The political course has begun very altered. This agitated climate contrasts with the oasis in which Barcelona lives politically after the change of mayor. The new mayor Jaume Collboni (PSC) will reach his first hundred days in office next Monday, just when the Mercè festivities are over. Its first summer has been placid, despite the narrow government minority that it has resolved by appointing commissioners to ease the work of its ten councilors. The ship works thanks to the presidential system that grants the mayor great executive power and waits for one of the crucial moments of the mandate: the approval, or not, of fiscal ordinances and budgets.
Collboni knows that it is essential to get the support of other political groups and that this agreement for the municipal accounts can condition a stable government pact for the entire legislature. The mayor has three options. The first and most difficult is to try the variable geometry and agree with one and the other indiscriminately. It is the least viable because the groups that aspire to form a government will not allow it. The second and third options are antagonistic. On the one hand, there is the winner of the elections, Xavier Trias, who with his 11 councilors would allow Collboni to add an absolute majority (21) and secure a peaceful mandate. The ex-mayor is ready to close a governance pact to prevent the ex-mayor and leader of BComú Ada Colau from re-entering the city government. The same goes for Colau, who has already warned Collboni that he will not support her in the budgets if he does not first conclude a government agreement with her and leave Trias in the opposition.
Both Trias and Colau do not want to leave the City Council until the alliance that governs Barcelona these four years is clarified. The problem with a pact with the communes is that its nine councilors are insufficient to achieve an absolute majority and it would need the five ERC councilors who agreed with Trias on an investiture agreement, which ultimately failed. In other words, the mayor should recover the municipal tripartite that already governed the city in the past.
However, there are at least three issues that condition the Barcelona pact. The first is the eventual agreement for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and the role played by the City Council portfolio. For this reason, Collboni insists on first agreeing on the budgets and then talking about stable pacts. This way he gains time to see what the political picture looks like. The second issue is in the next Catalan elections, in which the PSC aspires to rise again with victory and in which it has ERC as its main rival, especially in Barcelona and the metropolitan area. And the third is skin and bone due to the bad relationship between PSC and commons after the last municipal mandate which contrasts with the proximity to the Trias group in key aspects for the city of an economic nature and growth. The coin is in the air.
