The people of Madrid have discovered a simple way of getting in touch with their mayor. All they have to do is join the early morning rush of commuters at Arturo Soria metro station in the northern suburbs, and take line four into the city.
“People told me it would be impossible to go on using public transport every day,” Manuela Carmena, the 71-year-old retired judge who now governs Spain’s largest city, says in an interview. “But in truth people have been very reasonable. They greet me, or ask a question. Some want to take a photograph. But they always treat me with respect.”
Ms Carmena’s early morning metro journeys have been held up as a small but telling symbol of the broader changes she is hoping to bring to the Spanish capital. For more than two decades, Madrid’s imposing town hall was in the hands of the conservative Popular party. In May, however, Ms Carmena led an alliance of leftist groups, including the anti-austerity Podemos party, to a surprise victory at the polls.
Despite her age, she won overwhelming support from younger voters. Her friendly manner and no-nonsense style went down well with middle-class Madrileños who otherwise have little in common with Podemos.
Her triumph marked the biggest breakthrough yet for Spain’s new left, and a stinging rebuke for the country’s established parties and politicians. With a general election looming this year, pundits and voters alike are wondering whether Ms Carmena — along with a new batch of leftwing mayors in Barcelona, Zaragoza, Cadiz and other cities — will form the vanguard of more profound political upheaval.
“I believe that we can provide a model for change,” she says. “I want to prove that we can manage Madrid in a different way.”
Ms Carmena has promised to pursue what she calls “the politics of the small”, ending the habitual Madrid craze for grand and costly projects.
“I have a real aversion to big words and big projects. I want to do small things, concrete things, and things that are efficient. I don’t want to have anything to do with grand ideas and grand dimensions — and that includes the Olympics,” says Ms Carmena. Under her predecessors, Madrid had tried — and failed — to host the summer games three times in a row. Her main concern, she adds, is to put the city’s €5bn budget and 30,000 staff at the disposal of the capital’s underprivileged. Housing shortages and the struggle to prevent house evictions are key priorities — and have dominated Ms Carmena’s first round of meetings with the heads of Banco Santander, BBVA and Bankia, all of which have their headquarters in and around the capital. The first fruit of those talks is a new office in the Madrid town hall that will try to find solutions for homeowners threatened by evictions. Ms Carmena is also hoping to persuade banks to make available vacant apartments in their portfolios for social housing.
Whatever political skirmishes await her, Ms Carmena is used to far graver battles. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was a member of the banned Communist party that led opposition against the Franco dictatorship.
A lawyer by training, she dedicated much of her early career to the struggle for democracy in Spain. In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, her law practice was attacked by far-right gunmen, who killed five of her colleagues in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Spanish transition.
Her background helps explain another of her early moves in office — renaming all the Madrid streets and squares that still honour members of the Franco regime, or the dictator himself. “I decided to stand as a candidate out of a personal commitment to democracy, nothing more. I wanted to help get Spanish democracy out of the impasse it was in,” she says. “I didn’t do it because I wanted political power. I never liked power and I don’t like it now.”
In her first weeks as mayor, Ms Carmena has abolished many of the perks and privileges that traditionally surround high political office in Spain. Her loyalty to the Madrid metro aside, she has slashed her salary, and handed back the municipality’s boxes in the Teatro Real opera house and the Las Ventas bullfighting arena.
Ms Carmena’s friendly manner and no-nonsense style went down well with Madrileños
“When one of us wants to go to the opera, he or she will have to do what every other citizen also does: go to the box office and buy a ticket,” she explains. Neither will she accept invitations to the prized Palco at Real Madrid’s Bernabéu stadium, the executive box where Spain’s political and business elite comes to network (and watch football). “Real Madrid has not invited us yet, but if they invite us we won’t go,” says Ms Carmena.
As much as she dislikes the traditional closeness between Madrid’s politicians and businessmen, the new mayor insists that companies and investors have nothing to fear from her administration. In the long run, they too will benefit from a town hall that is “efficient and clean”, she says.
“We are not an expression of the radical left. In any case, I am not,” says Ms Carmena. “But we will be radical in the fight against corruption, in creating a class of politicians without privilege, and in communicating with the citizens. We want to be social and show solidarity. And I think business can fit very well into these lines.”
