Núria Marín is leaving the mayor’s office of the Hospitalet de Llobregat City Council, as La Vanguardia has been able to confirm. She had held the position since 2008. Her replacement as head of the City Council of the second city of Catalonia will be the also socialist David Quirós, as confirmed by sources close to the PSC.
Marín, who has accumulated extensive experience in the field of local politics, also in the presidency of the Barcelona Provincial Council, takes over from a less worn-out profile, councilor of the City Council since 2016. Currently, Quirós is deputy mayor of the Serveis a les Persones area with competencies in innovation, education, culture, sports and seniors. He had been increasing his public exposure as a councilor for months. His inauguration is expected to be on June 15.
Born in 1974 in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Quirós has a diploma in labor relations from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree in public management from the Ramon Llull University. With a spirit of dialogue and defender of culture as an engine of change, for some time now he was in all the pools to replace Marín.
His party, the PSC, does not have an absolute majority in the municipal plenary session so it will have to seek support to govern. Precisely, with this change it is hoped to iron out differences with some opposition groups. The ideological distance between the different opposition forces (ERC, PP, COMMONS and Vox) makes it almost impossible for an alternative candidate to emerge that gains more support than him.
Thus, the political leadership of one of the greatest exponents of municipal power of the PSC in Catalonia is over. Marín, a native and resident of the Torrassa neighborhood, saw them in all colors in front of the mayor’s office. From the economic crisis due to the bursting of the real estate bubble to the covid pandemic, two circumstances that especially affected humble people, such as the residents of l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Originally from and resident of the Torrassa neighborhood, in the City Council many of her collaborators address or talk about her as ‘the boss’. A sign of the respect she commanded. Socialism in Catalonia’s second city was never an easy task, but Marín almost always demonstrated solid leadership.
As affectionate as she was temperamental, she stood out more in short distances than in big speeches. She always had a waist. She was both able to seduce executives such as the head of the Mobile World Congress, John Hoffman, so that the great congress could continue in Barcelona and to start dancing country or whatever in a group of neighbors if the occasion required it. She once visited an assembly of one of the platforms for people affected by mortgages (PAH) of her population, which like a good part of the metropolitan area of Barcelona suffers significant problems with access to housing. In response to the complaints of those present, she was empathetic and even made some self-criticism. But at the same time, no matter how much desperation her interlocutors showed, she vehemently defended that to access aid you have to process things well.
The socialist always exhibited a strong personality. The presidents of the Generalitat, councilors and ministers who have passed through l’Hospitalet over the years know this well. He took several of them to the Bellvitge UFO, as the dome of the Hesperia Tower hotel is known colloquially, to make them understand from a bird’s eye view what was necessary for l’Hospitalet. She always raised her voice in the media to demand what her city needed. She fights by nature, she never stopped being demanding with higher administrations. Sometimes she achieved her goals and other times she didn’t. In this sense, she will leave the mayor’s office without the works to bury the train tracks, a transcendental work in l’Hospitalet and promised a thousand times, having begun.
The members of the National Police present in l’Hospitalet on October 1, 2017 also learned about his strong personality. Although on more than one occasion he acknowledged that he got along well with Carles Puigdemont when he was president of the Generalitat, he never collaborated with the referendum. independence. However, upon seeing the police charges at the Can Vilumara institute, he went down to the street to literally throw the law enforcement forces out of his city. “Go away from l’Hospitalet,” she snapped at them while, at that moment, she was booed by a good part of the independentists present. At that time she was number 2 in the PSC.
The truth is that the socialist was not having her best moment in l’Hospitalet now. After reaching it, in the last municipal elections she lost the absolute majority. She had to govern alone. She did not repeat as president of the Barcelona Provincial Council and was elected senator.
The last legislature was hard for her. Strategic projects such as the transformation of Granvia to create a biomedical cluster were delayed while the aforementioned burying of the roads did not arrive and the pandemic severely hit a city with many small homes, sparse urban planning with some of the most densely populated areas of all of Europe and where poverty is still present.
As if that were not enough, during her last years as mayor, three councilors were involved in two different alleged cases of corruption. She was not directly involved in any of them, but in the most notorious one, that of the Consell Esportiu, she was accused until the court exonerated her of any crime. They were difficult months, politically and personally, for her.
