The Ciudadanos candidate for mayor of Barcelona, ​​Anna Grau, has presented this Friday her program for the municipal elections on May 28 in the Casa Seat auditorium, where she has starred in an interview included in the cycle that La Vanguardia and Barcelona Global have organized to publicize the proposals of the different mayors.
In conversation with the deputy director of La Vanguardia Enric Sierra and after the presentation of the businessman Daniel Puig, from Barcelona Global, Grau explained the four programmatic axes of his candidacy, whose main workhorse is the fight against illegal occupation.
For the mayor of Ciudadanos, who this week started a protest campaign against the squatting of the premises known as El Kubo and La Ruïna in Bonanova, it is a crime that has become a “problem” in Barcelona, ​​a The city, he pointed out, has become a “mecca” for squatters, who live in the Catalan capital “a festival”.
To eradicate this phenomenon, which Grau relates to the growing citizen insecurity that, from his point of view, affects Barcelona, ​​Ciudadanos proposes that the Urban Police be “well equipped” and can use, if necessary, the controversial Taser stun guns. “Why not?” asked the candidate, who, however, has been prudent when it comes to pointing out to the agents which is the most suitable material for carrying out their work.
In any case, Grau recalled, Tasers are a “non-lethal” instrument, but a “deterrent”, therefore, at a time when the use of foam bullets is also in question, their use could serve, from his point of view, to prevent the squatters, whom he has described as “savages” in the case of El Kubo, from being able to “harm the neighbors”, given that they threatened to burn down the neighborhood if they were evicted.
Apart from the squatting, which will take her to demonstrate every Tuesday in Bonanova, Grau has outlined three other “red lines” of her program, from which she can reach agreements with the other political formations if Ciudadanos achieves representation in the City Council: the “active” defense of bilingualism, stopping the superblocks in progress until rethinking the urban and mobility model of the city and redefining the “dramatic taxation” of Barcelona.
For Grau, Barcelona continues to have “great potential” despite having been led by the “worst possible government” in recent years. For this reason, he has insisted on the need for public-private collaboration to reverse the negative drift that, in his opinion, the city has led to with the “communist mayor” Ada Colau, which has meant “a stopper for cultural progress” in the Catalan capital by rejecting projects such as the Hermitage.
“Living on tourism and disgusting it is contradictory,” said the mayor of Ciudadanos, who reiterated that Barcelona has 15% of its GDP linked to this sector and has celebrated that not only visitors to the city arrive for a few days but also expatriates who settle down to live and work: “There are more Colau than tourists,” Grau graphically exclaimed, for whom the extreme point of having to place a “check point Charlie at the entrance to Diagonal” has not been reached to reduce the number of tourists, but it is a question of better managing the flows.
As for the superblocks, another of the debate topics of this municipal pre-campaign, the Ciudadanos candidate does not propose removing them all but rethinking them: “Putting four geraniums and three planters is not turning the streets into green areas”, Grau pointed out, who has accused the City Council of “letting problems rot”, as in the case of the Carmel bunkers, so that they can then “act Soviet-style” and say “tourists out!”. In contrast, her program proposes a “rescue urbanism” from which to make a new plan based on technical criteria and agreed with neighbors and merchants.
“I am more concerned about finishing line 9 of the metro, reforming the Dalt ring road or expanding the airport than joining the tram, which will one day be done but it is not a priority and it has a high cost,” Grau said in terms of mobility. , who has accused Colau of not wanting to expand the airport, not because of ecological awareness (the mayoress “doesn’t care about Ricarda’s ducks”, she has assured), but because of the “childish discourse” that, in his view, characterizes the left.
Whatever happens at the polls, what will not happen again is that Ciudadanos, if they hold the key to governance again after May 28, contribute their votes “for free” to Colau’s investiture as Manuel Valls did in in 2009. Grau has insisted that Ciudadanos “divorced” that same day from the former French prime minister and that the electoral coalition that had formed around him broke up at that very moment. “That can never be done,” he pointed out.
