The second round of the municipal elections in Barcelona continues to be played out in the offices and, although Xavier Trias seems to have all the triumphs in hand to be elected mayor on the 17th, the attempts to build an alternative are still alive and will most likely experience a bespoke rush that the date of constitution of the city councils approaches. The socialist Jaume Collboni has become aware of the extreme difficulty for him to come to fruition with any of the maneuvers that he has deployed since the very night of the elections, but he is reluctant to throw in the towel.
Even so, in a medium-term horizon, not before the investiture session or the general ones on July 23, rather around the month of September, around the Mercè festival, when it will be necessary to start preparing the first City Council budgets, the future mayor will have to face a third and final round and choose the governance formula for the coming years.
Since the day after the elections, Trias has been maintaining contacts with the other political forces and with social and economic agents that can help him pave the way for the mayoralty. The former mayor who aspires to recover the position he lost eight years ago is confident that there will be no last-minute surprises. He hopes to be elected with the 11 votes of his group, although it cannot be ruled out that he could receive the support of the 5 from ERC, which in the context of the peace process that the two pro-independence parties have started would have a more symbolic than practical value and that it would not necessarily anticipate a subsequent government agreement.
Trias already knows what it is to govern in a minority. In the period 2011-2015 he did it with 14 councilors out of 41 and managed to approve the budgets and the main projects with the support of socialists and popular.
The 11 councilors obtained now are the same force that Ada Colau had at the beginning of her first term as mayor, before agreeing with the PSC, and in the second half of that term, since the differences around the process broke the fragile alliance between commoners and socialists. Never as in those years were the enormous difficulties of governing with such a meager minority so evident.
That is a lesson that any candidate for mayor will have learned and, of course, Xavier Trias if he wins the investiture in two weeks. Sociovergence, synonymous in this case with absolute majority, would be a full guarantee of stability. But that formula would not materialize until after the summer. Provisionally, Trias would make a folder only with members of his group.
Meanwhile, the PSC continues to work on three increasingly complicated scenarios. First, that of the left-wing tripartite from which ERC has made it clear, through Oriol Junqueras, that it is off the hook.
Second, the simultaneous support of common and popular under the pretext of avoiding, as happened four years ago, that Barcelona has a mayor of a pro-independence party. But the PP candidate, Daniel Sirera, has already announced that he will not enter into any operation in which Ada Colau is involved, nor will the members of the BComú group who could take over the leadership of this formation at the moment in which the mayor decides to pack her bags.
And third scenario, today still inconsistent, that Trias and Collboni share the mayoralty, two years each, ensuring a stable bipartite government and reinforced by some agreement in other institutions such as the Provincial Council or the Metropolitan Area.
Another unlikely sum that would allow Collboni to win the mayoralty would be to obtain the support of the 9 BComú councilors and the 2 Vox councilors at the same time. Until now, the Socialists have not contacted the far-right formation, which is convinced that its space is in the opposition. “Neither Collboni nor Trias”, the leaders of Vox proclaimed yesterday with spells of firm determination.
The Electoral Board could certify the final result of the scrutiny in the next few hours after having reviewed that the minutes of the tables correspond to the census and that the null votes are really null. No new votes are counted since the one that arrives by mail was counted on the same night of the elections.
The review is highly relevant because in the provisional vote count the PSC surpassed BComú by 141 ballots, too small a margin to not rule out the possibility of a sorpasso. By way of example, in the last elections, the final tally corrected that of election day as follows: BComú was the candidacy that won the most votes (336), followed by Junts (323), ERC (199), the PSC ( 137) and the PP (137). 42 votes were subtracted from the candidacy of Manuel Valls and 17 from the CUP.
Various sources pointed out yesterday that this time there would be some 6,000 votes under review. The doubts are centered on several tables in the Sant Martà district and especially in the Clot neighborhood, where the PP would have been awarded ballots that would correspond to the PSC. There could also be some correction for the confusion, which already has precedents, when assigning votes to the Pacma animalist formation that belong to the Socialists.
And another mystery hangs over hundreds of votes declared invalid in principle and that Vox claims. This aspect could lead to a challenge to the result by this party, which if admitted will bring the constitution of the City Council to July 7, the same day the general campaign begins. Thus, according to these sources, the PSC could increase its advantage over the commons by a hundred votes to around 250.
