Barcelona Election Puts Social Movements in Control of the City
EUROPE, 8 Jun 2015
Barcelona has decided that for the next four years it will be governed not by a party, but by the legitimacy we built as a radical democratic movement.
On Sunday [24 May 2015], people across Spain took to the polls for this year’s highly anticipated municipal and regional elections. The outcome of the vote has ended up shaking the status quo, catapulting a host of social activists and citizens’ organizations onto the political scene, and exploding a whole new set of opportunities for the country’s grassroots movements as they explore innovative new ways to negotiate the precarious balance between resisting austerity and reclaiming the commons while retaining a commitment to direct democracy.
Barcelona activist turned Mayor, Ada Colau. | Photo: Reuters
The elections took on a particular significance in Barcelona. For four years, the Catalan capital has been one of the hotbeds of urban resistance to neoliberal rule in Southern Europe. Ever since hundreds of thousands of indignad@s swarmed into the Plaça Catalunya in May 2011, the city has witnessed the development of some of the most inspiring grassroots struggles and some of the most innovative movement practices — from reinventing the general strike to building migrants’ autonomy to defending common spaces.
Even before that, starting in 2009, the anti-evictions platform PAH began mobilizing debt-stricken homeowners to defend housing rights, engaging in nonviolent direct action to prevent banks from repossessing people’s homes. Now the PAH’s co-founder and long-time spokeswoman in Barcelona, the 41-year-old activist Ada Colau, has been elected mayor on the ticket of the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common).
Beside the success of Ada Colau’s newcomers, the openly anti-capitalist and pro-independence Popular Unity Candidates (CUP) also made major gains in the elections, winning four council seats in the city’s legislative. The CUP has pledged to support Ada Colau’s list, which will still fall short of several seats for an outright majority and will therefore depend on further alliances to form a stable city government.
Despite this shortfall, the election outcome is important for a number of reasons. First, it should be noted that Barcelona en Comú is not an ordinary political party. It defines itself as a citizen platform and a confluence of various social movements and grassroots initiatives. Its organizational structure is based in neighborhood assemblies, providing considerable scope for popular participation from below. As ROAR editor Carlos Delclós aptly put it, “Barcelona has decided that for the next four years it will be governed not by a party, but by the legitimacy we built as a radical democratic movement.”
Second, the victory is remarkable because it is the first time that a major political project revolving around the commons has claimed an electoral victory in Europe. The concept of the commons has emerged in recent years as a powerful antidote to the outdated dichotomy between state and market. In a time when politics and business have effectively merged into one, while global markets increasingly constrain the ability of national governments to govern, there is a greater need than ever to develop radical alternatives outside of the remit of the public and the private. En Comú is committed to reclaiming the urban commons and developing a political project in the common interest.
Third, this victory is important because it highlights the importance of the urban terrain in contemporary class struggle. The city is where everyday life unfolds for most working people; reclaiming it allows the movements to pursue radical actions that directly touch upon the lives of millions. This is is particularly true in Spain, where as a result of inter-regional rivalries political power is relatively decentralized, giving cities a significant degree of decision-making power. This has allowed Colau to make a number of radical pledges, including the closure of all migrant detention centers in the city, a ban on evictions, the expansion of affordable public housing, and restrictions on mass tourism.
Fourth, the victory takes on a broader significance as the municipal and regional vote had been widely touted as a testing ground for the country’s political mood in anticipation of December’s general elections. In this sense, the decimation of the two-party political oligarchy that has ruled the country ever since Franco’s death in 1975 is a harbinger of what’s to come, as Spaniards head to the polls to elect a new government later this year.
Even though Barcelona en Comú should not be confused with the left-populist party Podemos (it is a parallel and independent political project that, in many ways, has remained much more faithful to the spirit of the squares), it is worth noting that Podemos — which did not field its own candidate in the city — did endorse Ada Colau’s list.
In this sense, Colau’s victory will have ramifications far beyond the Barcelona city limits. It could potentially reinvigorate Podemos, which has been flailing in recent months as the party has begun to abandon its more radical proposals in an attempt to win over the political center. If anything, En Comú has shown that it is possible for a political movement to propose an electoral candidacy without sacrificing its founding principles of a radical rupture with the old politics and of active popular participation in the process of social and political change. Hopefully, En Comú’s success will provide an impulse for Podemos to abandon its self-defeating flirtations with the center and its attachment to the hierarchical party-form, and to return instead to its roots in the movements and in the citizens’ circles.
Of course, some of the most important challenges for En Comú are still ahead. Before anything, Colau will have to form a functioning city government, and will therefore be compelled to work together with political parties who will not endorse all of her proposals. Beyond this, there can be no guarantee that her fellow grassroots activists will somehow be immune from the endemic pressures towards moderation and co-optation that, as a general rule, tend to emanate from long-term embeddedness in public institutions. There is a risk that the institutionalization of the struggle will “decapitate” the movement in the streets.
Nevertheless, there is a widespread sensation in Spain that the movements had no other choice but to occupy the vacuum they themselves had opened up with the social and political rupture of May 15. There was a recognition that the struggle had reached an “institutional glass ceiling,” and the movements had to somehow critically engage with the question of power.
Here it is worth recalling the words of Murray Bookchin, who argued in one of his final essays that, “Unless we actually run candidates in city council elections, we are not dealing with power. And to live in fear that power might “corrupt” not only ignores the many cases where it did not corrupt; it ignores the need to gain power. Theater, street events, and other photogenic escapades merely play at politics rather than engage in it.”
In this sense, the fact that Colau has promised to slash her salary by almost 120,000 euros to 26,000 a year, and the fact that she has pledged to “govern by obeying” — an expression that she directly took from the Zapatistas — give some grounds for optimism that, this time around, power may not corrupt as absolutely as it has before.
At any rate, one thing is clear after Sunday’s landmark elections: four years since the popular explosion of 15-M shook the country to its very foundations, ordinary people are continuing to change Spain from below in incredibly creative and inspiring ways. First they took back their squares, then they reclaimed their cities — soon, they may begin to recover a degree of control over their society, their workplaces and their everyday lives.
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Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute and founding editor of ROAR Magazine.
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