The Cercle d’Economia celebrated the results of the previous night’s election in the city of Barcelona in a muted tone yesterday, good manners almost always prevail. The electoral count showed that Xavier Trias arrived on the decisive day as the preferred choice, by the majority, of the social mass of this think tank of the Barcelona bourgeoisie.
Things were not so clear at first. Before the veteran politician with convergent roots announced his candidacy, the socialist Jaume Collboni was expected to be a useful vote option for change in Barcelona, ​​that is, to remove Ada Colau from the mayor’s office.
The irruption of Trias was an unexpected challenge, a last-minute script change that caused initial perplexity among strategists. The readjustment to the new narrative was not automatic. The conviction that it was a viable bet took time.
Among the leaders of the economy there was confusion. Could Trias be a good candidate in an election that seemed crucial to the government of the city? After all, hadn’t he been one of the prominent figures of the independence turn of Artur Mas’s Convergència? Did he have the political character to define his own line, different from what other sectors of his party would mark, such as Carles Puigdemont and Jordi Turull, or even Laura Borrà s? Who would they vote for in the hour of truth?
But the Trias effect progressed like a snowball, it was a progressive settling, slower at the beginning and accelerated during the last days. As the final count reflected, in the most affluent areas of the city, as can be seen on the street by street interactive maps, the elite opted for the former councilor of Jordi Pujol in a proportion unknown in recent years. As during the best times of pujolism. The conviction prevailed that, despite everything, Trias offered them confidence.
And yesterday the members of the Circle and their guests recognized each other as participants in the same choice and the same triumph. And although throughout Spain the news of the day was undoubtedly Pedro Sánchez’s new bet of calling general elections for July 23, in the corridors of the convention hall of the W Hotel the focus of comment and analysis was about the future tenant of Barcelona’s mayor’s office.
Among the attendees yesterday, Salvador Illa, first secretary of the Catalan Socialists, accompanying the intervention of his colleague Josep Borrell, the high European representative for Foreign and Security Policy. The leader of the opposition in Catalonia and aspirant to preside over the Generalitat resisted the chants of a businessman who was obstinate to snatch from him the commitment that the socialists would not prevent Trias, in his condition of the most votes, from being the new Barcelona mayor. A movement that has only just begun and that will continue until the unknown fades away.
The result represents an injection of morale for an economic patrician that had not tasted the honey of triumph for more than a decade, not even a partial one.
Does the result of these last municipal councils in Barcelona support readings in terms of recomposition of the old converging space, so longed for by the world gathered in the Circle?
If anyone thinks that Mayor Trias can be the seed of a renewed Catalan centre-right space, at the moment, he does not express it openly.
Junts continues to be a political space with many families often not well off. The apparent hierarchy of the formation does not draw a profile of a political formation open to returning to the old practices of pragmatic negotiations with the Central Government. Trias himself does not seem the right person to direct a reconstruction of the political space of this magnitude.
But it is certain that many of those who lead the Catalan economy already think that it is a path worth exploring and worth making efforts for. The July election will be a good testing ground.
