Until five in the afternoon last Saturday, Foment, the great Catalan employers’ association chaired by Josep Sánchez Llibre, had prepared a public statement of support and praise for the popular group in the Barcelona city council for their decision to allow Xavier Trias to become the new mayor of Barcelona, ??ensuring the governability of the city and thus blocking the way for the socialist candidate. Obviously, this pronouncement never took place since the new mayor of the city would end up being the socialist Jaume Collboni. Until the same Friday prior to the constitution of the new municipal plenary session, business contacts with the PP ruled out an agreement to vote for the one who would end up being elected.
In fact, the same socialist group did not receive a message confirming that its candidacy would be imposed thanks to the popular vote until the plenary session had already started. This was the reason why Collboni had two alternative speeches in his pockets, as he himself explained when taking 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 businessmen, they had privileged information derived from participating in the negotiation that they had opened with the leadership of the PP in Alberto Núñez Feijóo two days before the plenary session, on Thursday.
The agony thus extended until the investiture session in the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Hall. The agreement was in the air due to the demand, first, by Elías Bendodo, general coordinator of the PP, and later, by Santi Rodríguez, general secretary of the PP of Catalonia, that the socialists formalize in writing their commitment not to include the common people in the new municipal government. Demand that Illa flatly rejected and kept the pact blocked until late on Saturday afternoon. In the end it was not 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 exchanged. And they put reciprocal resignations on the table. But, in the end, everything came to nothing and the politicians made the decision that they would slam the door in the face of Xavier Trias, the Junts candidate who had won the elections and did not see the changes of alliances coming. And that it was the preferred option for the economic world given the possibility that Collboni would agree with the commons.
For the most relevant Barcelona businessmen and for the middle-class trade unions and professionals, the elections in Barcelona had been very special. After two legislatures of conflict with the administration of Ada Colau, they had thrown out the rest in favor of a change towards a more complicit council. For this reason, the role of the economic world had been, and was going to be, much more relevant in the political situation than it had been in the past.
The electoral result had been inconclusive. Certainly Colau would not be mayor again, but the future composition of the consistory left many possibilities open. And there was room for two that they considered negative: a pact between the socialists and the commons or a pro-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. Neither were these two alternatives the preferred entry scenarios for the two great political forces that were vying for the mayoralty. Contacts and the exchange of opinions between all parties began from the first moment.
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 heroes that was heavenly music, sociovergence, a long aspiration, always unsuccessful until then, seemed within reach. Even after the controversial plenary session, last Monday, Trias acknowledged it on the RAC1 microphones: “The pact 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. The alternation in the mayor’s office. Collboni initially proposed taking turns with Trias, two years each. Something that the former mayor did not accept, even though the socialist lowered his proposal to being mayor for only one year. The counterproposal was to name him vice mayor.
Trias’ interlocutors, the businessmen, promised to speak with Illa, but asked him to renounce the alternative pact with ERC, which the Junts leader had explored to block the way for a possible PSC-Comunes-Republican tripartite. The independence front, in the eyes of the economic world, announced new confrontations with the State and the central government. Something they want to avoid at all costs.
Business contacts with Illa, for his part, developed in a similar way, but with the vitamins that Trias’s enthusiastic disposition to the pact brought. Despite not having expressed it publicly, the Socialists had explored that agreement and, as has already been said, only the rotation of the mayor had made it impossible. Maxima at the gates of new elections. With Illa, the economic elite changed its reluctance towards ERC that had exposed Trias by the red light to the Colau commons. The socialist did not commit himself to anything and in fact expressed the difficulties of advancing towards sociovergence if Trias did not make more concessions. The rest is already known. The Socialists negotiated with the PP and Junts closed an agreement with ERC.
