Last Saturday began the 90th edition of a cycling return to Spain loaded with controversy for the participation of the Israel Premier-Tech team. For years, politics has become a sports chronicle in the same way that sport has been permeated with international political discourse. Politics and sport are infected with verbs that invite to force the rules of the game from the action. Marinetti, author of the futuristic manifesto, affirmed that fascism was movement, action.
“Israel denied the entrance to the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, on his first official trip to the next East”
In 2024, when the goals of the stages were filled with Palestinian flags, the competition began to be striking for protests against the Israel Premier-Tech team. This year it will be again. The political platform with-Zurekin Navarra, (composed of Podemos Navarra, United Left of Navarra, Batzarre, Verde and Verdes Equo Alianza) launched a statement last day 20 demanding the “exclusion” of the team that sponsors Israel of the Vuelta 2025. The verb of last week has been “excluding”. Three days after that petition, Israel denied the entrance to the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, on his first official trip to the East. The mayor had to land in Tel Aviv last Friday night, invited by the mayors of Bethlehem and Ramala, but at the last minute the Benjamin Netanyahu government notified the revocation of its permission to be able to enter the country.
Barcelona, global city. Collboni’s failed trip gives a local meaning to “the new Spanish diplomacy”. It is no longer just that the Government of Pedro Sánchez denounced the genocide in Gaza or that its Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, proclaims the independence of the Palestinian State by dragging France. The international policy of the states has created a golden thread that communicates to the global cities with the same intensity as the great sports events.
To be a global city, it is necessary for international policy to be incorporated into the mayors’s agenda. The capital that some cities claim or claim is a diffuse concept for which both the great capitals and the great ideas travel with the same intensity. Both are projected towards everyone else with different intensity. While Madrid looks at the USA and Latin America, Madrid of the 10 million inhabitants that Fernando Caballero claims, Barcelona speaks of the habitable city of the 5 million, connects to Brussels and looks for spaces in the East, either through the regional organizations of the community institutions in the first case, either through the recurring contact with China or expressing its commitment to human rights in Gaza, in the second.
“While Madrid looks at the USA. And Latin America, the Madrid of the 10 million inhabitants that Fernando Caballero claims, Barcelona speaks of the habitable city of the 5 million, connects to Brussels and looks for spaces in the East”
The figure of Jaume Collboni reminds me of the endearing and hyperactive mayor of Gijón and Asturian socialist president Tini Areces, perhaps because two of the geographical references that the old math professor always took into account to transform Gijón were the cities of Vitoria and Barcelona. Global cities or, rather, Glocales, as Juan Cueto defended, the Cathodic Magician who inspired much of the Arecista project in the 24 years that lasted its most important political period in Asturias. Think about the global to act in the local. And indeed, Gijón became the economic and cultural capital of Asturias, crystallizing in a quickly digitized city, covering it with all the necessary public equipment that demanded coexistence in each neighborhood. We talk about a project with a huge preeminence of the public in the sanitation and cleaning of the neighborhoods, health centers, municipal swimming pools, sports equipment, green spaces, libraries and a decentralized administrative service and present in each district. All this allowed to affirm that Gijón was a city that pressed the future in a habitable, socially fair and sustainable way.
A similar and updated score, forty years later, can be interpreted in Barcelona from the vision that Collboni shows of his city when he is claimed as the mayor of all Barcelona and all Barcelona, when he stands as the mayor of all his neighborhoods, when he demands more competitions, more power or more influence, for example, in the future of his port, one of the fundamental economic poles of the Mediterranean or The management of the airport where Illa has and, surely, will do so, a commitment to fulfill.
Barcelona has never renounced its time. It has been a fundamental factor in the political future of Spain. Thus in the rise and fall of the I Republic as in its participation in the Foundation in 1931 and its subsequent decline of the second after the pronouncement of 1934 of a Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic. Barcelona is key to understanding peaceful protests during the final stretch of Franco, from which a strong autonomist movement arose that Adolfo Suárez had to interpret to understand and sustain the consolidation of Spanish democracy which hatched with the return and popular acclamation of Tarradellas in 1977. The Modernity of 92 with Pasqual Maragall and the Olympic Games brought with them the city that thought itself. With the landing of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Barcelona and Catalunya they became a grammatically intransitive phrase that tried to decline a noun: the statute. Being Catalan was no longer being done or a “being” that finally led to the process and the value of democracy as an impossible that led the social problems that the city and the community dragged since the time when the convergent trias took local power. Not even Ada Colau’s commons managed to alleviate the serious problems that tourism or housing were carrying until the emergence of Jaume Collboni in 2023, sustained with the votes of his party, the PSC, the common ones and. Attention, the PP. I think that We do not observe the complexity of the local chess board that is Spain, where Barcelona always offers a novelty.
“Barcelona has become a city connected to the State, capable of assuming international commitments with Gaza but also with the economy of the European railway corridor and maritime traffic of the Mediterranean, along with Valencia and Algeciras”
The PP trust vote to Colbon is the cosmopolitan answer to the choice of Silvia Orriols as mayor of Ripoll by Catalan Alliance, the trumpet version of inner Catalonia. Spain is currently one of the European countries with the highest population growth. According to Eurostat, While Spain added more than 1.1 million inhabitants in 2024, Germany barely increased its population in 207,000 inhabitants, France in 440,000, while Italy lost more than 40,000 people. Barcelona is the metropolitan region of five million inhabitants most Vilanova, the Vallesses and the Maresme. Barcelona does not aspire to the 10 million inhabitants of Madrid or to be a Federal District, in the manner of Fernando Caballero in his essay. Barcelona and the entire eastern Spain grows demographically, unlike the three communities that make up the Route de La Plata, Asturias, Castilla y León and Extremadura. In that context, Barcelona has become a city connected to the State, capable of assuming international commitments with Gaza but also with the economy of the European railway corridor and maritime traffic of the Mediterranean, together with Valencia and Algeciras.
In the process of new migrations, the strong economic growth of the last years of Spain is not understood without taking into account the regulated increase in its immigration. The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, said a couple of weeks ago, on account of the events that occurred in Torre Pacheco, that 40% of the working class in the primary sector was made up of immigrant people. The plurinational Spain of the big cities hosts not only the international political agenda but the economic tasks that justify it in a global historical framework.
“The Barcelona of Collboni is the political response to a growing Catalan Aliança, in the expansion phase, which can be a serious problem for together in the municipal ones of 2027 and for Sánchez in the next generals”
Collboni’s Barcelona is consistent with the international pulse of Spanish and Catalan society. It is the political response to a growing Catalan Aliança, in the expansion phase, which can be a serious problem for together in the 2027 municipal and for Sánchez in the next generals. Without a doubt, if there is an ILLA formula for Catalonia, there is a Collboni formula for the Spanish municipal policy against Aliança, first, and against Vox, outside Barcelona. Junts must take note of what happens in the Vic-Ripoll-Polot-Figueres corridor.
Addendum
The Geopolitical Magazine Survey Le Grand Continent pointed out at the end of last year that Spain was the most European country in La Unión. 80% of Spaniards want to belong to the EU and 72% consider that their permanence has strengthened the country. We are 49 million people and climbing. Soon 50 million. We are more and more. And not only Spanish or Catalans. The Areces recipe, the Collboni recipe seems to work. Think about global and act at home.
