Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows, it also makes for strange photos. If you look at the image of Xavier Trias on election night, you can see him surrounded by characters from his party that he has tried to hide during the campaign, starting with the president of the party. The Trias team has been able to exploit the profile of the old convergent candidate, the experienced politician, the gentleman from Barcelona who aspires to change in small doses. That’s why I needed you not to betray the leadership of Junts, or even not to accompany him on the posters with the party’s brand. The candidate was the message.
Trias has managed to position itself at the opposite end of Ada Colau, so it has not needed to make too many proposals. He spoke of the mayor’s interventions in the city as “a disaster” and his slogan was as simple as “if you don’t want Colau, you can’t vote for Collboni, or anyone else but Trias”. His proposals for the future have been generic and he has established himself as an apostle of common sense. What is its model?: pactism.
In the middle of the campaign, he couldn’t have said it more clearly: “We need to seek collaboration and understanding. There are people who say to me ‘You choose to be Convergence’, so what will we do if it is to be convergent” . The success of the candidate has been to present himself as the last Mohican of CDC, of ​​that orderly world that appears in the collective imagination of the middle classes, although it would later collapse like a house of cards, until to the point that the party that had governed Catalonia from the transition until the beginning of the 21st century disappeared.
Trias won the elections on Sunday and has many numbers to be able to be mayor again, because the bad result of ERC, which has gone from being the first force in number of votes to the fourth, complicates the tripartite in Barcelona. The victory has more merit in view of how independence has fared and gives the right to the pragmatists within Junts. It is no coincidence that Jaume Giró is competing with MÃriam Nogueras to be the headliner of JxC in the general elections of July 23. Simone Signoret was wrong to proclaim in her memoirs that nostalgia is not what it was.
