Electoral banners are still seen hanging on trees, lampposts, and panels placed with smiling and seductive faces throughout the city. We already know the results; this article is not about analysis or possible agreements. Campaigns pass through our lives like a window of intensity, like a Good Friday, a tradition that in this case every four years puts us at a large family dinner table to discuss whether things are going well and whose fault it is that they are not. In more civic terms, it is a neighborhood assembly that should not renew a president just because it's time, but choose the best one from the staircase, and that obviously creates tensions. Especially in a town, where neighbors know each other and must greet each other every day, and where everyone knows where everyone stands. Yes, especially in a town. Like Barcelona.
Like a Sisa song, we can say there's the businessman who wanted a friendlier city council, and who hasn't stopped until he got it, but I still doubt he tried to become friendlier with the people. There's the activist, or directly the communist, who has had to hoist a flag too distant between idea and reality, as also happens, by the way, with independentism: promising more social housing, or class equality, has the small problem that it must be done. Like independence, exactly. That's why the campaign has been so distant from citizen language, because in this town we all know what has been done and what has not been done, and it has been impossible to disguise either of the two things.
There are the pacified zones, which are beautiful to look at and not so much to live in, as their closest neighbors seem to have expressed. There's the young person looking for work, but work to pay for an apartment, and who too often has to ask parents or grandparents for help. There are the urban guards, who surely don't want to have to appear more unfriendly, and there's the tram lobby, which will now be picking up four hundred phones at once. There's the expat, who looks at everything from the outside, because even though they live here, they vote (and pay taxes) wherever they want, and who doesn't know or care what it means to preserve the genuine identity of this town. Barcelona, I mean. When I say town, I mean Barcelona. And if you understand something else, you won't be wrong either.
There is the public official restless about the results, there is the civil servant who merely says "others who leave," there are the tourists who want something more from Barri Gòtic and something less of a modernism overdose because they find it more "authentic," like the Carmel bunkers. There is, above all, the Sagrada Família, majestically rising above its deluded undertakers, and there are the tactical urban planning paintings that wonder if more strategic urban planning can now be done. There are the promises, there is Montjuïc, and Morrot, and the airport, and Jaume Plensa, and Tom Thumb. There are those from Artós square, surpassed by Trias, and those from Ateneu Popular de Nou Barris, surpassed by Collboni. There is the Eixample, where in this town everything is always summarized and decided, and there are the merchants and liberal professionals who have lit a candle to Saint Pancras. There are the independentistas, who have discovered that sometimes to win you don't have to want to win everything, and there are the constitutionalists, who have learned that the neighbors on the third floor, second door, or those who hang esteladas there on the sea/Besós corner, are as much neighbors as they are.
There are the taxi drivers, the only guild that has publicly put its vote up for sale (or rather, they have exposed their sale), and there are the parks without grass that are dying of drought and neglect. And there are the motorcyclists, of course, who breathe a sigh of relief simply for having stopped being persecuted for a few days, and the cyclists who hope not to lose a single millimeter of space. Oh, and the abstainers, of course. The infallible winners of the night. There are people who cannot possibly be wrong, I suppose because they have been spectacularly wrong too many times.
In this surf and turf paella we will have to coexist for the next four years, ladies and gentlemen of the staircase, neighbors, boys and girls, old and young, Moors and Christians, Mercedes and Eulalias.It seems that soon we will have another electoral hurricane, with seductive smiles and posters that are hard to remove, with promises hanging in the air, with toasts to the sun and toasts to the shade, but here we will have to wait to see how they understand what we have decided.If it was a plebiscite, the result is clear. If it was something else, they will tell us. Now then, it has once again become clear that we are not a city like the others. That we maintain a strong singularity.And that, before and after a campaign, the Barcelonian already knows quite well what he wants. My summary: if there is something he does not want, it is to disappear. If they know how to listen or not, that is another "differenta" thing.