The former mayor of Barcelona and Junts candidate for mayor, Xavier Trias, maintains that the style of his successor in office and adversary in the next municipal elections, Ada Colau, "is linked to sectarianism and contempt for collaboration", to "the rage " and to "seek confrontation".
"I am the opposite, in many cases, to Mrs. Colau", Xavier Trias stressed in an interview with EFE, in which he assured that the current mayoress of Barcelona is "a person who does not listen, does not reach out and has the specialty of seeking confrontation: These are good, these are bad".
For Trias, Ada Colau has a way of acting "without consensus", with "a certain anger" and "rully", and the city model that she wants to consolidate "is a catastrophe", which has "mostly against public opinion ".
"If we continue like this, this will end badly (...) I am running to be mayor because people stop me on the street and say: Trias, this cannot continue like this," says the Junts candidate.
"My priority is not to go against Mrs. Colau, it is to win and be mayor," adds the septuagenarian politician, who retired four years ago, after 16 as Barcelona councilor -four of them as mayor- and whom the latest polls place as winner of the next municipal ones in the Catalan capital.
But for Trias, electoral victory is not enough, he must achieve "a spectacular result" that makes it "indisputable" and makes it clear that he will be "the future mayor of Barcelona" and does not allow "strange things", such as after the 2019 elections, that Ernest Maragall won in number of votes, but that brought Ada Colau back to the mayoralty by getting more support to be invested.
"I need many people to understand that the only way to change things is to help Trias," he points out, while reiterating that he will not support any of his rivals to be mayor and that he will only agree to be mayor and have a majority that allows him to "govern well".
In the interview, the former mayor has denied that his commitment is a "return to the past" and has assured that it represents "the Barcelona of the future".
Although he acknowledges that the city models that he and the commons candidate defend are different, Xavier Trias stresses that what distances them the most is not one issue or another, but "the way of doing things" of the mayoress and her government, which for him is "absolutely wrong".
"The current government is a sectarian government. They have a sectarian way of operating. They go their own way. They do not seek complicity either on the street or within the town hall," denounced Xavier Trias, who believes that this way of proceeding makes them not work to get solutions.
He has also considered that the "complicity" between the government and municipal workers "has been lost" with Mayor Colau and that there will be "many workers happy that we are back."
He insists that Ada Colau's way of understanding things is "I do what I want", despite the fact that "she does bad things and spoils good things", says Trias.
He gives as an example of the first thing that the union of the tram along the Diagonal has undertaken, despite the fact that it was rejected in a citizen consultation, and of the second, that "without negotiating with the neighbours" it has made the transformation of the street into a green axis Girona.
He has also accused the mayoress and her governments of paralyzing projects for the carretera de les Aigües, el Morrot, la Sagrera or el Besós, "not because they were against it, but because they were 'Trias' projects".
For this reason, he wants these four projects to "return strongly to Barcelona" and affirms that he will not allow the green axes to spoil the corners of the Eixample or the tram connection to destroy the Diagonal, three of the promises of his electoral program that have already revealed.
With regard to the team on which he will rely, he has been sparing, although he has assured that it is already "embarrassed" and that it will emerge from the "Trias group", a platform in which there will be other parties, in addition to Junts, and that it will include people he will choose.
Trias does not have those who formed his government team as mayor of CiU between 2011 and 2015, except Jordi Martí, current municipal spokesman for Junts, and Neus Munté, the current president of the municipal group.
"It will be a candidacy of very powerful people. People committed to the city of Barcelona who know how to manage. Better than the previous ones, who were already very good," Trias promised.
