Ada Colau promised this Saturday a firm hand against vulture housing funds if a progressive government is re-elected, with an agenda that includes more taxes for high incomes, the defense of the welfare state, and a new increase in the minimum wage.
The Broad Front candidate to preside over the Government made these statements at an event in Jardins d'Elx square, in Barcelona, where she also took for granted that the general strike called for Wednesday will be a success throughout Spain.
Colau placed housing as the main battlefield and defended that the city needs the “maximum effort” to expand the public housing stock, confront investment funds, and continue promoting use-cession cooperatives. “So many things that they told us could not be done, we did them,” she affirmed.
The former mayor of Barcelona maintained that building public housing is not easy in militant municipalism and that, for this reason, many formations that governed before did not prioritize it: according to her, it was not politically profitable for them.
In that area, she criticized the current mayor, Jaume Collboni, whom she accused of not having promoted “a single public housing unit,” despite the fact that, according to her version, hundreds of keys to developments promoted by the Comuns have been handed over during the mandate. “It is important to remember this,” she stressed, because in the next mandate, no matter who governs, new flats cannot be inaugurated if Collboni's mandate, she insisted, has not made progress in public housing.
Colau also vindicated her eight-year period as mayor, a position she recalled having held with pride as the first woman in the history of Barcelona, in addition to highlighting her status as a person from the LGTBI collective and an activist.
Fiscal clash and offensive against the far-right
The candidate sent a direct message to the PP's number two for Congress, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, after the latter expressed herself in favor of eliminating simultaneous translation in co-official languages in the Chamber. “You and your posh friends are going to be fried with taxes,” said Colau.
She also responded to the PP candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, for his statements in which he defined himself as a feminist for having grown up among women. “All humanity has grown thanks to women,” she retorted.
Colau added that women will not allow their right to decide over their own bodies to be taken away and recalled that Comuns-Frente Amplio has women heading its lists in the four Catalan constituencies.
In the harshest part of her speech, she warned that the far-right poses “a great threat” if it wins on November 29, understanding that this would imply a setback in rights and freedoms. She also criticized the visit of Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, to the program La Revuelta, and questioned that he had requested a “casting” to select the audience.
Furthermore, she celebrated that leaders of Núcleo Nacional had been arrested and maintained that fascism, hate speech, and violence are crimes. In that context, she accused Vox of practicing violence that, she said, is expressed when from Congress it calls for hunting down migrants. “It was about time those Nazis were arrested,” she stated.
Colau closed her speech with a defense of the tax on the rich, the idea of tax the rich, and denounced that Spain is, in her opinion, “a country where, apart from fascism, it is normalized that there are 33 billionaire people” while the majority of the working population struggles to make ends meet.
She also described as “immoral” and “unacceptable” that 13 investment funds concentrate more than 100,000 homes in Spain, a figure she used to reinforce her offensive against real estate and financial power.
