Xavier Trias won the municipal elections in Barcelona on Sunday, but no one dared that night to assume that he would be the new mayor of the city because numerically an alternative pact was possible. The socialist candidate Jaume Collboni took it upon himself to publicly point out this possibility when he announced at midnight of the election, and after a heart attack for the second place, that he would work to get a progressive government that would avoid the delivery of the rod of mayor in Trias.
This purported deal to oust the winner at the polls had two options. The first was the sum of the councilors of PSC (10), BComú (9) and ERC (5), who would give the mayorship to Collboni. The second option was more strange and involved the curious loan of two of the four PP councilors to give the mayorship to the PSC with Commons. This outrageous combination is similar to the one played by Manuel Valls four years ago when he decided that three of his six councilors would vote for Ada Colau's candidacy to prevent Barcelona from having an independence mayor in the person of Ernest Maragall.
Well, today the two possibilities that have been tried to oust the winner of Sunday's elections are diluted after the refusal of the people to participate in an operation that returns the Commons to the government of the city and after ERC has decided prioritizing a sovereign agreement with JxCat over a tripartite agreement with PSC and BComú, in which it would have a secondary role. This situation clarifies Trias' path to the mayor's office because the concreteness of an alternative pact is fading.
However, there would still be a more outrageous combination that would happen so that the two councilors that Vox won this election vote for the candidacy of Collboni and Colau. But this would have serious political consequences for PSC and Comuns, because the fact of obtaining the mayor's office with the votes of the far-right would always haunt them, starting with the next general election campaign on July 23. In any case, the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, clarified this week that they would not have any conversation with Vox. "With the ultra-right, nothing", he assured.
Another candidate who was decisive is the popular Daniel Sirera: "With the Commons, neither to drink coffee". This is how clearly the mayor of the PP of Barcelona expressed himself yesterday to rule out that his votes could give the mayorship to the socialist Jaume Collboni at the head of a coalition with the Commons. This week the popular people had been polled along these lines, but the electoral advance decreed by President Pedro Sánchez has left any possibility of an agreement with the PP to invest Collboni in a dead end.
The attempt to seduce the populists arose after the socialist cooks failed in their first objective of seeking a progressive alliance with ERC. The Commons have also added to this task, which all week have been posting messages on their social networks pressuring the republicans to propitiate a left-wing government in Barcelona. The problem is that PSC and BComú forget that the republicans are still very hurt because they were the architects of the pact with Manuel Valls to oust them from the mayor's office four years ago and make Ada Colau mayoress, despite having lost the elections to Ernest Maragall.
The current proposal of Socialists and Commons to the Republicans yesterday received an unequivocal response from the president of ERC, Oriol Junqueras: "The best thing is that there is a mayor linked to an independence party and committed to the fight for amnesty and amnesty self determination And not other formulas that they already used against us", referring to the 2019 pact.
With almost no possibility of an alternative pact, Trias is already working with the intention of binding the mayor's office on June 17 when the Consistory is formed. This day he will be mayor to lead the list with the most votes and, if he does not reach an agreement before then, he could start governing alone. However, the post-convergents are aware that with their 11 councilors it is very difficult to govern a large city like Barcelona. The Commons know this well, they were also at the head of the City Council in 2015 with an identical number of councilors and they suffered bravely until they agreed with the PSC a year later and the government was expanded.
This would be Trias' strategy if the imminent general election campaign forces the announcement of the pacts to be postponed. In this way, he would start the legislature alone and after the elections in July he would expand the government with the party that agrees to an agreement.
Xavier Trias also does not rule out reaching an agreement before the investiture with ERC, especially after hearing the intentions of the Republicans, who are betting on an agreement with the post-convergent mayor. The agreement between JxCat and ERC would add 16 councilors, a comfortable amount to govern, but insufficient to approve the city's budgets and important projects. In this sense, the 10 councilors of the PSC would give stability to the Trias government because they would add an absolute majority. The problem is that socialists do not foresee this scenario. Yet.
