Mayor Jaume Collboni now expects to approve his budget proposal on May 2. As it was more or less announced a few days ago, the Socialists only found the support of the Republican councilors at the Barcelona City Council meeting held yesterday. The opposition overturned its proposed accounts in the final approval. The PSC executive now has no other choice but to resort to a matter of confidence.
And Mayor Collboni did not hesitate to hold ex-mayor Ada Colau and her supporters directly responsible for the rejection of their accounts. “I had never seen so much irresponsibility together in such a short time”, he told his former government partner. The commoners were not amused that the mayor attacked Colau in this way when she had no right of reply. “His attitude has overturned up to three progressive budgets in a few days”, he added, referring to the budgets of the Generalitat and the State. “But I tell him that Barcelona will have new budgets approved this spring, on May 2, as I promised.”
Yes, on Wednesday the extraordinary municipal meeting will take place that will launch the issue of confidence. Then the councilors of the opposition will have 30 days to propose a candidacy for the mayor with a sufficient majority. Given the current correlation of political forces, and especially their relationships, at the moment it seems quite unlikely that a motion of no confidence can go ahead. After that, the municipal government’s budget proposal will be automatically approved.
Just a month ago, in the moat of the Carles Pi i Sunyer hall, moments before the previous municipal meeting began, before the councilors went to their respective benches, a few days after the socialist government and the ERC municipal group sealed an agreement on these budgets, the mayor Collboni and the republican spokesperson Elisenda Alamany were seen together. In this way, the photographers were able to immortalize their new complicity. Yesterday they also showed their good relationship. And Colau did not enter the room until Collboni took his place. The one and the other tried not to meet their gazes.
Colau insisted that the commons cannot give another blank check to the socialists while they show so much desire to dismantle the legacy of the two previous mandates, which is why they understand that any pact on the budgets must be accompanied by another on the governability, who already told them that if they did not enter the municipal government they would not support the budgets. “Their strategy is to make me responsible for everything – Colau told Collboni – but they don’t do anything other than try to dismantle what we did, and that’s how they prove that we can’t support them again”.
In politics more or less everyone can be reconciled. It all depends on the context. But the relations between the mayor and the ex-mayor are now going through their worst moment. The deputy mayor for Economy, the socialist Jordi Valls, described Colau’s attitude and his attempts to monopolize the political space of the left as absurd. “Perhaps we are not left”, Valls reproached him.
Obviously, Collboni would prefer to pursue his accounts through much more conventional ways. But on that morning in February when he again put on the table the same budget proposal that the opposition had already rejected a few months ago, he was very clear that the issue of trust was his lifeline, his last resort, his rock in the girdle… “Step by step”, he said at the time when he was asked about this matter.
And, paradoxically, the socialist can consider himself satisfied. A question of trust always leads to wear and tear, it denotes a certain loneliness, it reveals that you have not been able to convince them… But at the moment ERC is much closer to the PSC than to BComú. Right now the Republicans don’t want to hear anything about the commons. At the end of the day, it is the people of Colau who are being left most alone and isolated in this situation. The ex-mayor’s plans to form a three-way left-wing government went awry. In addition, it seems much more plausible that Collboni can be understood in a specific way with the conservative forces than with Colau.
“We are facing a progressive budget – said the Republican Alamany – and no one will understand that those who precisely defend progressive governments so much do not support it. Today we are laying the foundations for a new stage and ERC is where it always is, working for the people of Barcelona”. And then the leader of ERC called the attitude of the commons incomprehensible. “It seems that the problem is that they have changed the places where they are sitting, right? We, on the other hand, are where we always are, working for the people of Barcelona.”
At the moment we are light years away from the understanding that was distilled by commoners and republicans during the previous mandate. Alamany also reproached the communes for putting their own interests ahead of those of the people of Barcelona and the rest of Catalans. The republicans presented a proposal in which they regret the supposed damages that Barcelona will suffer after the fall in the budgets of the Generalitat. A whole torpedo aimed at making Colau blush. The initiative did not go ahead because it was rejected by Junts, BComú, the PP and Vox. But the PSC did support him, a very, very symbolic support. And then, in another plenary situation, the spokeswoman for the BComú group, Janet Sanz, accused the ERC councilors of becoming a docile accomplice of the socialists, of telling them yes to everything, of losing the his critical spirit.
The truth is that the morning’s political debate took place in a surprisingly moderate manner. Given the circumstances, one would have expected the spokespersons of the municipal groups to be much more aggressive, if not much more vehement. On other occasions, for less relevant matters, they brandished knives much more easily.
Ramon Tremosa, from Junts, for his part, regretted that, in his opinion, the socialists talk a lot, but do not negotiate much. The expression was coined by Xavier Trias at his last conference in Born, and summarizes in a very illustrative way the conversations in relation to the municipal accounts between Junts and the PSC. The popular Daniel Sirera stressed that these budgets will never activate the economy: “The destructive spirit of Colau is still there”. And Gonzalo de Oro, from Vox, said that these accounts are a cut and paste of the common ones.
