We said in these lines a year ago that the result of the municipal elections would show the exit door of Barcelona City Council to three of the four main candidates because only one would win the mayor’s office. The socialist Jaume Collboni was inaugurated after a heart-stopping negotiation with two antagonistic parties such as BComú and PP that gave him their support to prevent Xavier Trias, winner of the elections, from obtaining the leadership.
In this way, Collboni upset his three rivals: the aforementioned Xavier Trias, the former mayor Ada Colau and Ernest Maragall (ERC), who went from winning the elections in 2019 to losing half of his councilors. After the investiture, speculation arose about the departure of the three defeated. But first, everyone had to digest the result and assume the new political role that they had to play both on a personal level and within their parties to avoid being a stopper in their formations that need to start preparing a candidacy with options within four years.
The first to understand this situation was former mayor Xavier Trias. His famous phrase “Que us bombin a tots!” It was a prelude to his goodbye that he announced last October. But he postponed his resignation while waiting to close a government pact with Collboni and leave tied the disputed succession in his municipal group. These months of extension have been useless because the PSC prefers an agreement with the left and will only turn to the Trias group when the socialists need to approve issues that their preferred partners of BComú or ERC reject. Therefore, seeing that his group will be a second-table dish, the former mayor will soon leave City Hall.
The postponement of Trias’s departure caused the Republican Ernest Maragall to be the first to leave the City Council. He did it by surprise before Christmas and cleared the way for his party. Without Maragall’s stopper, ERC believes that its five councilors will only be relevant if they have a leading role within the government.
For this reason, and as a first step, its new municipal leader, Elisenda Alamany, has announced that she will support Collboni’s budgets while she patiently waits for what decision the PSC makes regarding the Commons. It is very likely that if BComú joins the government, ERC will refuse to be the youngest in the family of a municipal tripartite and will remain in the opposition. This would distance the option of an alliance that adds up to an absolute majority.
Without Maragall and with Trias packing her bags, it remains to be seen what Ada Colau will do. The former mayor stated a few weeks ago that she remains in the City Council after rejecting other political appointments, but in her party they are aware that her leader is also a stopper at the municipal level because she makes a possible alliance with Collboni difficult for three reasons. . Due to her bad personal relationship with the mayor built during the previous term, because there would be a constant dispute with the mayor for leadership in the City Council and because the PSC considers that Colau has not accepted his defeat and maintains a hostile stance towards the mayor. . Collboni does not forgive the disapproval that the former mayor promoted a few months after the beginning of the mandate and maintains that this attitude makes the insistent request of the BComú leader to enter the government little credible.
The socialists admit that the agreement will be more feasible if the commons first remove their particular plug and, in any case, they should first facilitate the approval of the budgets on March 22. This is the test of trust that the PSC has imposed on BComú to demonstrate that they really want to formalize an alliance. If they reject this date, the relationship will break up and the courtship with ERC will end in a wedding.
