“Hello, my name is Jaume Collboni and I want to be the next mayor of Barcelona”. With this declaration of intent, the PSC candidate for mayor of the Catalan capital was presented today at the event that took place at the INEFC in Montjüïc. After being unanimously proclaimed by the council of the local socialist federation, the current first deputy mayor has assumed the responsibility of rescuing the mayor's office for the PSC with the promise of "recovering the best Barcelona"
By show of hands and unanimously, the PSC Federation Council has confirmed Collboni as a candidate. The socialist leader in the Barcelona City Council has been the only one who attended the primary process in which he garnered more than 700 endorsements despite the fact that he only needed fifty
Surrounded by the leadership of his party, Collboni has started the race towards the elections on May 28, 2023 from the conviction that the circumstances are right for the PSC to win these elections and recover the position it lost in the 2011 after more than three decades of hegemony in the city.
Collboni has opted for a clean, orderly, safe Barcelona that fights uncivility and where it is possible to earn a living, a city that recovers its international projection. “I am not running to make someone mayor, but to win”, he has insisted in a clear allusion to Ada Colau, with whom he has shared government during this municipal mandate.
In this first intervention as a candidate for mayor, Jaume Collboni has avoided criticism of his partner in government – there will be time for hand-to-hand combat – to whom he has only dedicated a few critical evenings. The already PSC candidate has placed his party in a position far from the independentists, whom he has accused of fragmenting society, but also from the "populists", those who "told us that we were the caste and that we made political regressive”.
However, Collboni has identified ERC as his great rival, a rival of whom "we don't know what he thinks of the airport, the Sant Antoni round, the Dalt round". "We only know -he added- that they believe that the councilors of the Barcelona City Council should not use Spanish and that the town crier of La Mercè cannot use this language". According to the socialist mayor, "this is the only message from ERC six months before the elections."
The act of proclamation of Jaume Collboni has had the intervention of the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, who has advocated a Barcelona governed by socialists, in which the city "and not its mayors" are the protagonists.
"Barcelona and Catalonia -Illa added- are in the best interest of a new phase of useful politics, not just good intentions". “The objective is that in May the mess ends and a stage of hope, of orderly politics, begins in Barcelona and Catalonia, which allows us to combat populism and extremism and the discourses of confrontation”
