After the investigation by La Vanguardia that has uncovered that the CNI investigated the formation of a government in Barcelona after the victory of the ERC in the last municipal elections, the leader of the Republicans in the Catalan capital, Ernest Maragall, has pointed out to the mayor, Ada colau; and the first deputy mayor, Jaume Collboni. "To maintain power, anything goes, even the help of the CNI," said Maragall.
In an interview on Catalunya Ràdio, Maragall assured that the information published "demonstrates that these were not negotiations because everything was predetermined, prepared, everything was directed so that those conversations could not twist what had already been decided with the knowledge of Mrs. Colau ".
The accusation of collusion of the mayor with the espionage that Maragall has launched has deeply irritated the space of the commons, which has come out in a storm on social networks to demand a full-fledged rectification from the Republican leader. Deputies in Congress, in the Parliament, councilors and leaders with organic responsibility in the purple space have accused Maragall of launching an "unacceptable slander"
while they have reminded him that they have not only denounced "the sewers of the State forcefully", but that they have also "suffered" them.
This is the case of the deputy mayor of the Barcelona City Council and member of the commons, Jordi Martí, who has asked the Republican leader on social networks to rectify his statements. "Ernest Maragall's accusation against Colau is an unacceptable slander," Martí said on Twitter, demanding an "immediate rectification" from the Republican leader. "The commons have always been against any kind of political espionage," he added.
The deputy in Congress representing the commons, Joan Mena, added that "everything is not fair in the campaign and in politics." "Maragall should rectify and ask for forgiveness or he will show that the instrumentalization of an act as serious as espionage is not only a matter of the PP", he has also written through Twitter.
Leaders such as the president of the Unidas Podemos parliamentary group in Congress, Jaume Asens, have also spoken along the same lines; MPs Gerardo Pisarello and Aina Vidal, MP David Cid, Joan Carles Gallego and Jordi Jordan; municipal officials such as Deputy Mayor Janet Sanz and rabbits such as Tània Corrons, Marc Serra, Jordi Rabassa and Lucía Martín; as well as MEP Ernest Urtasun.
The official complaint from the BComú account highlights that Maragall's words are "a very serious and false slander with a clear partisan intention." In this sense, in the commons they consider that Maragall's intention is to start warming up engines for the municipal elections of 2023. There is a year left for that contest and, although Colau has not yet decided if he will run for the third time, this Saturday the bases of BComú showed unanimous support for him to do so.
The plenary session of the training meeting in the Pepita Casanellas room on the Paseo de la Zona Franca approved this Saturday the proposal made by one of the mayor's own referents, the current Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats. The vote ended with 221 votes in favor, one abstention and none against and this fact would have caused "nerves" in Maragall, argues a source from the commons.
The Republican candidate is not going through his best moments. In the absence of new polls being published, the biannual barometer of Barcelona indicated in December a clear setback for the Republicans in the city against Colau. For the first time, the survey gave a clear victory to Barcelona en Comú, with an intention to vote of 14.8% of those surveyed compared to 10.2% who would vote for ERC. In addition, Maragall suffered a clear setback in December due to the approval of the Generalitat's budgets, when he lifted the veto on Colau's budget "to serve the general interest of the country."
The case has also caused other formations to refer to the news published today by La Vanguardia. In Junts, the still president of the party and former president of the Govern, Carle Puigdemont, lamented the fact that a Supreme Court judge authorized "spying on the negotiations to decide the mayor of Barcelona", something that he considers "barbarous". "In what article of the Constitution is it protected?", he questions. And since its formation, the group's spokesman at the Barcelona City Council, Jordi Martí Galbis, recalls that the previous candidate Joaquim Forn had already denounced that Colau's investiture was already part of a "state operation to prevent Barcelona from having a mayor independentist".
In addition, the spokesman recalls that the councilwoman Elsa Artadi appears among the 18 spies recognized by the CNI, and that the convergent former mayor Xavier Trias was the subject of an "infamy prepared by the state apparatuses" when it came to light that he was hiding money in Swiss. Junts therefore denounces that Barcelona "is a key player on the Catalan and Spanish political board" in which "the State has decided to influence legally or illegally".
"If I were Collboni or Colau, I would think twice before continuing with this calm in their positions knowing that they are also the object of explicit democratic manipulation," Maragall said in one of his interviews.
The veteran politician has also passed through the microphones of Rac1 this Sunday. "In addition to the CatalanGate, we now have the BarcelonaGate", he has valued in the Via Lliure programme. For him, the last municipal elections in the Catalan capital are "intervened elections".
"It is a state operation, which adds its own instruments to prevent the ERC from governing a city like Barcelona," stressed Maragall, who also had words for former councilor Manuel Valls, key for Colau to govern in a second term: " They gave him an assignment, he lasted a few months and left."
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