I meet a prominent member of Xavier Trias’s list at a public event and I see him very animated. “We really want to start”, he explains to me without hiding a big smile. Since he is an energetic and hardworking guy, I imagine him with dozens of ideas in his head. That’s okay. The problem is that, as of today, the general project of Trias is unknown, which has a simple explanation: the Trias candidacy campaign for Barcelona consisted of repeating that this ballot was the only useful vote to be able to cast outside Ada Colau. It didn’t take much longer.
Whoever was mayor with Convergència spent little time explaining his city model and the approach to the major pending challenges, beyond generic considerations of the type “we bet on quality tourism”. The last Barcelona battle consisted of choosing between Colau and change. Explaining the program in detail – as Ernest Maragall intended – was not what the voters expected.
The Barcelona that will promote Trias is, for the moment, an unknown. If we discount four slogans, we only have the experience of his mandate between 2011 and 2015, a period with successes and mistakes, with lights and some shadows. We wrote, a few weeks ago, that the best thing about Trias was and is his temperament, an inseparable tool of his recent success at the polls. But temperament is a necessary but not sufficient condition to credibly lead a metropolis like Barcelona. When the Trias team gains access to the local government – ​​if there is no unprecedented alliance to invest Collboni –, it will discover that it must fill with content the great expectations it has generated, not only among its voters.
Two dimensions will mark the mayorship of Trias. On the one hand, the dual geometry of Pla̤a Sant Jaume, that is to say, the existence of a monochromatic ERC Government, of which Junts was initially part. President Aragon̬s, like Trias, is a figure who tends to seek dialogue, a circumstance that could serve Рa priori Рto foster good relations between the two administrations, and to reach the future autonomous elections in a climate of collaboration that served, incidentally, to close wounds in the pro-independence camp.
On the other hand, what emerges from the general elections on July 23 will also influence the type of mayorship exercised by the veteran post-convergence politician. If a right-wing Central Executive is formed, Trias will hardly be able to avoid the foreseeable clash between Moncloa and a majority of Catalan society (left-wing and pro-independence voters); in this landscape he will not have much room to exhibit his usual good roll. If, on the other hand, Pedro Sánchez achieves a good result and builds a new progressive government majority, Trias could have a window of opportunity for the most important city in Spain not governed by the PP, and seek productive agreements with the Socialists, without leave the republicans aside. As one of his friends assures me, Trias will be a good mayor in times of peace, but not so much in times of war.
