The Cercle d'Economia celebrated yesterday with muteness, good manners are almost always imposed, the electoral results of the day before in the city of Barcelona. The electoral count revealed that Xavier Trias reached the decisive day being the preferred, majority option of the social mass of this center of thought of the Barcelona bourgeoisie.
Things were not so clear at first. Before the veteran politician with convergent roots announced his candidacy, the socialist Jaume Collboni was seen as the useful vote option for change in Barcelona, that is, to remove Ada Colau from the mayor's office.
The irruption of Xavier Trias was an unexpected challenge, a last-minute script change that caused initial perplexity among those who defined strategies. The readjustment to the new narrative was not automatic. The conviction that it was a viable bet was slow in coming.
Among the leaders of the economy there was confusion. Could Trias be a good candidate in an election that seemed crucial for the city government? After all, hadn't he been one of the leading figures in the independence movement of Artur Mas' Convergència? Did the politician have the character to define his own line, differentiated from what other sectors of his party would mark, such as Carles Puigdemont and Jordi Turull, or even Laura Borràs? Who were they going to vote for when push came to shove?
But the Trias effect advanced like a snowball, it was a progressive decantation, slower at the beginning and accelerated during the last days. As the final tally reflected, in the wealthiest areas of the city, it can be seen on the street-by-street interactive maps, the elite opted for Jordi Pujol's former councilor in a proportion unknown in recent years. As in the best times of pujolismo. The conviction prevailed that, despite everything, Trias offered them confidence.
And yesterday the members of the Cercle and their guests recognized each other as participants in the same option and the same victory. And although throughout Spain the news of the day was, without a doubt, the new bet of Pedro Sánchez calling general elections for July 23, in the corridors of the convention room of the W hotel the focus of comments and analysis was on the future tenant of the Barcelona mayor's office.
Among those present yesterday, Salvador Illa, first secretary of the Catalan socialists, covering the intervention of his colleague Josep Borrell, the high European representative for foreign and security policy. The leader of the opposition in Catalonia and aspiring to preside over the Generalitat resisted the chants of a business community that persisted in wresting from him the commitment that the Socialists would not prevent Trias, as the most voted, from being the new mayor of Barcelona. A movement that has only just begun and that will continue until the unknown is cleared up.
The result is an injection of morale for an economic patriciate who had not tasted the benefits of victory for more than a decade, not even a partial one.
Does the result of these last municipal ones in Barcelona admit readings in the key of recomposition of the old convergent space, so longed for by the world embodied in the Cercle?
If someone thinks that Mayor Trias could be the seed of a renewed space for the Catalan center-right, for the moment he does not express it openly.
Junts continues to be a political space with many families often not on good terms. The apparent hierarchy of the formation does not draw a profile of a political formation open to returning to the old practices of pragmatic negotiations with the central government. Trias himself does not seem the right person to lead a reconstruction of the political space of this magnitude.
But, surely, many of those who hold the bar high in the Catalan economy already think that it is a path worth exploring and one that is worth making efforts. The July elections will be a good testing ground.
