It's been a long time, 20 years now, that municipal elections have been resolved in Barcelona by a narrow margin of votes. And on this occasion the polls, which point to a technical tie between at least three candidacies, predict that these differences, which four years ago registered their historical minimum, could be even smaller.
The times when the winner of the elections exceeded 400,000 votes, with percentages above 40%, are part of a story that is difficult to repeat. In 1983, Pasqual Maragall, who arrived at that electoral appointment already as mayor of the city but heading the PSC list for the first time, marked an unimaginable record today: 413,034 votes and 45.8%, which despite everything they were not enough to reach that absolute majority that no one has ever achieved in the Catalan capital.
40 years ago, the successor to Narcís Serra was one step away from emulating his Madrid counterpart, Professor Enrique Tierno Galván, who that same day gave the Socialists an absolute majority in the capital of Spain. Pasqual Maragall then led his main opponent, the convergent Ramon Trias Fargas, by more than 165,000 votes. And even so, the mark obtained by the loser of this duel, the mayor of CiU, is a stark distance from the results achieved by the winners of the last four elections, Jordi Hereu in 2007, Xavier Trias in 2011, Ada Colau in 2015 and Ernest Maragall in 2019.
The trend to reduce the differences between the main candidates, which has a lot to do with the growing fragmentation of the vote, began in 2007, when Hereu surpassed Trias by just over 27,000 ballots, and in 2019 set a record of 4,696 votes that could be seriously threatened today. In fact, in the last elections, the difference between the first classified, the Republican Ernest Maragall, and the third, the socialist Jaume Collboni, was only 22,304 votes.
The electoral evolution of recent times allows us to venture that whoever approaches a record of 25% of the votes today is practically guaranteed to arrive in first position in that second round of the municipal elections that, except for surprises not detected by the polls of the latter weeks, will be played in the headquarters of the Catalan political parties starting tomorrow.
Ada Colau removed Xavier Trias from the Barcelona mayor's office when four years ago he established his electoral ceiling with 25.2% support, almost four points more than Ernest Maragall in his insufficient victory on May 26, 2019.
One factor that could be decisive in the electoral result in Barcelona is participation, which has never reached high levels in municipal elections in the Catalan capital. To find the largest one, we must go back to 1987, when the first confrontation between Pasqual Maragall and the convergent Josep Maria Cullell took place, resolved in favor of the former by a difference of just over 74,000 votes and a difference of 8.1 points. Between the two almost 80% of the votes cast, which shows to what extent those elections were polarized.
The 1987 elections were a matter of two, as was the duel four years later that the same protagonists waged. On that occasion Maragall and Cullell accumulated 77% of the votes.
Participation in Barcelona in municipal elections is usually around 60%. The last elections were above average: 66.2% of voters went to the polls in 2019. Since 1995 there has not been such a high turnout. Abstention broke all records in 2007 when it did not even reach 50% participation (49.6%), a circumstance that was also about to occur in the 1999 elections (51.5%9 and 2011 (53.0%).
