Ada Colau

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ada Colau (2013)
Colau at a PAH event in Raval 2013

Ada Colau i Ballano [ ˈaðə kuˈɫaw ] (born March 3, 1974 in Barcelona ) is a Catalan activist and since June 2015 mayor of her hometown Barcelona. The left-alternative platform Barcelona en Comú , which was also supported by the left-populist Podemos , won a narrow majority in the 2015 local elections with her as the top candidate; in June 2019 she won a second mandate.

Family and education

Ada Colau i Ballano grew up in the El Guinardó district of Barcelona. She lived with her three sisters with her mother, a saleswoman, and her partner; the mother was separated from her father, an advertising photographer. The grandparents on both sides had moved to Catalonia as Spanish internal migrants. Colau completed her schooling at Academia Febrer and studied philosophy without a degree at the University of Barcelona in the 1990s and during an Erasmus stay in Milan. She then worked in the areas of communication, audiovisual production and translation, and in the early 2000s Colau worked briefly as an actress in the Antena 3 television series Dos + una .

The partner Ada Colaus has been the PAH activist and economist Adrià Alemany since 2007 ; You have a son.

Activist

After Colau had already taken part in social initiatives with her mother in elementary school and protested against the Gulf War as part of an "activist generation" , she became involved in 2001 as a political activist, in the criticism of globalization , against the Iraq war and during the Spanish real estate bubble against extremes Price increases, among other things in the squatter movement "okupa". Her interest shifted from global to local city difficulties. Since 2007 she has been working in the Observatorio DESC , a social and research project that advocates the recognition of social rights. For this purpose she organized a series of seminars, courses and conferences, among others with David Harvey , published several books and linked her work with the HABITAT program of the UN .

In the wake of the financial crisis from 2007 after the real estate bubble in Spain in the 2000s, she co-founded the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in February 2009 to help the victims of property speculation against evictions. Until spring 2014 she remained the spokesperson for this platform, which was awarded the European Citizens' Prize by the European Parliament in 2013 . She became known in this role in 2013 when she attended hearings on the subject in front of the Spanish and European Parliaments.

At the end of June 2014 she was one of the founders of the civic platform Barcelona en Comú , which brought together various civil society groups and initiatives in order to run for the local elections in May 2015 with the aim of gaining a viable political majority and fundamentally changing the political situation. Instead of the usual “detached” representative politics, activists should be able to intervene directly in the political process and overcome its previous fragmentation. Colau had previously rejected requests from the left-wing parties CUP and ICV . Her movement was supported by Pablo Iglesias and his Spain-wide collective movement Podemos and stood up against the corruption and encrustation of the previous elites, to which she subjected mafia-like structures. Priority should therefore be given to job creation and the fight against inequality and poverty in the city. Colau named transparency and thrift in the city administration as a further goal and announced that she would limit her salary as Lord Mayor to 2,200 euros per month and abolish company cars and expenses. In addition, the city should be developed away from mass tourism, multinational corporations and the impoverishment of entire city quarters.

politician

In the local elections on May 24, 2015, Barcelona en Comú won the most seats in the city council with around 170,000 votes, defeating the liberal-conservative Convergència i Unió , which was marked by corruption scandals, with around 150,000 votes. In the mayoral election she herself defeated the top candidate, the previous incumbent Xavier Trias , which Colau described as a victory for David against Goliath .

Colau did not support the referendum on October 1, 2017 on the independence of Catalonia. At the same time, she accused the conservative government in Madrid under Mariano Rajoy of having refused to enter into dialogue with the Catalan leadership for years, and sharply criticized the efforts of the Spanish police against the referendum. Nevertheless, on October 10, 2017, she declared before the Catalan regional parliament that the result of the referendum was not a basis for a unilateral declaration of independence; In view of the escalation of the conflict, she appealed to Puigdemont and Rajoy not to "make any further decisions that would destroy a dialogue."

Colau ran again for the local elections in May 2019, although the support of the people of Barcelona for their policies in the spring of 2019 was at a low; In an opinion poll in February 2019, the approval rate fell to 26.5%. At the end of March 2019, the Barcelona Municipal Council voted for the eighth time in favor of a reprimand from the administration by Colau; are accused of u. a. Deficiencies in housing policy and public safety. In the local elections that took place in May 2019, Barcelona en Comú von Colau, with 20.7%, was narrowly defeated by the also left-wing separatist ERC with 21.3% from Ernest Maragall ; both parliamentary groups hold 10 of a total of 41 city councilors. In June 2019, with the support of the Socialists ( PSC ) and part of the non-partisan parliamentary group of Manuel Valls , who tried to prevent the appointment of Ernest Maragall, she was re-elected mayor.

Fonts

  • with Adrià Alemany: Vides hipotecades. De la bombolla immobiliària al dret a l'habitatge (= El fil d'Ariadna. Vol. 52). Salafranca, Barcelona 2012, ISBN 978-84-15002-96-3 . Translations into Castilian (“Vidas Hipotecadas”) and into English (“Mortgaged Lives”).
  • with Adrià Alemany: Sí que es pot! (= L'Ancora. ). Grup62, Barcelona 2013, ISBN 978-84-9710-238-4 . Translations into Castilian ("¡Sí se puede! Crónica de una pequeña gran victoria.") And into English ("Yes you can! Chronicle of a small great victory").

Web links

Commons : Ada Colau  - collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ The spelling of the surname is not uniform: The Catalan version with i between the two names is about the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana used , while the Madrid Official State Gazette in part, without i Ada Colau Ballano and partly Ada Colau i Ballano writes; Both spellings are used on the website of the Ajuntament de Barcelona : Transparencia: Ada Colau i Ballano. In: Ajuntament.Barcelona.cat (Spanish); Els Alcaldes de Barcelona. In: BCN.cat (Catalan).
  2. ↑ a b c d Biography. ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: AdaColau.cat .
  3. ↑ a b c Toni Sust: Ada Colau, activista de profesión. In: El Periódico , February 12, 2013.
  4. ↑ Pasado de la activista. El, papelón 'de Ada Colau en Antena 3. In: El Mundo , April 19, 2013.
  5. ↑ Toni Sust: Ada Colau, activista de profesión. In: El Periódico , February 12, 2013.
  6. ↑ Hans-Günter Kellner: Activist Ada Colau. Fresh political wind in Barcelona. In: Deutschlandfunk , November 13, 2014.
  7. ↑ Who we are. ( Memento from May 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) In: ObservatoriDESC.org
  8. ↑ Ada Colau: »We are not running to get a seat on the local council. We want to win «. In: Luxemburg Online , July 2014.
  9. ↑ Joachim Rienhardt: Ada Colau - the woman who frightens with her heart. In: stern.de , May 23, 2015.
  10. ↑ Ashifa Kassam: Barcelona's Anti-Poverty Crusader Leads Race to be City's Next Mayor. In: The Guardian , May 15, 2015.
  11. ↑ Ada Colau le arrebata a CiU la capital catalana. In: ABC.es , May 24, 2015.
  12. ↑ Reiner Wandler: Massenhaft gegen Madrid In: taz.de, September 11, 2017.
  13. ↑ Thomas Urban : Madrid heats up conflict with Catalans. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 20, 2017.
  14. ↑ Rajoy: "There was no independence referendum in Catalonia" . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2017, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed April 17, 2019]).
  15. ↑ tagesschau.de: Barcelona's mayor against the secession of Catalonia. Retrieved April 17, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Reiner Wandler: Ada Colau stands for a third way. In: Die Tageszeitung , October 11, 2017.
  17. ↑ Metropoli Abierta: Dos de cada tres barceloneses desconfía de Colau , March 3, 2019 (Spanish)
  18. ↑ La Vanguardia: Séptima y octava reprobación a Colau , March 29, 2019 (Spanish)
  19. ↑ Election results for Barcelona in El Pais, accessed on May 28, 2019 (Spanish)
personal data
SURNAME Colau, Ada
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Colau i Ballano, Ada (full surname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Catalan activist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona