“If they give me a choice between being a member of the PP and the interests of my city, I will always choose Badalona,” Xavier Garcia Albiol says whenever he has the opportunity. Under this premise, the future mayor has woven an electoral campaign fleeing partisanship, neither left nor right, only "Badalonismo", with which he has achieved an overwhelming majority of the votes and crowning his victory in all the neighborhoods of the fourth Catalan city.
Symbolism has always been very present in Albiol's campaign. Banners of various ranges of colors, from the red of the socialists to the purple of the commoners, have been alternating messages pointing to local problems. This severe delimitation of the messages in Badalona code has allowed him to "erase the ideological borders" without denying his PP militancy, from which he does not hide.
Albiol joked yesterday on Jordi Basté's El món a RAC1 program that his counterpart Manu Reyes had copied his campaign in Castelldefels and for this reason he has obtained 12 councillors, one of the absolute majority. "The key is to set a single priority, that this case has been exclusively Badalona." A strategy that, both in Badalona and Castelldefels, has borne electoral results and that the rest of the popularly elected could imitate.
The PP, in these last municipal elections, has obtained 8.22% of the votes in Catalonia and 196 councilors, doubling the 4.63% of the debacle that led to the result of the 2019 elections. In Badalona, the popular ones have added 55.73% of the votes, while in Castelldefels they have remained at 42.11% and 15.89% in Roda de Berà (Tarragonès), the third city in which they have obtained a great result.
Apart from cleaning the electoral campaigns of partisan symbols, another of the keys of the PP has been to focus the proposals on the demands of the residents. "We must have the intelligence to know how to read what the citizens ask of us," said García Albiol.
For the Popular Party in Catalonia, once the electoral improvement is guaranteed, consolidation and territorial implantation is essential, such as the entry into the fray of the former Badalonian councilor, Miguel Jurado, who has obtained two councilors, or all three joined in Sant Adrià de Besòs and the two recovered in Mataró. An example of what the party proposes as "the reconstruction of the PP in Catalonia".
