On November 19th of last year, after collecting the opinions of the members of Jaume Collboni’s team, La Vanguardia headlined in the pages of Viure that the governing pact in Barcelona would be delayed until the spring. The enormous instability of Catalan politics has fueled this forecast that more than one political actor, influenced by the pressure that Junts and especially the commons exerted on the mayor and by the recent investiture of Pedro Sánchez as president of the Spanish Government, came to qualify as exaggerated or excessively cautious. But no, Barcelona will not have an extended government this spring that starts next Wednesday.
The advance of the Catalan elections to May 12 and the celebration, without a continuity solution, of the European elections on June 9, make the realization of any alliance to govern Barcelona unfeasible, at best, before the summer .
The reconfiguration of the new political map after these two consecutive elections, the strength or weakness of the different formations after the double electoral battle (or triple contest: who dares to rule out a repetition of the Catalans?) and the communion of ‘interests arising from these results will determine the governance formula in the Catalan capital’s City Council. When this happens, at least the first four years of the current municipal mandate will have been used up. But Barcelona, ??unlike Catalonia and Spain, will have budgets for 2024, with more resources and without the need to resort to the extension of the previous financial year.
A week from now, on Friday March 22, Jaume Collboni’s government will submit to the consideration of the municipal council the budget project agreed with the ERC group, which will contribute the votes of its five councilors to the PSC’s ten. Totally insufficient, unless in the coming days the negotiations – for many weeks now not only scarce but non-existent – ??cause a completely unbelievable turn of the script, the forecast of accounts of the socialist government will be rejected. The following week, an extraordinary plenum would be convened that would open the process of the question of confidence and, after the mandatory 30 days, the impossibility of an alternative candidate emerging to the current mayor would give way to the automatic approval of the budgets rejected by the plenum day 22
Yesterday, in an institutional statement on the occasion of the electoral advance, the mayor called on the opposition groups to support the project already agreed by PSC and ERC next Friday. Collboni assured that the door of his office is open to you, although he knows that he probably has no other option left, he avoided referring to the question of trust. The socialist mayor did not mention the commons at any time either, but, remembering the events of the day before the Parliament, there is no doubt that he was referring to them when he stated that “we cannot lose any opportunity for partisan interests and the political irresponsibility of some”.
Be that as it may, Barcelona will have budgets for this year, probably at the end of April, budgets – the largest in the city’s history – which, among many other things, will allow the City Council to dispose of more than 700 million of euros to invest. Jaume Collboni will thus benefit from a wildcard, the question of trust, which has ceased to be an extraordinary card in Barcelona’s municipal politics. This formula had previously been entrusted to Xavier Trias and Ada Colau to approve budgets when they governed in a clear minority.
There will be budgets, but another very different thing will be the expansion of the government of 10 councilors from the PSC. The temptation to govern the four-year term in the minority is increasing for Collboni, either alone – an option that causes heavy attrition – or by integrating ERC into its executive and looking for the votes that are missing to achieve the majority of 21 in the ranks of an opposition that will hardly be able to agree with each other. However, once again, everything is liable to go haywire depending on the results of the imminent elections and the evolution of political alliances in both Catalonia and Spain.
What does seem clear, even more so now if it is possible, is that a governing agreement between socialists and commoners at Barcelona City Council is totally unfeasible if former mayoress Colau is part of the equation. The relationship between the leader of the commons and Jaume Collboni was never good, not even when they were partners, but now there is an insurmountable wall between the two and an unbreathable atmosphere.
As if all this were not enough, another relationship that has exploded is that of Colau herself with ERC. From the very moment of Collboni’s investiture, Colau has spent nine months demanding a tripartite government of socialists, commoners and republicans while trying with little luck to overcome the indigestion caused by the loss of power and prominence in someone who, in his eight years of professional political career, has not known anything else. If there is anything that almost everyone agrees on, from socialists to republicans, through ex-convergents and even more than one commoner, it is that everything would have gone much more smoothly if, as practically everyone expected , the ex-mayor of Barcelona had found a job outside the City Council.
Blaming Ada Colau for having been practically the only instigator of the tsunami that has denied the shores of Catalan politics gives the common people irony with that joke, with which they are so comfortable, that attributes to her leadership the beginning of all evils, almost from the time of original sin. But in any case it is true that the role of a dislocated Colau in the City Council has given arguments to all her adversaries to point to her as the main person responsible for the non-approval of the budgets, those of Barcelona, ??but also those of the Generalitat and the State.
