The main candidates for mayor of Barcelona attended today the first electoral debate, organized by Pimec at the Born Cultural and Memory Center, with marked cards, a well-defined script and no rabbits in their hats. The crossing of reproaches, more than the presentation of new proposals, has characterized a debate in which tourism management, housing policies, the effects of the new green axes of the Eixample on mobility and the expansion of the airport have defined positions hardly reconcilable between the heads of the list in the elections on May 28.
After the introduction of the president of Pimec, Antoni Cañete, Ernest Maragall (ERC), Ada Colau (BComú), Jaume Collboni (PSC), Xavier Trias (Junts) and Daniel Sirera (PP) debated on various aspects related to the economy of the city in a long debate and in which no one has made friends or drawn blocks of possible alliances.
The discussion on the management of tourism has made the first frictions appear. The socialist Jaume Collboni has defended that Barcelona is now in a moment of "balance" with regard to the way of dealing with an economic activity whose importance for the city no candidate doubts. The mayor of the PSC has opted for quality tourism, like the rest of the candidates, which allows them to escape both the "open bar", which both he and Ada Colau have attributed to the time of the Trias government, as well as the " tourismophobia”.
Xavier Trias has reproached Ada Colau for "not believing in tourism" and for even acting as "an activist" against him and has promised to carry out promotional campaigns for the city in which it is made clear that Barcelona does not want tourism of “prostitution, drugs and alcohol”.
The popular Daniel Sirera is the only one of the mayors who has clearly defended cruise tourism, even for those passengers who visit the city for only a few hours, and has announced that if he accedes to the city government, he will remove the ban on building new hotels. that weighs on the most touristically saturated areas of the city.
Ernest Maragall has reiterated that Barcelona cannot continue to be a "low cost city" and, although he has recognized the need for tourism, he has stated that the city's economy cannot depend on this activity. Addressing Ada Colau and Jaume Collboni, he reproached them for saying that "you have abandoned tourism management."
For her part, Ada Colau highlighted the role of tourism regulation carried out by her government after receiving as an inheritance eight years ago "the open bar of Mr. Trias". The mayoress has insisted that Barcelona is today an example of management of this activity admired by the rest of the big European cities.
Housing policies, and not only those of the Barcelona City Council but also those of the Generalitat and the central government, have also highlighted the differences between the five mayors, not so much because of what they propose –in general, they all agree on the need for the public sector to collaborate with the private sector to find solutions to the problems of access to affordable housing- but rather for the centrifugation of responsibilities of one and the other.
But, without a doubt, when the greatest clash between the candidates for mayor of Barcelona has occurred, it has been when addressing issues related to urban mobility, and especially with the latest urban developments in the Eixample. Ada Colau has used some statistical data that until now had not been made public, and that are partial in nature since they analyze mobility only from Tuesday to Thursday, and that reveal that overall traffic in the city has been reduced on those weekdays , in the roundabouts and in the accesses to Barcelona by 11%, and that even in the alternative routes to the green axes under construction there has been a reduction in traffic.
The rest of the candidates have not believed the BComú candidate when she has stated that she has nothing against cars and motorcycles, and her partner in government until recently, Jaume Collboni, has warned that if she wins the mayoralty in the There will not be 21 streets in Eixample like Consell de Cent, as the commoners propose, because "it is not viable".
Xavier Trias has lamented the congestion of the Eixample, aggravated in his opinion by the actions carried out by the current municipal government. The popular Daniel Sirera, who in repeated moments of the debate has set the policies of the Madrid City Council as a good example to follow, has stated that if it is in his hands "we will recover the Eixample de Cerdà" and will eliminate the bike lane on Via Augusta , whose construction is causing serious congestion problems. For his part, Ernest Maragall has accused Colau and Collboni of turning the Eixample into "a trench" and of acting as if it were a merely local issue over something that has a metropolitan dimension.
As was to be expected, the debate on the expansion of El Prat airport has not been exempt from mutual reproaches either. Both Xavier Trias and Ernest Maragall have rejected the solutions imposed or suggested from Madrid, in reference to Aena's proposal to extend the third runway by 500 meters.
In the debate on the airport, the moment of greatest tension between Collboni and Colau has taken place. The socialist candidate has promised that in the first hundred days of government, if he wins the mayoralty, he will promote an agreement on the expansion, which he considers essential for the future of Barcelona. The current mayoress has come to accuse him of "climate denialism" for defending the proposal of the president of Aena, Maurici Lucena.
