Xavier Trias won the municipal elections in Barcelona on Sunday, but nobody dared that night to assume that he would be the new mayor of the city because an alternative pact was possible numerically. The socialist candidate Jaume Collboni was in charge of publicly pointing out this possibility when he announced at the stroke of electoral midnight and after a heart-stopping vote for second place, that he would work to achieve a progressive government that would avoid handing over the mayoral staff to Trias.
This alleged agreement to unseat the winner at the polls had two options. The first was the sum of the councilors of PSC (10), BComú (9) and ERC (5) who would give the mayoralty to Collboni. The second option was more strange and went through the curious loan of two of the four PP councilors to give the mayoralty to the PSC together with Comunes. This bizarre combination is similar to the one that Manuel Valls starred in four years ago when he decided that three of his six councilors voted for Ada Colau’s candidacy to prevent Barcelona from having a pro-independence mayor in the person of Ernest Maragall.
Well, today the two possibilities that have been tried to unseat the winner of Sunday’s elections are diluted after the refusal of the popular to participate in an operation that returns the Commons to the city government and after ERC has decided to prioritize a sovereign agreement with JxCat over a tripartite one with PSC and BComú where it would have a secondary role. This situation clears the path of Trias to the mayoralty because the concretion of an alternative pact vanishes.
However, there would still be an even more bizarre combination that would happen because the two councilors that Vox has obtained in these elections vote for the candidacy of Collboni and Colau. But this would have serious political consequences for PSC and Comunes because the fact of obtaining the mayoralty with the votes of the extreme right would haunt them forever, starting with the next general election campaign on July 23. In any case, the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, clarified this week that they would not have any conversation with Vox. “With the extreme right, nothing,” he assured.
Another candidate who was exhaustive is the popular Daniel Sirera: “With the Commons, not even to drink coffee.” That is how clear the mayor of the PP of Barcelona expressed himself yesterday to rule out that his votes could give the mayoralty to the socialist Jaume Collboni at the head of a coalition with the Commons. This week the popular had been polled in this line, but the electoral advance decreed by President Pedro Sánchez, has left any possibility in agreement with the PP to invest Collboni in deadlock.
The attempt to seduce the popular arose after the socialist cooks failed in their first objective of seeking a progressive alliance with ERC. To this work have also been added the Commons that have been launching messages on their social networks all week pressuring the Republicans to promote a left-wing government in Barcelona. The problem is that PSC and BComú forget that the Republicans are still very hurt by them because they were the architects of the pact with Manuel Valls to oust them from the mayoralty four years ago and make Ada Colau mayor, despite having lost the elections to Ernest Maragall .
The current proposal from the Socialists and Comunes to the Republicans received an unequivocal response yesterday from the ERC president, Oriol Junqueras: “The best thing is that there is a mayor linked to an independence party and committed to the fight for amnesty and self-determination. And not other formulas that they have already used against usâ€, referring to the 2019 pact.
With hardly any alternative pact possibilities, Trias is already working with the intention of tying the mayoralty on June 17 when the Consistory is constituted. That day he will be mayor for leading the most voted list and, if he does not reach an agreement before, he could start governing alone. However, the post-convergents are aware that with their 11 councilors it is very difficult to govern a big city like Barcelona. The Commons know this well, who were also in charge of the City Council in 2015 with the same number of councilors and suffered unspeakably until they agreed with the PSC a year later and the government was expanded.
This would be Trias’s strategy if the imminent general election campaign forces the announcement of the pacts to be postponed. In this way, he would start the legislature alone and after the July elections he would expand the government with the party that agrees to an agreement.
Xavier Trias also does not rule out reaching an agreement with ERC before the investiture, especially after hearing the intentions of the Republicans who are betting on an agreement with the post-convergent mayor. The agreement between JxCat and ERC would add 16 councilors, a comfortable number to govern, but insufficient to approve the budgets and important projects of the city. In this sense, the 10 PSC councilors would give stability to the Trias government because they would have an absolute majority. The problem is that the socialists do not contemplate this scenario. Still.
