Politics not only makes for strange bedfellows, but also for photos. If you look at the image of Xavier Trias on election night, he is seen surrounded by characters from his party that he has tried to hide in the campaign, starting with the president of the party. Trias’s team has managed to exploit the profile of the old convergent candidate, the experienced politician, the man from Barcelona who aspires to changes in small doses. For this, he needed the Junts leadership not to show up, not even for the party brand to accompany him on the posters. The candidate was the message.
Trias has known how to place himself in the antipodes of Ada Colau, so he has not needed to make too many proposals. He has spoken of the mayor’s interventions in the city as “a disaster” and his slogan has been as simple as “if you don’t love Colau, you can’t vote for Collboni, or anyone other than Trias.” His proposals for the future have been generic and he has set himself up as an apostle of common sense. What is his model?: Pactism.
In the middle of the campaign, he could not say it more clearly: “We must seek collaboration and understanding. There are people who tell me ‘Trias, that is being from Convergència’, well, what are we going to do if it is being from convergenceâ€. The success of the candidate has been to present himself as the last Mohican of the CDC, of ​​that ordered world that appears in the collective imagination of the middle classes, although it would later collapse like a house of cards, to the point that the party that led it disappeared. it had governed Catalonia from the transition to the 21st century.
Trias won the elections on Sunday and has many numbers to be able to be mayor again, because the bad result of ERC, which has gone from being the first force in number of votes to the fourth, complicates the tripartite process in Barcelona. The victory has more merit in view of how the independence movement has fared and gives the pragmatists within Junts the reason. It is no coincidence that Jaume Giró disputes MÃriam Nogueras to be the headliner of JxC in the general elections on July 23. Simone Signoret was wrong to proclaim in her memories that nostalgia is not what it used to be.
