It’s confusing what’s going on in the combustible relationship that socialists and commoners live in since Ada Colau’s party facilitated, with the crutch of the PP, the investiture of her ex-partner Jaume Collboni as mayor of Barcelona. The BComú group, which aspires to return to the municipal government with the PSC and ERC, registered the day before yesterday, in the meeting of speakers prior to Friday’s plenary session, a proposal in which it called for the reproof of the mayor and the his government “for the inability to lead an agreement to approve the budget for 2024, as well as a 2024-2027 economic framework that accompanies the project”. In the end, this attempt at reproof has not passed the test. The lack of support from other groups, the confirmation of the agreement between the PSOE and Sumar to govern Spain and the commitment to convene an upcoming meeting between Collboni and Colau led the commons to back down yesterday.
The initiative of the commons came after last Wednesday, in the Economy committee, the fourth deputy mayor, Jordi Valls, withdrew at the last moment the project of budgets and fiscal ordinances for the next year after verifying the absolute lack of support, which prevented it from being approved.
The proposal of the commons, which caused astonishment among the members of the municipal government, also demanded that the municipal plenum urged to urgently start real and in-depth negotiations to get out of the current situation.
This attempt at reproof had a spicy decoration just yesterday, just a few hours before the commons withdrew the proposal. In an interview with Ràdio 4, Ada Colau was very critical of what had been her first deputy mayor. According to Colau, Collboni and his team “are stuck with their role in the mayor’s office and have lost sight of the world”.
The commons tempted other groups to see if their attempt at reproof in Collboni had any chance of succeeding. They contacted ERC to try to obtain its support with arguments such as that a reprimand would prevent Collboni from escaping unscathed from a possible agreement with Trias that would lead to the approval of the tax ordinances. ERC, despite sharing many of BComú’s criticisms of the socialist government, did not prove to be very predisposed to cede this trump card to the commons.
But it is that, according to Junts sources, Colau’s party also knocked on the door of Trias for Barcelona, ??no less than the political nemesis of the commons in the City Council. Once again it was emphasized that the antagonism between these two formations makes any agreement between them practically impossible. The Trias team is still cringing at the audacity of BComú.
The attack by the commons on the PSC waterline took place on Monday, just 24 hours before the PSOE and Sumar decided to announce the pact to continue governing Spain together. Yesterday, the scene was already different and Collboni’s reproof proposal added a few tenths more extemporaneity. BComú finally decided to annul the red card to the mayor and leave the sanction in a simple verbal reprimand. After “assessing” the different options, he removed the proposal of reproof from the agenda of the municipal meeting and kept the other initiative presented in the board of speakers. It is a proposal with the content of an institutional declaration that calls on the mayor to “lead the freezing of ATM fees by 2024 for regular users and the maintenance of the bonus of 50% discount on the T – Usual and the T- Young”.
The text of the commons also asks Collboni to urge the Catalan and Spanish governments to “continue to increase investments in public transport to deal with the mobility of citizens who use public transport and to fight against the climate emergency”. The proposal does not over-commit the mayor, especially after it was known just yesterday that the agreement between Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz maintains price reductions for public transport and the free transportation of Rodalies.
Jaume Collboni and Ada Colau have called for an upcoming meeting to try to rebuild a relationship that, although it has never been idyllic, has gone through better times.
