Until five in the afternoon on Saturday Foment, the large Catalan employers’ association chaired by Josep Sánchez Llibre, had prepared a public statement of support and praise for the popular group at Barcelona City Council for the decision to allow Xavier Trias to become in the new mayor, which ensured the governability of the city and blocked the way for the socialist candidate. Obviously, this pronouncement never happened, since the new mayor of the city would end up being the socialist Jaume Collboni. Until the same Friday before the constitution of the new municipal plenum, business contacts with the PP ruled out an agreement to vote for the one who would end up being elected.
In fact, the socialist group itself did not receive any message confirming that its candidacy would prevail thanks to the popular vote until the plenary session had already begun. This was the reason why Collboni had two alternative speeches in his pockets, as he himself explained when he took the floor. One as the new mayor; another as leader of the opposition.
Although in the case of the colleagues of Salvador Illa, the first secretary of the PSC, unlike what happened to the president of the employers, they had privileged information derived from participating in the negotiation they had opened with the leadership of the PP d Alberto Núñez Feijóo two days before the plenary, Thursday.
The agony lasted until the investiture session in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council. The agreement was in the air due to the demand, first, of Elías Bendodo, general coordinator of the PP, and then, of Santi Rodríguez, general secretary of the PP of Catalonia, that the socialists formalize in writing their commitment to not include the commons in the new municipal government. Demand that Illa rejected out of hand and that kept the pact blocked until well into Saturday. In the end, it wasn’t like that.
Unforeseen outcome of a convoluted chain of events in which politics and the business world deployed a range of approaches and seductions. Requests for help and support were crossed. And they put mutual resignations on the table. But in the end it all came to nothing and the politicians made the decision to slam the door in the face of Xavier Trias, the Junts candidate who had won the elections and did not see the alliance changes coming. And that it was the preferred option for the economic world due to the possibility of Collboni making an agreement with the commons.
For Barcelona’s most relevant businessmen and for tradesmen’s and middle-class professionals’ guilds, the elections in Barcelona had been very special. After two legislatures of conflict with the administration of Ada Colau, they had thrown the rest in favor of a change towards a more complicit City Council. For this reason, the role of the economic world had been, and would be, much more relevant in the political situation than it had been in the past.
The electoral result had not been conclusive. Certainly, Colau would not be mayor again, but the future composition of the Consistory left many possibilities open. And there were some that they considered negative: a pact of the socialists with the communes or an independence front of Junts and ERC. Neither the first nor the second liked them, in that same order of degree of rejection.
But they were not alone. These two alternatives were also not the preferred entry scenarios for the two major political forces that contested the mayorship. From the first moment, contacts and the exchange of opinions between all parties began.
Everything accelerated a week before the plenary meeting, when Trias met with the big Barcelona businessmen and told them that his first option, the one he liked, was the agreement with the Socialists. For the procers, this was heavenly music, sociovergence, a long aspiration, until then always failed, seemed within reach. Even after the controversial meeting, on Monday, Trias acknowledged it on the microphones of RAC1: “The agreement with the PSC is what I wanted, I tried and did everything possible, but I saw that it was impossible”.
Even more. Trias asked the economic elite for help and to push the socialists towards the pact and remove obstacles. Actually, only one. Alternation in the mayor’s office. Collboni initially proposed to alternate with Trias, two years each. Something that the ex-mayor did not accept, even though the socialist reduced his approach to being mayor for only one year. The counter-proposal was to appoint him vice-mayor.
Trias’ interlocutors, the businessmen, undertook to speak with Illa, but asked him to renounce the alternative pact with ERC, which the leader of Junts had explored to block the way to a possible tripartite PSC-commons-republicans. The pro-independence front, in the eyes of the economic world, announced new confrontations with the State and the central government. Something they want to avoid both yes and no.
The business contacts with Illa, on the other hand, developed in a similar way, but with the vitamins that the enthusiastic disposition of Trias brought to the pact. Despite not having expressed it publicly, the Socialists had explored the agreement and, as already said, only the rotation of the mayor had made it impossible. Maximum at the gates of new elections. With Illa, the economic elite changed their reluctance towards ERC, which had exposed it to Trias for the red light in the commons of Colau. The socialist did not commit to anything and, in fact, expressed the difficulties of moving towards sociovergence if Trias did not make more concessions. The rest is already known. The socialists negotiated with the PP and Junts closed a pact with ERC.
