use. And if you don’t want to collaborate, we’ll try other
instruments to give you an incentive.’ ”
In
early September, Colau held a victory party, for herself and seven
other leftist Spanish mayors who had recently taken power, in a
community center in a former train station. Colau was the last to take
the podium, and she gave an impassioned speech on topics ranging from
violence against women to the plight of refugees to subsidized meals for
schoolchildren. The unifying theme once more was the fight against
inequality. “The crisis we’re facing is not only economic or social,”
Colau said. “It’s a primarily political and above all ethical crisis,
one that has taken place under decades of governments that have been
hostage to the 1 Percent.”
Two months earlier and 1,100 miles to
the east, Greece had held a referendum on the terms of a bailout of its
debt in which voters roundly rejected conditions imposed by creditors
collectively known as the troika—the European Commission, the European
Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Shortly after, Athens
was forced to accept even harsher terms to avoid being ejected from the
euro zone. “We give our full support to Greece,” Colau told the
applauding crowd at the community center. “It must not surrender. Let
them know that in southern Europe, the democratic revolution is
unstoppable, that they are not alone, that we are here to stand up to
the troika and the criminal markets.”
Her election is part of a
destabilization in European politics as traditional parties have wilted,
providing opportunities for anti-establishment candidates. Colau also
comes out of a long history of protest movements in Barcelona. It’s the
capital of Catalonia, which is linguistically distinct from the
Spanish-speaking regions of the country. As Spain’s second-largest city,
Barcelona has always been a counterweight to the central government in
Madrid. It was the epicenter of the country’s anarchist and labor
movements in the early 20th century and a Republican stronghold during
the Spanish Civil War.
Colau leaving city hall after the swearing-in ceremony on June 13.
The
city has also been home to a growing Catalonian independence movement.
The same discontent that opened city hall’s doors to Colau has brought
hundreds of thousands of people into the street, demanding a chance to
redefine their relationship with Spain. Madrid has consistently declared
the independence movement in violation of the constitution. One of the
campaign’s leaders, Artur Mas, who is president of Catalonia, has called
regional elections for Sept. 27, pledging to start the secession
process if parties in favor of independence get a majority of seats in
the Catalan parliament.
Independence from Spain has never been an
important issue for Colau; while she supports the right of Catalonians
to decide, she hasn’t taken a strong stance on how they should vote.
“Nationalism as a subject has never interested me,” she says. “But
democracy, yes.”
Despite the city’s protest roots, its politics
have been remarkably stable since democracy was reintroduced to Spain in
1978. Until the global economic crisis, the left-wing Partit deis
Socialistes de Catalunya (Socialists’ Party of Catalonia) won every
election. Then, in 2011, voters elected a center-right government, only
to reject it four years later in favor of Colau even though the economy
had started to grow again. “When you start recovering, there are people
who are going to be able to grab the hook and rise,” says Antoni Vives, a
councilman who served as deputy mayor in the previous government. “And
there are people who aren’t. Those are the people who voted for Ada
Colau. We were not able to explain to them that we care for them, and
that the prosperity will eventually reach them.”
In a country with
a surprising number of politicians who are clumsy communicators, Colau
stands out as a skilled and emotive speaker. In addition to traditional
street rallies, her campaign organized its supporters to push hashtags
into trending topics. Among its most successful social media efforts was
an autotuned YouTube video of Colau singing a lively campaign song, her
charisma shining through as she breaks composure between takes. “It was
a way of trying to connect with people who are difficult to connect
with in the traditional way,” says Joan Subirats, a professor of
political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who helped
plan her campaign. It worked: Turnout in the 2015 elections was higher
across the city than it had been four years earlier, and it rose much
more in the poorer neighborhoods where support for Colau was strongest.
Colau
came of age as an activist during the anti-globalization movement of
the 2000s. Spain generally, and Barcelona in particular, has developed a
tradition of theatrical activism, and Colau has spent most of her adult
life in the thick of it. It was the housing battle, though, that made
Colau a national figure. Under Spanish law, when a bank forecloses on a
mortgage and seizes a house or apartment, only part of the debt is wiped
out. The rest remains on the books, and the owner isn’t able to declare
bankruptcy to escape the debt. The bank has claim to all assets, not
just the house.
“The president of the government had explicitly
told the population, ‘You have to buy a house because it’s the most
secure investment, the best thing for your country,’ ” says Colau.
“Millions of people who weren’t trying to speculate, or to be rich, but
who thought they were doing the most responsible thing, the safest
thing, discovered that they had done the worst thing in their lives, and
that there was no way to escape.”
Colau
(center) is carried out by police officers after occupying a bank in a
protest to support a neighbor facing eviction in Barcelona on July 26,
2013.
Photographer: Paco Serinelli/AP Photo
In
2009, Colau and a handful of other activists formed a grassroots
organization called the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages—known
by its Spanish acronym PAH. “She’s a natural leader,” says Lucía Martín,
one of the group’s founders. “It’s not that she says, ‘OK, I’m going to
be the leader.’ It’s that everybody looks around and says, ‘Yes. Her.
She looks like she can do it.’ It became really obvious.”
One of
the first people PAH assisted was Matías González Barquero, who had
taken out a mortgage on his home to soundproof his bar at the request of
the municipality. González was forced to close the bar in 2009 after a
partner died and another fell sick. As a small-business owner, he was
ineligible for unemployment, and soon he couldn’t pay his mortgage.
When
he attended his first PAH meeting in 2010, his apartment had already
been put up for auction, but it had failed to sell, and he hadn’t moved
out. When González was scheduled to be evicted by police in March 2010,
the group obtained a period of leniency from a judge. Over the next year
and a half, PAH blocked two other eviction attempts, mobilizing some
300 people to block the entrance to his apartment. Colau was with
González in his house, coordinating the protest from behind locked
doors. “She said, ‘You keep calm, we’re going to make it,’ ” recalls
González. “When she was facing the banks, she was very tough. But with
me, she was a very close person.”
In September 2012 the bank tried
to evict González again. This time, he and Colau took the case to the
company’s Barcelona headquarters. Colau brought her newborn with her.
González dressed for the occasion in prison stripes. As a result of the
showdown, the bank agreed to forgive the outstanding debt, and even paid
for a van to move his belongings into a public apartment provided by
the city.
The PAH campaign changed the dynamic between banks and
their debtors. The group had stratospheric public support. PAH now can
often stop an eviction with a phone call or a handful of demonstrators.
“It used to be the case that I would go trembling to the bank,” says
González. “Now it’s the banks that are trembling when we go there.”
Spanish Tourism Minister Jose Manuel Soria Rejects Idea of Barcelona Visitor Limit
It
would be a stretch to say that the banks are trembling at Colau’s
election. But they’re paying attention. As mayor, she has met with the
heads of many of the banks she once protested against, reiterating her
intention to enlist their support in expanding the stock of public
housing. The tactic of fining banks with empty homes on their books is
vulnerable to legal challenges, but the town of Terrassa, about a
40-minute drive from Barcelona, has already tried it, handing out its
first fines last year and fending off a lawsuit.
“The main
objective of the banks is to sell as soon as possible those empty
houses. Unfortunately they can do nothing, given the weak housing market
situation,” Encarna Pérez, a spokesperson for the Spanish Banking
Association, said in an e-mail. Penalizing banks for holding properties
they’d rather be rid of is “incomprehensible,” she added.
Much of
the business community has adopted a wait-and-see stance, especially
regarding Colau’s views on tourism. “We have to be less dogmatic and
more open to reality,” says Jordi William Carnes, director of the
tourism board. “It’s not a question only of big business owners. The
taxi driver, the hairdresser, the storekeeper, all these are getting
advantages from tourism.”
Colau’s concern about tourism is,
unsurprisingly, informed by her experience with housing. A tourism boom
has transformed large parts of the city, especially the rambling
medieval streets of the historic center, the neighborhood around the
fairy-tale spires of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família
Basilica, and some of the areas around the waterfront. La Boqueria
market in the city center, for instance, where locals once did their
shopping, has become a giant food court, with tour groups crowding
around stands that previously sold fresh fish but now serve meals.
The
overall effect—familiar to residents of such cities as Venice, New
Orleans, or Rome—is similar to gentrification, as the influx of money
and soaring property values drives out local residents. Barcelona has
some 10,000 registered tourist apartments and perhaps as many as 20,000
unauthorized rentals—most of them marketed through sites such as
Airbnb—and as property owners have found it more profitable to serve the
tourist market, rents have risen.
Colau has wasted no time
signaling a change in the way the city approaches tourism. In addition
to putting new hotel licenses on hold, she has questioned the
appropriateness of using city money to subsidize Formula One racing and
declared that the city wouldn’t bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
When
Barcelona hosted the Olympics in 1992, it had so few hotels that
organizers chartered 11 cruise ships to accommodate visitors. In 2013,
Barcelona was the fourth-most-visited city in Europe, according to PwC,
with hotel room demand outpacing supply despite hotels opening at an
average rate of about 10 per year. That’s made the city’s hotels among
the most expensive on the Continent. In the past four years, tourism has
grown by 18 percent; the industry accounts for 12 percent of the city’s
gross domestic product. For Colau, the effect is worryingly reminiscent
of the housing bubble—a socially disruptive surge in investment that
enriches a few at the expense of many. “There’s strong growth, and this
should serve as a warning, because it can generate imbalances,” she
says. “We don’t want to repeat the errors of the real estate boom.”
The
general consensus in Barcelona is that Colau, like insurgent
politicians across Europe, has entered unfamiliar territory. Her ability
to make sure she is seen and heard is unquestioned, but her success
will depend on her skills as a manager and her ability to turn her
proposals into policies. “Many cities would like to have the problems
that Barcelona has,” says Mateu Hernández Maluquer, chief executive of
Barcelona Global, a business lobby. “Her diagnosis is OK. There’s a need
to better manage tourism. It’s the prescription we’re still waiting
for.”
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