The socialist Jaume Collboni has been elected this Saturday as the new mayor of Barcelona, ??thanks to the in extremis support of the commons and the PP, which have thus prevented the Junts candidate, Xavier Trias, from taking over the command despite having been the most voted in the 28M elections and have the endorsement of ERC.
In a Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council full of Catalan political leaders -such as Oriol Junqueras, Laura Borràs, Jordi Turull or Artur Mas-, the constitutive session of the new Barcelona council was held, marked by a twist of script at the last moment , since the communes announced an hour earlier that they would support the socialist Jaume Collboni and try to leave Xavier Trias, from Junts, the candidate with the most votes, in the opposition.
At 5:20 p.m., twenty minutes late, the senior committee headed by the PSC-Units councilor Albert Batlle opened a session of maximum tension and intrigue, since at that time it was not yet known what the four councilors of the PP, keys for Collboni to be elected mayor -along with the votes of the socialists and the commons- and thus unseat Trias at the last minute.
Collboni has obtained, in a secret ballot, 23 votes -ten from the PSC, nine from BComú and four from the PP-, compared to 16 from Trias -eleven from Junts and five from ERC- and two from the Vox candidate, Gonzalo de Oro -Polished.
The head of the Junts en Barcelona list, Xavier Trias, has attacked PSC, Bcomú and PP for launching an “operation” against them to prevent the city from having an independentist mayor and has warned them that they are “absolutely wrong”: “Let them all be bombed (let them be punished)”.
Trias has accused these formations of “lying”, of “doing nonsense” and of generating “an atmosphere of confrontation”, while he has reproached them for being “ashamed” to look him in the face.
With a “que els bombin a tots” (that they mend), he has reiterated that he will leave the consistory, as he already announced that he would do if he did not achieve the mayoralty, but before that he has reminded his political opponents that when they retire “they will go home knowing that they have done things that they should never have done.
For his part, the leader of the municipal group of ERC in Barcelona, ??Ernest Maragall, has called the investiture of Jaume Collboni with the votes of BComú and PP an “unworthy spectacle”.
This scenario, he underlined, has to do with “power, cold, stark, explicit”, and he thanked Trias for the negotiations in recent weeks, in which he said that the leader of Trias for Barcelona has taken the initiative, has assumed the risk and disposition.
He has reproached PSC, BComú and PP for not having an agreement, as Junts and ERC did, and added: “I am aware and I regret the lost opportunity to rebuild the trust that was at stake and that we were about to recover”.
He has warned Collboni that “it will not be easy, not only because of the opposition, but also because of the citizens who will oppose him. The citizens will not forgive this spectacle”, since he recalled that the citizens asked for a change in the elections.
Likewise, the outgoing mayor, Ada Colau, has assured that they have voted for the investiture of the new mayor Jaume Collboni (PSC) “without enthusiasm and in a commitment to a lesser evil”, with the conviction that “the Convergence of 3% will not had to go back to govern the city of Barcelona”, with Xavier Trias.
He has also warned Collboni that with the 10 councilors they have “it is impossible to govern the city”, that the common people do not enter the government and go to the opposition and that “confidence is at a minimum”.
It is the second time in a row that the second force has won the mayoralty in the elections, after in 2019 the votes of the list of former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, added to those of BComú and the PSC, gave the mayoralty to Ada Colau, to the detriment of the ERC candidate, Ernest Maragall, who had received the most votes.
But unlike then, this time the vote could not have been more exciting, since the vast majority of those who attended the plenary session did not know what the final result would be.
The uncertainty was reflected in the faces of all the councilors, including Collboni and his councilors, who according to socialist sources consulted by EFE have accessed the Saló de Cent without knowing for sure what the four of the PP would vote for.
At 4:01 p.m., Barcelona en Comú, the group led by the until now mayor, Ada Colau, issued a statement that took all the other groups by surprise.
“The elected municipal group of Barcelona en Comú, with the approval of the training coordinator and after much debate, has decided this noon that its councilors vote for the PSC candidate, Jaume Collboni,” the statement stated.
After the announced support of the commons, which until yesterday, Friday, assured that they would not participate in any operation that involved the PP to unseat Trias and continued to bet on an agreement with the PSC and ERC, all attention was focused on the popular ones.
In recent days, the municipal leader of the PP, Daniel Sirera, had shown his predisposition to support Collboni to leave Trias in opposition, as long as one condition was met: that the commoners did not enter the government with the Socialists.
In fact, Sirera explained that the PP was willing not to enter the municipal government and invest Collboni in order to “have a constitutionalist mayor and have sensible policies”, for which reason he demanded that the commoners act in the same direction.
The communiqué of the commons fits with what Sirera claimed: BComú argues that his change of position has been taken “in coherence with the need to avoid a government of Junts that lays out red carpets for lobbies and sectors favorable to the policies of the right”.
BComú stresses that this decision has been taken “without any prior agreement with the PSC and, in no case, with the PP”, and stresses that it does not intend to enter the minority government of the PSC, since its intention is “to make an opposition clear and unambiguous.
“Barcelona en Comú will only form part of a government in the city of Barcelona if it can join the other two progressive forces,” the statement added, alluding to a tripartite with PSC and ERC.
The announcement of the commons has caused a political earthquake in the Barcelona City Council, with contacts at multiple levels in the minutes before the plenary session, to verify if the PP would allow a reversal in all the forecasts.
