No other electoral consultations are so marked by what happens under one's house as the municipal ones. Ideologies, the great visions of what this society should be like and other interpretations of the most abstract reality determine state and regional consultations much more than local ones.
But when it comes to electing a mayor, proximity, closeness and changes that disrupt daily lives rule. The citizens then go to the polls thinking that every day it seems more difficult for them to take their garbage out into the street, about the bloody foreigners who spend every night laughing by their bedroom window, about the impunity of a restaurant that always scratch a few minutes at the time of picking up the terrace... and also in the supposed scuffle between a lifelong neighbor of the neighborhood and a squatter who... In the end one ends up voting for the candidate who really shows a greater empathy with these issues.
And politicians are also well aware of this. In this way, in the municipal elections, neighborhood conflicts become city issues, reflecting issues of much greater depth, or perhaps what happens in the bunkers of the Carmel neighborhood does not illustrate all the problems related to overcrowding? tourism that can be found in so many corners of Barcelona?
The mass tourism of the Carmel bunkers took its toll this Sunday on BComú and PSC. And Xavier Trias fished much more than expected in some fairways that had always looked to the left. The vote figures clearly illustrate how a good part of the residents on this side of the city disapprove of the municipal management of the Turó de la Rovira viewpoint in particular, and also the policies launched by the mayoress Ada Colau's executive in order to mitigate the drawbacks of tourism in general. The Horta-Guinardó district was led this mandate by the socialist mayor Rosa Alarcón, the great defender of fencing and the night closing of the bunkers, a measure that most of the people in the neighborhood disapprove of. And the comunes, for their part, flagged these four years of their efforts to end the saturation of public space, to protect the daily life of the neighborhoods in the face of the abundance of visitors. Here, in Carmel, many understand that they did not do enough.
The analysis of the scrutiny in some of the streets most affected by the bustle of tourists in search of the most beautiful photo of Barcelona shows it. Thus, in Marià Labèrnia, the main scene of the coming and going of visitors, the commons went from adding 110 votes in 2019 to 85 this Sunday. Junts, on the other hand, went from 75 to 107. And in Mühlberg and Gran Vista streets, the socialists went from 226 to 187, and the commoners, from 175 to 125. Former mayor Trias, on the other hand, doubled long the support registered in 2019, going from 33 to 77 votes. The increase in abstention in these streets is considerable, but it seems that the hardest bill was passed on ERC, whose tremendous drop seems more like a consequence of the demobilization of a large part of the pro-independence electorate in these elections.
The historic center of Sant Andreu was the scene in 2021 of a fiery conflict over the implementation of door-to-door garbage collection. The municipal government, in this matter more from BComú than from the PSC, received strong criticism from the opposition en bloc –Junts was especially belligerent– because they considered that the new system left the neighborhood dirty. The responsible council, which has been directed by the common Eloi Badia, defended the deployment, but as a result of the pressure received, it ended up introducing changes and left the second phase in the air, for after the elections. Thus, while waiting to find out who will govern the City Council, it is not known what will be done. On the other hand, this area has seen how its main street, Gran de Sant Andreu, with strong commercial vitality, has completed its reform in the term that is now ending –the first part was done in the previous one– becoming a pedestrian priority road , to the detriment of the car.
In most of this territory on Sunday the commoners won, which have emerged quite gracefully from the electoral stake. Although in some census units Junts and PSC prevailed, with more adjusted results, displacing ERC. For example, in the one that crosses Coroleu and Monges streets, 247 votes went to the party of the still mayor Ada Colau and 196 to the candidacy of Xavier Trias. In 2019, the former obtained one less and in second place was Esquerra, very close with 243. Between Riera de Sant Andreu and Ignasi Iglésias, the socialists came first (134) and the commons came second (127). Four years earlier, the Republicans prevailed with 222 and BComú followed them with 150. In Onze de Setembre and Fabra i Puig with Llenguadoc, the post-convergents and the commons tied with 141 votes when in 2019 ERC won with 190, followed by the commons with 150.
The works to convert Consell de Cent street into a green axis have been rewarded at the polls by the residents directly involved. Despite the decrease in participation and the general drop in support for the commons in the city as a whole, in this area of the Eixample they have gained votes, going from 2,648 to 2,764 if the 17 census sections that the street still under construction crosses are added . The area in which the most support is concentrated is the one between Balmes and Muntaner, where around 28% of the votes are around, and from Viladomat to the Joan Miró park, in the part closest to the Sants-Montjuïc district. There are specifically five census sections where the formation with the most votes is that of Colau, and in the rest it is second, unlike four years ago, when in some places it was third and even fourth (and Valls was the most voted in some of them) .
All in all, the candidacy of Xavier Trias is strongly imposed on the whole of the green axis, although without recovering the levels of support that the extinct Convergència i Unió had in 2015 in this neighborhood. That year, when he lost the elections in the city, he won in 15 of the 17 census sections of the Consell de Cent axis. This time he has stayed in 12 of the 17, results that double the number of votes from the last elections and occupy the place that ERC occupied at that time, but still leave him far from the majority support obtained in 2011, when Trias he became mayor. If the focus is broadened, Junts is also imposed this time in the rest of the Eixample, including the green axes of Girona and Borrell streets, but not in Rocafort.
Only Vox took advantage this Sunday of the partisan use of the problems related to the squatting in the Sant Gervasi-la Bonanova neighborhood. Ciudadanos and Valents, the other two formations that made the usurpation of the buildings known as El Kubo and La Ruïna one of the main axes of their electoral campaign, were unable to temper their tremendous collapse, a collapse that leaves them out of the picture. City hall. The far-right formation and green color obtained this Sunday in Sant Joan de la Salle street, where the buildings in question are located, 52 votes; and in the Bonanova square, many others. They are many more than those harvested in the previous elections, when Vox obtained fourteen and eight votes respectively. But they are very far from the records of Junts, which, tiptoeing around this issue, went from 147 to 355 in Sant Joan de la Salle, and from 105 to 244 in Bonanova square.
On top of the PP, a candidacy that also declared itself an enemy of all squatting, but which preferred not to participate in the scenery promoted by Ciudadanos, Valents and Vox, doubled its results in these two places. In addition, neither BComú nor PSC, the main party in the municipal government and the party that held the security portfolio and also the management of this district, were especially punished in these enclaves. But what has been said, the stumble of Ciudadanos and Valents was tremendous. Both formations contested the 2019 elections under the acronym of BCN pel Canvi. Then they prevailed in Sant Joan de la Salle and in Plaza Bonanova with 316 and 181 votes. And on Sunday in the first street Valents barely got 40 votes, and Ciudadanos, ten. And in the square, Valents obtained 28, and Ciudadanos, 13. In both elections and in both places the participation was very high, always around 70%.
And among the most angry complaints about the noise from the terraces, Xavier Trias prevailed. Now we are in one of the busiest points of Enric Granados street, on both sides of Provença street, at km 0 of the neighborhood fight in this city against noise pollution. Here, in the heart of the Eixample, there are 114 residential buildings and up to 117 terraces! Well, in the upper part of Provença Xavier Trias took victory with more than 37% of the votes, while in the lower part he did it with more than 36.5%. The list of former mayor Trias thus multiplied the votes harvested by his formation in 2019. The efforts of the government of mayor Ada Colau, especially in the final stretch of this term, to reduce noise and ensure the well-being of the residents in the area allowed to the common ones to improve their results with respect to the previous elections, but in a truly somewhat pyrrhic way, remaining practically twenty points behind the winner of the last elections.
The accusations that the evils on this street were actually hatched during the mayoralty of Trias did not have much effect among the people who live around here. The Socialists, for their part, experienced a small setback this Sunday, but the big bump, as in a good part of the city, was given by the Republicans. The controversy, however, is not closed. The citizen groups most indignant with the noise levels that Barcelona suffers will hold a new protest tomorrow.
