As Spain’s general election of 26th June approaches, DiEM25 was active last week in Barcelona, together with Mayor Ada Colau’s (a founding member of DiEM25), our Barcelona en Comú friends and comrades as well as the local DiEM25 branch. The occasion was the anniversary of Ada’s extraordinary, brave and inspiring victory in the City of Barcelona municipal elections. But it was also an opportunity for DiEM25 to participate in the Spanish pre-election campaign in a bid to encourage the people of Catalonia, and more generally Spain, to seize the opportunity of electing a government that can ignite real change in Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis, who was in Barcelona to celebrate and to agitate alongside Ada Colau, Gerardo Pisarello (Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor) and Jordi Ayalla (Barcelona’s senior financial officer), had this to say:
“Under Ada, Gerardo and Jordi, the whole of Europe is looking at the City of Barcelona as a standard-bearer of democratic politics at the level of local government and a laboratory that produces innovative ways of supporting local communities, cooperatives and businesses in practical ways. Barcelona is also the initiator of the network of rebel cities that DiEM25 believes central to the process of democratising the European Union. Ada and our other comrades asked DiEM25 to spread the word of what Barcelona has achieved to the four corners of Europe, a task that DiEM25 is embracing with enthusiasm.”
Regarding the forthcoming general election in Spain, Varoufakis said:
“On 26th June the people of Catalonia, the people of Spain, have a unique opportunity to vote in a progressive government that will save the European Union from itself and from the disaster caused by the self-defeating austerity breeding unbearable authoritarianism. The incumbent prime minister of the right-wing People’s Party behaves like a spoilt child in Brussels, begging to be allowed to violate the unenforceable rules. The next prime minister of Spain, representing a progressive government that the Spanish voters now have the opportunity to bring to power, must call forth a EU summit that discusses and draws up new, rational, enforceable rules. Only then can Spain breathe again in a Europe that re-discovers its poise, rationality and humanity. This is why the 26th of June presents a unique opportunity, one that will be realised as long as the next government refuses to commit to existing policies and to Rajoy’s and Dos Guindos’ prior commitments to the Eurogroup.”

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