On a distant November 19 of last year, after gathering the opinions of members of Jaume Collboni’s team, La Vanguardia headlined in the pages of Vivir that the government pact in Barcelona was delayed until spring. The enormous instability of Catalan politics has dynamited that 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 Government, came to call it exaggerated or excessively cautious. No, Barcelona will not have an expanded government this spring that begins next Wednesday.
The advancement of the Catalan elections to May 12 and the holding, without interruption, of the European elections on June 9 make it unfeasible to establish any alliance to govern Barcelona, ??in the best of cases, 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 Catalan ones?) and the communion of interests that emerges These results will determine the governance formula in the City Council of the Catalan capital. When that happens, at least the entire first of the four years of the current municipal mandate will have been exhausted. 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 year.
In a week, next Friday, March 22, the government of Jaume Collboni will submit to the consideration of the municipal plenary session the draft budget agreed with the ERC group, which will contribute the votes of its five councilors to the ten of the PSC. Insufficient, since, unless in the coming days the negotiations – for many weeks now not scarce but non-existent – ??provoke a completely credible change in the script, the socialist government’s forecast of accounts will be rejected. The following week an extraordinary plenary session 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 to the current mayor emerging would give way to the automatic approval of the budgets rejected in the plenary session of the day 22.
Yesterday, in an institutional statement on the occasion of the early elections, the mayor called on opposition groups to support the project already agreed upon by PSC and ERC next Friday. Collboni assured that the door to his office is open to everyone and, although he knows that he most likely has no other option, he avoided referring to the question of trust. The socialist did not mention the commons at any time, but, remembering what happened the day before in Parliament, there is no doubt that he was referring to them when he stated that “we cannot lose any opportunity due to partisan interests and the political irresponsibility of some”.
Be that as it may, Barcelona will have budgets for this year, surely at the end of April, budgets – the largest in the history of the city – that, among many other things, will allow the City Council to have more than 700 million euros to invest. . Jaume Collboni will thus benefit from a wild card, that of the question of trust, which has already become an extraordinary card in Barcelona municipal politics. Xavier Trias and Ada Colau were previously entrusted to this formula to approve budgets when they also governed in a clear minority.
There will be budgets, but another thing quite different will be the expansion of the government of ten PSC councilors. The temptation to govern the four years of his mandate as a minority is increasing for Collboni, either alone – an option that causes great wear and tear – or by integrating ERC into his executive and seeking the votes he lacks until he reaches the majority. 21 in the ranks of an opposition that will hardly be able to agree among itself. However, once again, everything is susceptible to blowing up depending on the results of the imminent elections and the evolution of political alliances in both Catalonia and Spain.
What does seem clear, now even more so if possible, is that a government agreement between socialists and commoners in Barcelona City Council is totally unviable if former mayor Colau is part of the equation. The relationship between the leader of the commons and Jaume Collboni was never good, not even in the times when they were partners, but now an insurmountable wall and an unbreathable atmosphere stand between them.
As if all this were not enough, another relationship that has exploded is that of Colau herself with ERC. From the moment of Collboni’s investiture, Colau has spent nine months demanding a tripartite government of socialists, commoners and republicans while trying with little success to overcome the bad digestion caused by the loss of power and prominence in someone who, In his eight years of professional political career, he has not known anything else. If there is one thing that everyone agrees on from the socialists to the republicans, including the ex-convergents and even more than one common person, it is that everything would have gone through much calmer channels if, as almost everyone expected, the former mayor of Barcelona had found accommodation outside the City hall.
Blaming Ada Colau for having been practically the only instigator of the tsunami that has flooded the shores of Catalan politics gives rise to the common people to make fun of that joke, with which they feel so comfortable, which attributes the beginning of all of it to their leader. evils, almost since the times of original sin. But in any case it is true that the role of a misplaced Colau in the City Council has given arguments to all her adversaries to point her out as the main person responsible for the non-approval of the budgets, those of Barcelona, ??but also those of the Generalitat and the state.
