Barcelona, the Left and the Independence Movement in Catalonia

Richard Gillespie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351046855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Created by social movement activists and left-wing parties during years of austerity, Barcelona en Comú, or the Comuns (as they are known in Catalan), won control of the city council of Barcelona in May 2015. The ensuing municipal government gave the city its first ever female mayor in the form of former housing rights campaigner Ada Colau. The Comuns' administration proceeded to undertake ambitious initiatives, attempting to regenerate democracy by changing the relationship between municipal authority and citizen, addressing social inequality issues and seeking to curb the hitherto unbridled tourist expansion in the name of improving the environment for those who live in the Catalan capital.

This book examines the extent to which the political project of the Comuns has brought radical change in Barcelona, where it has faced opposition from revolutionary anti-capitalists, traditional Catalan nationalists and independentistas, as well as conservative political and economic forces. It also considers the Comuns' relationship to Podemos and their prospects of growing beyond the city, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona and across Catalonia.

1   Introduction

Created by social movement activists and left-wing parties during years of austerity, Barcelona en Comú (BComú) won control of the city council of Barcelona in May 2015. The ensuing municipal government gave the city its first-ever female mayor in the form of former housing rights campaigner, Ada Colau. With the dubious distinction of commanding the fewest council seats ever in Barcelona’s history, her administration proceeded to govern through ad hoc support from other parties and, for a while, a coalition with the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC), affiliated to the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Despite its minority status, the administration of the Comuns (as they are known in Catalan) proceeded to undertake ambitious initiatives, attempting to regenerate democracy by changing the relationship between municipal authority and citizens, addressing social inequality issues and seeking to curb the hitherto unbridled tourist expansion in the name of improving the environment for those who live in the Catalan capital.

While associated with the Spanish left-wing party Podemos, created in 2014, BComú has a dynamic and a culture of its own. In the Spanish Parliament, the Comuns are in the same parliamentary group as Podemos, and, in Barcelona the latter’s Catalan section, Podem, forms part of the ‘confluence’ of forces constituting BComú. Yet disagreements emerged with Podem as the Comuns proceeded to construct a new Catalan party, Catalunya en Comú (CatComú). When this process bore fruit in 2017, Podem stayed out, although individual Podemos supporters became involved in the new project.

Though CatComú had a disappointing electoral baptism in the Catalan elections of 2017, both it and especially BComú have become significant players in multiple, simultaneously unfolding contests: over left-right policy options in Catalonia, Spain and beyond, but also about the territorial distribution of power, with the Comuns being the only force that straddles the Catalan divide over the question of independence. They assert the right of Catalans to decide the future status of Catalonia vis-à-vis Spain autonomously, but mostly their members wish to avoid separation. In the eyes of many Catalan independentistas, they form part of the problem of Spanish dominance, while in the minds of many unionists they have been guilty of collaborating with the independence forces.

At the Spanish level, the Comuns are one of several relatively new parties and electoral platforms that have helped undermine the dominance of the parties that have governed since 1982, namely, the centre-left PSOE and the right-wing Partido Popular (PP). They form part of a trend in some European countries of ‘alternative left’ initiatives being undertaken following the disappearance of mass communist parties and the difficulties experienced by social democratic parties in dealing with capitalism in the age of globalization. Like Podemos, the Comuns have been allies especially of Syriza in Greece. Ada Colau herself has been a promoter of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), associated with former Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis.

This book examines the extent to which the political project of the Comuns has brought radical change in Barcelona, where BComú has faced opposition from revolutionary anti-capitalists, traditional Catalan nationalists and independentistas, as well as conservative political and economic forces. It also considers the prospects of the Comuns growing beyond the city, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, across Catalonia and at the Spanish level, for while perceiving the city as the fundamental point of departure for democracy-enhancing efforts, they recognize that their project cannot be realized entirely through municipal efforts.

A key concern of this book is to bring out what is novel, and not so novel, in BComú’s political approach, while comparing it with other left-wing forces in Catalonia. The Comuns, like Podemos, are descendants of the indignado movement that rose up across Spain in 2011, denouncing the governing ‘caste’ formed by the two main parties, the corruption pervading political life, the anti-social aspects of globalization and the austere economic policies. In Barcelona, they have attempted to go beyond protest and, while criticizing the distance between elites and citizens associated with representative democracy, they set out to develop political action from the bottom up, with a view to the further empowerment of citizens. Equally novel has been their idea of developing a ‘confluence’ of left-wing and progressive forces whose politics are shaped less by ideology than by concrete inputs from the grass roots of society, in contrast to old-style attempts to strengthen the left by means of elite pacts negotiated by party leaders.

The structure of the book

This book critically assesses the extent of radical innovation by the Comuns in terms of their ideas, policies, organizational approach and political strategy, considering what has been achieved thus far in terms of confluence on the left and a more participative democracy. The first substantive chapter focuses on the context in which the Comuns emerged as a political force (Chapter 2). This is discussed in at various levels – global, Spanish, Catalan and local – all of which have seen developments influencing their political genesis. Here, one finds a particularly interesting interaction between the local and the global, with the Comuns emerging as part of the anti-globalization movement yet arising out of locally-focused social movements and proceeding to make the city of Barcelona a point of reference for radical municipalist movements worldwide (Chapter 2).

Following this, in Chapter 3, the book examines the rise of Barcelona en Comú: how rethinking within alternative left parties and among social movement activists led to its creation in 2014 and its electoral triumph just a year later; the process whereby a largely successful process of confluence took place in the Catalan capital; and the way in which the new organization set out to renew traditional left-wing thinking by drawing upon recent debates about the concept of ‘commons’ (Chapter 3).

Thereafter, the focus shifts to BComú in office between 2015 and 2019. Chapter 4 focuses on the difficulties of minority government, made worse by divisions between left-leaning parties as the Catalan independence process unfolded; Chapter 5 examines the Colau administration’s efforts to extend public participation and introduce transformative policies in a number of key policy areas, among others, those relating to social inequality, the local economy, the environment and gender issues.

Chapter 6 is devoted to the Comuns’ efforts to graduate to intervention at the Catalan level through CatComú. This raises questions about the possibility of emulating the politically successful Barcelona model at higher political levels. It is argued that the tasks of developing a solid, sustainable citizen base here have taken second place to the desire to make an immediate electoral impact and have been hampered by the sheer number of elections in Catalonia since 2015. Moreover, the Comuns have been buffeted by strong pressures to take sides in the polarized contest over independence: the prime focus of mass mobilization and civil society political action during the 2010s. In these circumstances, CatComú’s attempt to develop as a confluence of forces has been less successful than that of BComú. The frustration this has brought was leading to the open expression of internal political differences among the Comuns by the time that multiple elections (general, municipal and European) were held during the first half of 2019 (Chapter 7). These elections provided a basis for gauging public responses to the Comuns’ performance in political life thus far and their potential to achieve change and exert further influence in the future. At the municipal level, many reforms were still unfolding and required a further period of office if they were to become consolidated. What happened in these elections in Barcelona and beyond was to be of huge interest, not only to antagonists in the independence and left-right contests within Spain, but also to people on different sides of the globalization debate in Europe and the Americas.

2 Outlining the context

The origins of Barcelona en Comú are to be found in the context of widespread social, economic and political dissatisfaction with the established order, whose most graphic expression was the widespread protest movement of the indignados (‘outraged ones’) that swept Spain in May 2011, becoming known as the 15-M movement. This experience eventually led radicals to combine in new ways with a view to channelling public protest into the construction of a radical political movement, amid signs that this had some chance of municipal electoral success at a time of growing fragmentation in the party system both across Spain and within Catalonia. The social context was marked by the austerity policies subscribed to by both the PP (Partido Popular, People’s Party) and the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) by 2010, undertaken in response to the global financial and economic crisis, compounded by the national collapse of the Spanish construction industry and property market. It was shaped too by longer-term aspects of globalization such as the growth of mass tourism from abroad and its ecological impact on the city of Barcelona.

Economic conditions and austerity politics prompted a rise in social movement activity right across Spain, but nowhere was this as vigorous as in Barcelona, with its long history of radical protest and cultural creativity. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, social inequalities had worsened throughout Spain, but in Barcelona and Catalonia the discontent was overlain also with a growing sense of injustice over territorially-configured disparities. While Barcelona experienced a particularly acute economic crisis, many Catalans began to express grievances over the amount they were contributing to poorer regions of Spain through inter-regional financial transfer mechanisms and about the neglect of their community by central government, which they saw reflected in a deteriorating regional infrastructure – especially the road and rail networks.

Equally, the rise of an ‘alternative left’ must be viewed against the decline of traditional left parties, the crisis of the party system that had existed since the Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s and popular disillusionment with representative democracy, encapsulated in the indignado protest slogan, ‘they don’t represent us’. BComú came into being at a time when many Catalans were embracing pro-independence political options and thus challenging the Spanish political system in other ways, but there existed a political window of opportunity for a municipally-based left-wing resurgence in Catalonia too, not least because the leading party within the independence movement up to 2015 was a nationalist entity that was right of centre. Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), refounded in 2016 as the Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català (PDeCAT), had become neo-liberal in economic outlook since the 1990s under the successive leaderships of Jordi Pujol and Artur Mas. It was the dominant partner of the Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC) in the Convergència i Unió (CiU) party federation, which had pursued austerity policies after being returned to office in Catalonia in 2010 and had collaborated with the PP at various levels of government until 2012.

There is also an international context here of the rise of city politics, seen in many metropolitan centres of the world, yet of singular significance in the case of Barcelona. Traditional Catalan nationalism had worked to amass as much power as possible in the regional government, the Generalitat, exploiting the fact that devolution in Spain has been essentially regional in direction. Eventually this helped shape the character of the Catalan sovereignty challenge of 2017, by which time many Catalans perceived their nation to be locked in a zero-sum game with the Spanish state, centred in Madrid. However, territorial dimensions to political competition have been present too within Catalonia, with centre-right nationalists seeing Barcelona and its city hall (Ajuntament) as a potential political rival to the Generalitat. While presiding over the latter between 1980 and 2003, Pujol successfully resisted the ambitions of Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist mayor from 1982 to 1997, to gain more municipal autonomy and establish a stronger metropolitan governance body based on democratic representation. In response to Maragall’s efforts to strengthen the Corporación Metropolitana de Barcelona – a developmentalist institution created in 1974 with a bigger remit than today’s Área Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB) – Pujol made use of CiU’s control of the provincial government of Barcelona to abolish the corporation in 1987.

The global dimension

Although local in its initial electoral focus, Barcelona en Comú has been characterized by a global outlook and awareness since its origins. It has identified itself with the transnational anti-globalization movement. The Comuns perceived the politics of austerity implemented by the traditional parties prior to 2018 as reflecting neo-liberal trends across western countries and within international institutions, resulting in a serious erosion of democracy and accountability as well as increased inequality. However, BComú has been marked by eclecticism and cannot be defined purely in terms of an anti-globalization characterization. Although effectively a party, it describes itself more as a common ‘space’ for political activism and is politically broad enough to share some common ground with social democrats as well as involve elements descending from the old Catalan Communist Party, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC). There is also the Comuns’ positive evaluation of some aspects of globalization, especially the opportunities afforded by new digital communications media to promote political messages and facilitate the building of networks of citizens and of cities grappling with common challenges. The appeal of globalization, albeit strongly qualified in the case of the Comuns, is understandable in a country that had experienced decades of international isolation under Franco (González-Enríquez, 2017: 17).

To some extent, too, BComú has associated itself with the ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ left currents seen in other parts of Europe, including France and Germany, since the 1960s, and with more recent radical movements in Latin America, notably the Zapatistas in Mexico. The Zapatista uprising of 1994, involving an assertion of local autonomy and self-government, was hailed by the indignados in Spain as the first revolt against the ‘New World Order’ defined by neo-liberalism (Antentas and Vivas, 2011: 15; Observatorio Metropolitano, 2014: 47–71). Contemporaneously, like Podemos, and especially before the Tsipras government acquiesced to EU demands in 2015, the Comuns demonstrated a special affinity with Syriza, formed through a realignment of left-wing forces opposed to neo-liberal orthodoxy in Greece.

Barcelona en Comú thus sees itself as part of various international movements and has not focused its activity on the big anti-globalization protests of recent years so much as fight back municipally against the impact of globally-driven policies that have eroded the living standards and rights of most sections of society, while also undermining local government. Its appearance as a political force reflected the emergence of new social, cultural and political loyalties and renewed public interest in civic engagement resulting from need, as people reacted to the prevalence of neo-liberal ideas over traditional social democratic models (Eizaguirre, Pradel-Miquel and García, 2017: 425–427). In response to these trends, BComú identifies with traditions of municipalism on a global scale, but with special reference to Europe and the Americas (Shea Baird, 2017) and also across Spain where it sees a history marked by phases of local assertiveness on the part of civil society, alternating with periods of institutionalization when interaction between local government and the grassroots has been more limited. The election of ‘councils for change’ in several major Spanish cities in May 2015 promised to make political life revolve more around the citizenry and seemed to vindicate the decision taken by social movement activists to join with alternative left parties in the name of ‘reclaiming the city’ through contesting these elections with a firm determination to triumph and introduce transformative change.

The Spanish context

This contextual discussion invites consideration of the extent to which Barcelona en Comú should be conceived as a ‘Spanish’ or even españolista (Spanish unionist) phenomenon, as some Catalan pro-independence parties claim it to be. Certainly, the Comuns place themselves partly in the historical traditions of Spanish republicanism and municipalism going back to the nineteenth century, whose progressive promise bore fruit politically following phases of centralist dictatorship – most recently after Franco’s demise in 1975. During the ensuing transition to democracy, Spain experienced several years of democratic municipal revival accompanied by a rise in social and political activism and the growth of local neighbourhood associations. The city of Barcelona had 70,000 residents’ association members by 1978 (Balfour, 1989: 195). However, the victory of the left in Spain’s municipal elections in 1979, the gradual establishment of a regional tier of government across Spain and the electoral victory of the PSOE under Felipe González in 1982 led many activists to move on from associational involvement into governmental, administrative or advisory roles, causing civil society organizations to decline as the new democracy became institutionalized.

The new Spanish model of democracy involved various mechanisms to consolidate the position of a reduced number of parties (essentially two), to the point that it was referred to by some critics as a ‘party state’. Though the dominance of these parties (and of leadership elites within them) brought problems, such as corruption and the underrepresentation of political minorities, Spain experienced periods of impressive economic growth and rising living standards, assisted by entry to the EU in 1986; thus overall there was extensive public satisfaction with what was seen to be a ‘consolidated democracy’. Only after the global financial crisis had brought misery to the construction industry and property market did the collapse of growth and the rise of unemployment – reaching 26 per cent of the economically active population (twice as high among young people) – generate a widespread public sense of systemic failure, particularly once the PSOE, as well as the PP, had decided that there was no alternative to severe austerity as the means of addressing major sovereign debt and budget deficit crises and eventually emerging from the great recession.

Social movement activism revived in the early years of this recession as people began to see politicians collectively and their political parties as part of the problem, incapable of providing solutio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Outlining the context
• 3. The making of Barcelona en Comú
• 4. Party politics under a radical minority government
• 5. The Comuns in office: Achievements and shortcomings
• 6. Comuns in Catalonia: Failing to take off?
• 7. Consolidation and prospects
• Appendix: List of interviews
• Bibliography
• Index