Ada Colau ended eight years as mayor of Barcelona yesterday. The leader of BComú publicly assumed, at the last plenum of the term, that she will hand over the city’s baton to a new mayor on Saturday. “It remains to be seen whether the mayor or the government that will come out next Saturday, but what is certain is that I will not preside over this plenum for the next four years”, he said in his speech at the plenum of tears, known as such because the councilors who are leaving the City Council take advantage of the last opportunity to say goodbye to the institution.
Ada Colau ended her term as mayor, but not as councilor of the City Council for now, three days before the 41 councilors elected on May 28 elect the successor of the woman who has governed the city since June from 2015 until now. Hours after Colau staged his farewell to the mayor’s office, it was confirmed that the investiture plenum will be held, as in the rest of the councils, on Saturday 17 June. It was announced by Vox after reporting that, once the Central Electoral Board has once again rejected its appeal for the vote count (the far-right formation was disputing a councilor with the PSC), it rules out proceeding through the judicial process through the presentation of an administrative dispute.
Vox assured that it will not delay the constitution of the City Council after the Central Electoral Board has maintained the criterion by which only the acts of the electoral months in which incidents were recorded on the election day are reviewed.
The question of the date of the investiture has been resolved – the risk that the constitution of the City Council would be delayed until July 7 had been on the table for the last week -, the deadlines are shortened so that a maneuver can materialize that avoids that Xavier Trias, the winner of the elections, regains the mayorship. After the resounding failure of the proposal launched the previous day by Colau – a rotating mayoralty between PSC, BComú and ERC–, all eyes are still on the possibility that the PP will support the socialist Jaume Collboni and prevent Barcelona from having a mayor who he is active in an independence party.
Nevertheless, the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, poured another bucket of cold water on this option yesterday. It is true that the leader of the popular left a door ajar, but the condition he sets to propitiate the investiture of Collboni is little less than unsalvageable for the other hypothetical protagonists of this operation.
In an interview with esRadio, the president of the PP assured that his party will not support Collboni, “at least for the time being”. “What they want – he said – are our votes, but Colau will continue in the government. The Colau-Colboni marriage of the previous term is now the Collboni-Colau marriage. What changes is who presides over the City Council, but not the coalition”. Feijóo explained that they have proposed to the socialist mayor “a constitutionalist government”, but his answer is that “nothing can be agreed with the PP and that the only thing the PP has to do is vote for me”.
Meanwhile, BComú insists on the “pact of progress”. Yesterday, his number two, Jordi Martí, demanded a meeting with PSC and ERC while ruling out voting for Collboni if ??this pact is not closed before Saturday. Esquerra does not seem to be up for the job, even though yesterday in Junts there was not full confidence in the republicans. This suspicion is not caused so much by Ernest Maragall as by the pacts that ERC and the PSC are signing in other councils, as well as the fear that these two parties will add an agreement to the Provincial Council as a currency of exchange for the Council.
The ultimatum of the commons did not go down well with the socialists. Laia Bonet reproached them for threatening not to vote for Collboni. “In 2015 and 2019, the responsibility of the socialists made possible two investitures of Colau without even having drawn up a government pact”, recalled the councilor of the PSC on Twitter. “Now – he added – it would not be understood that they would not act with the same generosity towards the PSC to build a government of progress”.
