Xavier Trias will run for the mayoralty of Barcelona for the fifth time in the elections on May 28, 2023. The former mayor of the Catalan capital between 2011 and 2015 has communicated his decision tonight to the militants of the local Junts federation at the Christmas dinner attended by some 300 people in the Cotxeres de Sants, among them the president of the party, Laura Borràs, and the general secretary, Jordi Turull.
Trias has said yes after all the sectors of Junts bet on him as the only candidate with a chance of achieving a good result and contesting the mayoralty of Barcelona in elections that appear to be extraordinarily close.
The veteran nationalist leader will compete in a close fight with the current mayoress, Ada Colau, the republican Ernest Maragall and the socialist Jaume Collboni, all of them already invested as heads of the list of their respective formations.
To confirm his candidacy, Trias must submit to the mandatory primary process, a procedure in which he will hardly have an opponent. The proclamation and staging of the candidacy will take place in mid-January.
One of the advantages of the mayor, who for months has managed the expectations around his possible presentation, is precisely that, given his experience and the knowledge that the people of Barcelona have of him, he does not need much exposure time in the electoral showcase.
Xavier Trias starred in a long journey through the desert between 2002, when he abandoned the presidency of the CiU group in the Congress of Deputies to present himself as a coalition candidate for mayor of Barcelona, and 2011, when he managed to unseat the third attempt to the PSC after 32 years of socialist hegemony in the City Council of the Catalan capital.
Four years later, in the 2015 elections, he was surprisingly defeated by the Barcelona en Comú candidacy led by the former spokesperson for the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), Ada Colau.
The convergent leader remained at the head of his group until the 2015 elections, in which he handed over the baton to his lieutenant in the times of opposition and municipal government, Joaquim Forn, who was prosecuted for his participation in the events of February 1. October 2017, moved away from institutional politics. Elsa Artadi took the reins of the municipal group until last spring she announced her decision to leave politics, at which time the options for a return of Xavier Trias began to gain strength.
For months, Xavier Trias has been meditating on his return to municipal politics and has begun to prepare the team that will accompany him. The rupture of the government of the Generalitat between ERC and Junts and the agitated internal situation of this last formation was about to ruin the candidacy of Trias. This has always demanded a free hand to assemble his team and his project without impositions from the leadership of his party. Having obtained these guarantees, the 76-year-old politician has decided to step forward with only five and a half months to go before the elections.
A large part of Trias's options involves bringing together the majority of the anti-Colau vote, a circumstance for which he seems to have an advantage over the socialist Jaume Collboni, who has shared government with the commons throughout this term, and the republican Ernest Maragall, who until now could claim the exclusive right to vote for independence, but who has not only shared many of Ada Colau's policies during these three and a half years, but has even proposed going further on issues related to mobility or urban planning that have found a strong response from broad economic sectors of the city.
In Trias's strategy to try to reconquer the mayoralty of Barcelona, it will be necessary to see the influence that his affiliation with a purely independentist formation may have. In any case, he has already made it clear that these elections are from Barcelona and that, as things are, the estelada, which he does not deny at all, must remain in the background.
