JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Ada Colau, Barcelona's first woman mayor, has made it her first order of business to cut high salaries and cancel expensive cars in the city government. Ada has said that increasing women's representation is part of an effort to make politics more social.

Ada, elected Barcelona's mayor in Spain's local elections, won the post running with Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), an alliance of local political groups affiliated with Podemos. Ada was one of the founders of the PAH anti-eviction platform. The economic crisis drove countless Spanish families into poverty, homelessness and suicide because of banks' profiteering from the property market. In the PAH (which Ada helped to found), those affected by the mortgage crisis organized themselves to occupy seized buildings, provide psychological support and defend one another in court.

Now, Ada's plan for her first month in office is to reduce inflated city salaries, raise the minimum wage, stop evictions and immediately create jobs in Barcelona (which has a 24% unemployment rate.) Ada, speaking with Democracy Now, says the real actor in her victory has been the grassroots movement.

"We think the city governments are key for democratic revolution," said Ada. The citizen movement over the last 15 years has developed local governance tactics as a response to the takeover of government by elites serving big banks and economic powers, she explained. "The citizens… saw the formal democracy is not enough, that we need to find new ways of democratic participation where everyone can have a place, and contribute what every person has to contribute."

Ada called it "completely illogical" that when women make up half of the population there has never been a woman mayor of the city before her. She said the representation of women in politics was key to the new, more socialized policies citizen movements envision.

"In this moment of change, we can contribute by feminizing politics," said Ada. "For this we need not only to put more women in the decision-making places, but also transform the values in politics and to prove that cooperation is more efficient and more satisfactory than competitiveness, and that collective social policy making is better that individualism. I think this are the collective values we can contribute to feminize politics, and with this no only women will win, men and women will win."

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