He joined Barcelona City Council as a coach at the beginning of the seventies. He made the leap into municipal politics with the help of his brother, Mayor Pasqual Maragall, and was a key player in the socialist governments of the city. Already leading the ERC candidacy, he won an election in 2019, but an unusual maneuver by former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, with Comuns and Socialists, prevented him from becoming mayor. Then came four years in the opposition, although supporting Ada Colau’s government on many occasions, and the fall in the last elections. On Friday, Ernest Maragall i Mira (Barcelona, ??1943) says goodbye to what has been his home for more than half his life.
The moment and the context in which he announced his goodbye was surprising. Is it a 100% personal decision?
It is a personal decision spoken to those who correspond.
Had you planned it since the day after the elections?
Yes, but the date was determined based on a certain environment and certain circumstances. The City Council lives in an eternal provisionality that in our case advised not to remain installed in it but to provide ERC and Barcelona with the maximum of possibilities and capacity, especially to prepare the project and for new leadership to emerge.
The mayor does not seem to feel uncomfortable in this provisionality…
It seemed that there could be a direct link between what was happening with the political agreements in Catalonia and in the State and what could happen in Barcelona, ??but it has become clear that this is not the case and this paralysis and immobility has been imposed.
But, I insist, Collboni does not seem very worried.
He is comfortable giving up a budget, defining a city governance strategy, giving up deciding what policy we adopt in housing, tourism, mobility, large infrastructure. The option of a budget extension would imply, to begin with, the renunciation of a significant volume of investments. Is this the price we have to pay for this government’s refusal to take the initiative and define its political alliances? The comfort of the current government has a price that is Barcelona, ??a price that all citizens are paying.
The city’s economic indicators are not bad…
To what extent is apparent and inertial economic growth compatible with a very serious deepening of social inequality? The model that the current government is defending facilitates a set of successes for certain sectors, but the serious and terrible thing is that this model is compatible with the increase in inequality. In this way, Barcelona’s identity, which must be based on social cohesion and the fight against inequalities, is being broken. Barcelona ends up being another scene of market domination, of the decisions of large investors.
What do you think the role of ERC in Barcelona should be in the next three and a half years?
That decision must be made by ERC in the coming weeks and months, and it will do so freely, conscientiously, with all the elements of judgment on the table.
Do you see any possibility of a government agreement between PSC, BComún and ERC?
The first answer to that question corresponds to a socialist mayor who seems to prefer to extend the provisional period and, in the process, renounce the real governance of the city.
Ernest Maragall leaves the Barcelona City Council. Are you also leaving politics?
As a citizen and as an ERC member, no. Catalonia has lived through a period of exception for six or seven years that seems to have ended. We went from a period of defensiveness and exception to another of construction, with a distant but also specific look at the country and its social, economic and political construction. We are entering a new period but what is not clear is the role that Barcelona, ??as a city and institution, plays in this new period. The attitude of the current local government is a direct harm to the city.
What is the best memory you have from your time at City Hall?
There have been many. I have been in the City Council for more years as a professional than as a politician. I have good memories, above all, of the Olympic period and the city’s transformation.
The worst, I suppose, is having won an election and not having been mayor.
That is a very marked moment
And it shouldn’t be easy to overcome…
It is part of the landscape and the possible scenarios posed by the current rules of the political game that we have in the city and in the country, no matter how horrible or unnatural it may be. It was a hard learning experience, but it did not stop us from continuing to work for the general interest of the city.
How can you explain that the formation that had won the previous elections, with a very similar program and the same candidate, can suffer such a pronounced fall?
We were unable to define our own role regarding the dominant question in the social and political scenario of the city, which was none other than how to oust the mayor and her government. We had been marked as something different from the explicit rejection of the mayor, which was the dominant question of the citizens.
Did practicing constructive opposition to the Colau government condemn them at the polls?
Yes, clearly. Just when we were beginning a path of distancing ourselves from the government, with the negotiation of the municipal budget for 2022, that interested connection was generated between the budget of the City Council and that of the Generalitat and we ended up doing an exercise in institutional responsibility. This evidenced the refusal to exercise a critical alternative regarding Mrs. Colau. That was the turning point that placed us in impossible territory to appear as an alternative in the elections. In the last elections there was not a debate on the city model but rather a kind of referendum on the mayor.
And so the one who took the prize was Xavier Trias
Exact. Neither he nor his political force had appeared in Barcelona for four years, but they had a starting bonus that they knew how to play and that must be respected and valued.
Is your conclusion that Barcelona is not going through a good moment?
There is a bipolarity. We have very good news, some fantastic events and, at the same time, an unacceptable reality of social fragmentation.
It is the current evil of almost all large cities.
It’s true, Barcelona is becoming more and more like any other big city, it shares the same problems. But this should not console us nor should we resign ourselves.
It is still paradoxical that inequalities in Barcelona have barely been reduced or even increased in a few years of government by a leftist formation that championed the fight against these inequalities.
Indeed, inequalities have not been reduced. We have had governments characterized by an excess of ideology, an evident lack of results in terms of equality and failure in certain policies such as housing.
