The activity in the Barcelona City Hall was very intense yesterday afternoon. In the technical negotiation, the operators collected the entire structure that was used in the investiture plenary session on Saturday. And in the political sphere, they were recovering from the tension experienced during the in extremis election of the new mayor, the socialist Jaume Collboni. In fact, he himself admits that he had no guarantee that he was going to be sworn in as mayor until minutes before entering the Consell de Cent room and he held his breath while the votes were counted until he saw that he had an absolute majority. So much so that he had two speeches in his folder, one in case he was elected mayor and another in case he remained in opposition. He also explains privately that he already had a personal plan B if he did not become mayor. The reality is that last night he had 950 cell phone messages waiting to be answered, added to the more than 300 that he has already answered.
The investiture plenary session began almost half an hour late because the meetings and calls to their respective parties in Madrid continued in the offices of the PSC and the PP. For their part, the commons of Ada Colau also rushed the clock and sent the statement announcing that they would support Collboni 55 minutes before the scheduled start of the plenary session.
It was an unprecedented afternoon of heart attack in the democratic history of Barcelona. The faces of the new mayor and his rivals were a poem and conveyed the tension of three weeks of negotiations with offers of all kinds between the two candidates with the most options: Trias and Collboni. There were two possible pacts that gave an absolute majority (21 councilors) to form a strong and stable government: the tripartite one between PSC, BComú and ERC (24 councilors) and an alliance between the winner of the elections, Xavier Trias, and the PSC ( 21 councillors). The latter was the one that a majority of the so-called civil society viewed sympathetically, even had the approval of the PP.
The left-wing tripartite dismantled quickly due to the ERC’s refusal and socio-vergence was impossible after the announcement of the sovereignist front that prompted Trias and Ernest Maragall (ERC) to negotiate an alliance knowing that it was insufficient, since it had 16 councilors. That pro-independence front, in practice deactivated by various local pacts, set off the alarm in the PP and the PSOE and the strange vote that the mayor gave to Jaume Collboni began to take shape. Before, the socialist offered Trias to divide the mayor’s office for two years each, but the former mayor rejected it because he had already almost closed the agreement with Maragall.
So, Collboni launched a desperate appeal on Thursday to his government partners in the City Council to support him in the investiture and remain in the opposition, as the PP requested in exchange for giving up their votes. The commons reluctantly accepted to prevent Trias from reaching the mayor’s office and dismantling his government work. And, furthermore, they had the well-founded hope that, once the political storm due to the inauguration on Saturday had passed, they could be decisive as preferred partners of the PSC from the opposition. Thus, BComú and PP voted for Collboni for different reasons. The former, to prevent a right-wing mayor and have options to influence the government, and the popular ones, to avoid a pro-independence mayor. The extremes came together in an alliance that will not be repeated for the rest of the term.
In fact, the new mayor assures that he does not feel conditioned by the PP and does not rule out incorporating the common people into his government to promote progressive policies. Perhaps that was what the secret pact that Collboni allegedly offered Colau was about, as revealed by the former mayor in plenary session on Saturday. The problem for BComú is that this future agreement would, this time, go through the PSC government program, which includes thorny aspects for the commons such as the brake on superblocks or the expansion of the airport. Will BComú accept becoming a gregarious member of a socialist mayor? We will see, although the foreseeable departure of former mayor Ada Colau from the Consistory could facilitate this entente.
The official office that Colau has occupied for the last eight years no longer kept yesterday the objects that she had placed symbolically to show that she was the first woman mayor of Barcelona. These are portraits of women relevant to history that she had hanging on one of the walls and a photo that was on her table of Frederica Montseny, the prime minister of Spain.
What will happen now? Collboni’s tenure will be very difficult. Never before has a mayor of Barcelona had such a weak government. “With ten councilors it is impossible to govern,” Colau reminded him. The former mayor spent a year and a half governing with 11 councilors and did not give them life until the four Socialists that Collboni had then entered. However, the new mayor has the advantage of his government experience in the City Council. In addition, a good part of his councilors have governed the last four years and he knows that the mayor’s office grants executive power to govern on a day-to-day basis. Another thing is if the ten councilors of him will be able to reach everything.
For this reason, he wants to maintain the current municipal structure with positions appointed by the commons, in a clear gesture towards his former partners. But he is determined to change some key pieces in the medium term. In parallel, he will have to mend the trust broken these days to weave the majorities necessary to approve important issues such as the municipal budget. The new mayor will try to govern based on a variable geometry seeking support to his left (BComú and ERC) and to his right (Junts and PP). But first, both must pass the duel of the impact of Saturday and reposition themselves. The success or failure of his term will be linked to his ability to find agreements.
