Jaume Collboni has not won the elections, but the arithmetic allows him to aspire to the mayorship. Aware of this, he does not throw in the towel, on the contrary. “The PSC does not give up anything, we have the opportunity and the duty to open a new stage of progress and stability”, assured the socialist candidate when the ten councilors were guaranteed after concluding 100% of the tight scrutiny . He did so, moreover, highlighting that the PSC has become “the first progressive force in the city of Barcelona”, a city which, according to Collboni, “has very clearly voted to start a new stage and has voted progressive”.
Although it is a scenario that during the campaign he had ruled out if he did not win the elections, it is now more symptomatic than ever the memory of the era of socialist mayors that Collboni has had in recent days, with former mayors Joan Clos and Jordi Hereu with a very active role. It is not futile, since both governed for a few years with ERC and ICV, the formation that was later integrated into the commons. Regaining the support of the two formations in a left-wing pact led by the PSC that serves to deal with Trias is one of the options that began to be studied last night in the engine room of the socialists. The sum would make it possible, another thing is that there is will on the part of the other parties, who will have to manage internally first the harsh correction they have received at the polls.
At the moment, those of Collboni have in their favor the fact that they have two councilors more than four years ago and have advanced by the hair of Ada Colau, who has gone from being the majority force to being in third position, below the Socialists. All in all, the second place represents a bitter disappointment for a candidate who came out to play with everything since he left the municipal government in January to distance himself from a Colau against whom he stood as an alternative and to whom he now needs to turn if he wants to be mayor.
The good results in the tight polls of the last few weeks made the PSC dream of regaining the mayorship twelve years after precisely Trias put an end to the historical socialist hegemony that ruled the city for decades. In the same way that at that time Trias’s victory was clear, in the corridors of the City Hall everyone remembers how in 2015 those who were converging at the time recognized defeat and threw in the towel on the same election night, so they closing the door on some sort of coalition deal that might have been feasible in the days that followed. Precisely for this reason, Collboni did the opposite yesterday and left everything open while he was chanted with the cry of “mayor” by those who were at the PSC headquarters in Carrer Pallars.
The skills of the socialists to combine municipal pacts were demonstrated four years ago, when they convinced Valls to make Colau mayoress, which shows that anything can happen in Barcelona until the constitution of the City Council on Saturday 17 June.
