The second round of the municipal elections in Barcelona continues to be played out in the offices and, although Xavier Trias seems to have all the victories in hand to be elected mayor on the 17th, the attempts to build an alternative are still alive and will most likely experience a final compromise as the date to constitute the town councils approaches. Socialist Jaume Collboni has become aware of the extreme difficulty of any of the maneuvers he has deployed since the very night of the elections, but he is reluctant to throw in the towel.
Even so, on a medium-term horizon, not before the investiture session or the general meetings on July 23, rather towards September, around the Mercè festivities, when it will be necessary to start preparing the first budgets of the new City Council, the future mayor will have to face a third and definitive round and choose the governance formula for the coming years.
Since the day after the elections, Trias has been in contact with the other political forces and with social and economic agents who can help him clear the way to the mayor’s office. The former mayor, who aspires to regain the position he lost eight years ago, is confident that there will be no last-minute surprises. He hopes to be elected with the 11 votes of his group, but it cannot be ruled out that he could receive the support of the 5 of the ERC, which in the context of the peace process initiated by the two pro-independence formations would have a symbolic value rather than a practical one and that would not necessarily anticipate a subsequent government agreement.
Trias already knows what it is to rule in a minority. In the period 2011-2015 he did it with 14 councilors out of 41 and managed to approve budgets and main projects with the support of socialists and popular parties. The 11 councilors obtained now are the same force that Ada Colau had at the beginning of her first period as mayor, before agreeing with the PSC, and in the second half of that term, since the differences in around the process they broke the fragile alliance between communes and socialists. Never as in those years were the enormous difficulties of governing with such a small minority so evident. This lesson will be learned by any candidate for mayor and, of course, Xavier Trias if he wins the investiture two weeks from now. Social convergence, synonymous in this case with an absolute majority, would be a full guarantee of stability. But the governing formula would not be finalized until after the summer. Provisionally, Trias would make a card with only members of his group.
Meanwhile, the PSC continues to work on three increasingly complicated scenarios. First, that of the left-wing tripartite that ERC has made clear, through Oriol Junqueras, that it is leaving. Second, the simultaneous support of the commons and the popular with the pretext of avoiding, as happened four years ago, that Barcelona has a mayor from an independent background. But the PP candidate, Daniel Sirera, has already announced that he will not enter into any operation in which Ada Colau is present, nor will the members of the BComú group who could take over the leadership of this formation at the time when the ‘Mayor decides to pack her bags. And third scenario, as of now still not very consistent, that Trias and Collboni share the mayorship, two years each, and ensure a stable bipartite government and strengthened by some agreement in other institutions such as the Diputació or the Metropolitan Area of ​​Barcelona .
Another improbable sum that would allow Collboni to win the mayorship would be to collect the support of the 9 councilors of BComú and the 2 of Vox at the same time. So far the socialists have not contacted the far-right formation, which is convinced that its space is in the opposition. “Neither Collboni nor Trias”, the leaders of Vox proclaimed yesterday with a more than apparent firm determination.
The Electoral Board could certify in the next few hours the final result of the scrutiny after having reviewed that the acts of the mesas correspond to the census and that the invalid votes are really invalid. No new votes are counted, as mail-in votes were counted on election night.
The revision is very relevant because in the provisional scrutiny the PSC surpassed BComú by only 141 ballots, a margin too small to rule out the possibility of an overtake. As an example, in the past elections, the final count corrected that of the election day as follows: BComú was the candidacy that won the most votes (336), followed by Junts (323), ERC (199 ), the PSC (137) and the PP (137). 42 votes were subtracted from the candidacy of Manuel Valls and 17 from the CUP.
Several sources consulted by La Vanguardia indicated yesterday that this time around 6,000 votes would be reviewed. The doubts are centered on several months in the Sant Martà district and especially in the Clot neighborhood, where the PP would have been awarded ballot papers that would have corresponded to the PSC. There could also be some correction due to the confusion, which already has precedents, when assigning to the animalist formation Pacma votes that belong to the socialists. And another unknown hovers over hundreds of votes declared void in principle and that Vox claims. This aspect could lead to a contestation of the result by this party, which, if accepted, will bring the constitution of the City Council to July 7, the same day as the start of the general election campaign. In this sense, according to these sources, the PSC could increase its advantage over the commons by a hundred votes and place it at around 250.
