On the 14th, a few hours before the BComú plenary agreed in a genuinely Bulgarian vote (211 votes in favour, one abstention) to ask Ada Colau to run for a third term, and only five days before the mayor announced her more than predictable yes, the party that has governed the city for seven years held a welcome ceremony for the “new activists” in the “defense of Barcelona” in the Zona Franca.
The call for participation that Saturday morning left no room for doubt: “Help us defend Barcelona from those who intend to hinder the green transformation of the city and paralyze Ada Colau's social policies through false accusations against the mayor and her team. of government". A song to resilience in the face of an alleged threat and, at the same time, a statement that would not be out of place at all in the candidate's final minute of a television debate broadcast 48 hours before an election.
It only remained to explicitly ask for the vote and that next Saturday there will still be a year to go for what, once again, are announced as the closest elections in the history of the city. Considering the rhetoric that some of the mayoral candidates have used in recent weeks, nobody would say that May 28, 2023 is so far away. Is there anyone capable of denying without blushing that the pre-election campaign has already begun?
In recent weeks, preparation for next year's elections has accelerated, probably ahead of time and more than necessary. It all started in February, when Junts per Catalunya invested Elsa Artadi as mayor, a condition that she renounced three months later in a personal decision that continues to fuel the curse that haunts many primary winners in this country.
Later it was Ernest Maragall who endorsed the ERC candidacy in other unrivaled primaries that will culminate next weekend with his proclamation as head of the Republican list. And this week it has been confirmed that in politics the exception does make the rule and Ada Colau has said yes to the relief of her own, unable to face and even imagine a future orphaned by their leader.
In the middle, the revelation in La Vanguardia of the Barcelonagate and Ernest Maragall's intemperate reaction, first insinuating, clarifying or correcting later, the complicity of Ada Colau and the socialist Jaume Collboni with political espionage and linking the tortuous maneuvers of the CNI with the operation that prevented him from reaching the mayor's office in 2019 despite outperforming his rivals at the polls.
This spy film, of candidates who seem to drag in some cases an old feeling of guilt and in others a deep resentment, has rarefied, charged with electricity, an atmosphere that today already resembles that of the most tense electoral eve. If Maragall's relationship with Colau and Collboni has never been an example of cordiality, it can well be said that these days it has been blown up.
The three formations with real aspirations to obtain victory within a year believe that the time has come to set their own profile, although in the commissions and in the municipal plenary sessions they end up voting together most of the time and, from time to time, they make an effort to distance themselves from each other, yes, without ever causing a mess.
While ERC and BComú have already decided who will lead their next assault on the Barcelona mayor's office, the Socialists have decided to wait until next fall to start their primary process. To date, no one has ventured to publicly question Jaume Collboni, who has been preparing the oppositions for mayor of Barcelona since 2014, working carefully with part of civil society and the city's economic agents and paying for an electoral campaign that Colau deliberately abandoned and to which he has almost never tried to peek. Since the mandate began, it gives the impression that common and socialists not only divided up management areas but also the type of public they address.
After the defeat in 2011 against Xavier Trias, the fall into hell in 2015 and the recovery in 2019, the PSC once again has options to return to the Barcelona mayor's office. And it is precisely those expectations that justify the exhausting dance of alternative names to Collboni. What if Salvador Illa, committed to the attempt to end the pro-independence hegemony in Parliament. What if Miquel Iceta, apparently happy in the Ministry of Culture. What if Maria Eugènia Gay, from the Col·legi de l'Advocacia to the Government Delegation in Catalonia, perhaps the waiting room for the trip to the Town Hall and with the bonus of being able to confront Ada Colau with another woman... In the end As is known, the polls will have a lot to do with the decision, although, as is also known, they are often wrong.
Although according to the result of three years ago –and what the polls known to date indicate– there is a marked tendency to think that the 2023 elections are a matter of three, the truth is that the future of the other formations already present in the Barcelona City Council, from the already consolidated ones that can obtain representation –case of the CUP or Vox– and from those that can arise from the magma of citizen platforms with aspirations of becoming electoral will largely depend on the fate of May 28 of 2023 and, above all, of the subsequent negotiations for the formation of a government majority and the election of the first mayor. On June 1, 2019, the unwritten rule that the mayor of Barcelona is the one who heads the most voted list was broken. Perhaps it serves as a precedent.
A bad result in the elections can precipitate the end of some leaderships. That is why the designation of the second in the lists takes on special relevance, especially in formations such as ERC or BComú in which success will be measured according to whether Ernest Maragall or Ada Colau win the mayor's office or not. In this case it would not be surprising that the loser said goodbye to the Consistory.
In the case of the Republicans, the most repeated name when asked about a possible second that could end up being the first is that of Ester Capella, current delegate of the Generalitat in Madrid, former Minister of Justice and former councilor of the Barcelona City Council, where she left an excellent I remember in its municipal stage, between 2007 and 2011.
The composition of the first places in the list of the commons also arouses interest. On Thursday, when Ada Colau announced her decision to run for re-election, she did so accompanied by the deputy mayors Janet Sanz, Laura Pérez and Jordi Martí. The game is between the three, unless the mayor opts, as in the previous elections, for a figure like the current Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats, who despite the place he occupied in the electoral ladder in his short period in the City Council had more weight as moral and ideological authority than in management tasks.
In the case of Pérez and Sanz, it would not be strange for BComú to apply the same exceptionality clause to them as to the mayor. For Janet Sanz, the next would be not the third but the fourth term, since between 2011 and 2015 she was a councilor for the Initiative for Catalonia group. For Jordi Martí Grau, the one that will open after the 2023 elections would also be the third term, although only the second under the initials of BComú. Martí presided over the socialist group when Jordi Hereu left the City Council after his defeat in 2011. He did not, however, complete the four-year period: he resigned the act of councilor after losing the PSC primaries to Jaume Collboni to elect the mayor of the 2015. After Ada Colau signed him as municipal manager
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