Xavier Trias wins one day; the next day, Jaume Collboni, and sometimes even Ada Colau. What is happening in Barcelona? Is it a city with a volatile electorate and a shifting mood that carries over to the polls? Or is the correlation so close that it is not possible to clearly elucidate who will ultimately be the winner? The answer is a mixture of all these things, although the decisive factor is embodied by an electorate that has evolved towards fragmentation and that, increasingly, registers a very fickle voting intention.
History supports this interpretation, but the polls also offer some clues. For example, more than a third of voters plan to decide their vote in the period between the start of the electoral campaign and voting day. In fact, 5% will make the decision “on the same day as the elections”. And, in addition, currently only 16% always vote for the same party. More than 50% decide what they vote (or if they vote) “according to what suits them best at the moment”. The data are from the CIS.
From here you can understand how unpredictable the electoral outcome is when the campaign has not even started. But the case of Barcelona presents a specificity that can be more clearly appreciated from the historical evolution of the results. In 1979, in the first democratic municipal elections after the dictatorship, the difference in absolute votes between the first party (then the PSC) and the second most voted force (the PSUC) approached 120,000 ballots and 15 percentage points . Translated into councilors, the Socialists added seven more than the Catalan Eurocommunists.
The distance between the party with the most votes (once again the PSC) and the second force (now CiU) grew in the 1983 elections to exceed 165,000 votes (which translated into an advantage of almost 20 percentage points and 8 councilors for the winner). The differences between the first and second forces remained between 70,000 and 90,000 votes for the next two decades. The exception occurred in 1999, when the advantage of the PSC over CiU again exceeded 160,000 ballots (and touched 24 percentage points).
Obviously, in view of these correlations, the demoscopic institutes did not have much difficulty in estimating a winner. Nevertheless, elections as tight as those contested by Pasqual Maragall and Miquel Roca in 1995 decided the color of the mayorship by only one tenth: the number that allowed Esquerra to enter the distribution of councilors and to opt for the balance in favor of the bloc of leftists that composed PSC and ICV. Otherwise, CiU and Partit Popular would have had an absolute majority.
However, the forecasts continued to be based on clear differences until 2007. That year, the distance between Jordi Hereu and Xavier Trias was reduced to just over 25,000 ballots (and 4.5 percentage points). Only two councilors separated the first from the second force.
Since then, and although in 2011 CiU prevailed over the PSC by a margin of almost 40,000 votes and 3 councillors, the correlation has been narrowing. And all this in parallel with a greater fragmentation of the electoral market: between 1979 and 2011, the formations with representation in the Consistory ranged between four and five. But in 2015 this figure rose to seven, and in 2019, to six.
The best reflection of this evolution is the current distance between the first and second forces. In 2015, the advantage of the winner (Barcelona en Comú) over the runner-up (CiU) fell to just over 17,000 ballots, two and a half points and a solitary councillor. And in 2019 the differences narrowed even more: less than 5,000 votes and 6 percentage points. A tie for ten councilors and, for the first time, the force with the most votes (ERC, in this case) did not govern in Barcelona. But in view of these millimetric differences between the main forces of the Barcelona Consistory, it is perfectly foreseeable that, should a similar correlation be maintained today, the advantage of the winner will be almost undetectable.
