What is really being played with the control of this institution is the way to imagine in the coming decades what will be the role of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, in Catalonia, in Spain and in Europe
In recent days, the ups and downs of the pacts for the government of the Diputació de Barcelona have become an argument for debate and cross-fire controversy both in the press and, obviously, on social networks.
This is so for two obvious and weighty reasons. The first has to do with the definitive demonstration that there is no type of strategic unity on the part of the pro-independence parties. It had already become clear with the constitution of the town councils, but the spectacle of the last few hours, during which they have accused each other of having agreed with "prisoners" and have rhetorically challenged each other to break them (without any intention of doing so) has made it clear even to those most confident in the process. It is not possible to know how this will affect – or not – the Government of the Generalitat. Maybe it won't affect you at all.
The other reason for the controversy – even more blatant – had and has to do with a piece of evidence: the Provincial Councils are the local institutions best endowed financially and those with the most room for maneuver to decide where and how resources are distributed. Achieving control of them – especially that of Barcelona – is a kind of life insurance, especially in the case of Junts per Catalunya, which has recently lost its institutional presence and, therefore, its resources.
These two reasons explain the media controversyfast food(which touches on two inflammable topics, but at the bottom of the surface, such as the rancid process and the survival or not of certain partisan acronyms), but they do not explain the political importance of what is really being played with the control of this institution, which is nothing more than a way to imagine in the coming decades what will be the role of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, in Catalonia, in Spain and in Europe.
The issue is obviously an old one: Pujol closed it with a bang in 1987 using his absolute majority (and with the numerically unnecessary ERC competition) as a club, with the abolition of the Metropolitan Corporation of Barcelona. The then mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, had promoted that institution (it had been created in 1974 still during the dictatorship, under impulsesdevelopmentalists) and had every intention of transforming it in a democratic sense to coordinate and harmonize decision-making and the provision of fundamental services for the 26 municipalities that made up it. In other words, he wanted to institutionally consolidate the Barcelona of four million. The CMB was wiped out in one fell swoop and only recently was the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona created, an entity that has less scope and potential.
The conflict had obviously been generated by a question of resources and partisan presence in the territory (the left had a very strong presence in terms of mayors), but the question went further and had a nuclear impact on the role given to metropolitan cities as political actors and, therefore, also in the construction of imaginaries, legitimacy, ways of conceiving the relationship between people, communities and institutions. The phrase contained in one of the letters that Pujol and Maragall sent to each other during the hardest moments of the CMB conflict became famous, where the former president said: "The Hanseatic cities were a powerful city, fundamentally a large commercial port (...) and practically nothing else. They hadhinterland. They are not a country. We want Catalonia to be a country". The message was clear: conservative Catalan nationalism would not allow alternative visions of the territory that would generate other imaginaries other than the traditional "patriotic" ones. In reality, this has remained constant over the decades: the statements of Torra himself about the fact that Barcelona is no longer the capital of the country (and Girona would be) is the degeneration of this very way of thinking in a context - now yes - of the resurgence of reflexes And, despite everything, the issue is stubborn and tells us that, despite the nostalgics of Westphalia (those here, and those in the middle of Europe), the metropolitan cities have and will have a decisive role from a political, economic, and cultural point of view. In Madrid, they have already understood this for a long time as a kind of federal district will exercise the presidency of the Provincial Council, and the one who is heading the Barcelona City Council (and who will exercise the presidency of the AMB) – they will not be carried away by surface controversies, they will be able to look at the real challenges that metropolitan Barcelona has and they will face with strength the construction of a powerful, innovative, solvent and democratic institutional actor.
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Paola Lo Cascio