For a purely statistical fact, logic dictates that some of the political parties focus part of their activity on Barcelona and its metropolitan area: 42.6% of the population of all of Catalonia is concentrated in its 36 municipalities.
The PSC has always been fixed in this zone. Historically. ERC put the spotlight here when Oriol Junqueras became president of the party, in 2011. Since then and until the municipal elections of 2019, the Republicans have managed to go from being fifth to second, almost quintupling the votes: from 62,000 to 292,000. Everything indicates that the fight between PSC and ERC for this space will be harsher in the elections on May 28.
Republicans and Socialists dispute a good part of their aspirations for the presidency of the Generalitat in the metropolitan area. Although its weight is underrepresented electorally, the area represents a decisive pool of voters to define the Parliament: there are 3.3 million people out of the 5.6 million in the province of Barcelona and the 7.7 million in Catalonia.
The Socialists seem to have the headwind because to the favorable polls is added the trend of the last municipal elections, where the PSC reinstated nine absolute majorities -especially in Baix Llobregat-, a good part of them lost due to the irruption of Ciudadanos in the most intense years of the process.
Esquerra aspires at least to repeat the remarkable results of 2019, which gave him first place in all of Catalonia. Pere Aragonès, the visible face of ERC, unlike Quim Torra, is a president with a discourse that appeals more to diversity and the social, and not so much to essentialist nationalism. This means that, despite not being a charismatic leader, he does not provoke rejection in an electorate of the metropolitan area that often (with the exception of the 2017 Catalan elections with the victory of Cs) flees from essentialist debates.
Esquerra sees difficulties. She is convinced that there are agreements agreed in advance between PSC and Junts to prevent it from taking over some mayors. "Tripartite? What returns is sociovergence. Look at what is happening in the Parliament", they reason from ERC, while remembering that the agreement for the Generalitat's budgets was "punctual" and "responsible".
A second derivative. The city of Barcelona is the apple of the eye of the Republicans, but after coming first in the elections four years ago with Ernest Maragall, the polls are not encouraging. The Trias effect – which hides the initials of Junts – has had an impact on ERC to the point that the party has recovered the reference to the surname Maragall in the campaign. “Maragall més que mai” is the motto, a nod to the government of his brother Pasqual, mayor of the PSC from 1982 to 1997. In 2019, the candidate preferred to avoid him, and his campaign team gave priority to the name: Ernest.
All in all, Oriol Junqueras has positioned Gabriel Rufián as the spearhead in the metropolitan area. He is running for Santa Coloma de Gramenet, where he has no chance of wresting the mayoralty from the socialist Núria Parlón. But the president of Esquerra trusts that the figure of Rufián "acts as a shock wave" in the electorate from the 36 municipalities of the metropolitan area, despite the controversies so far surrounding his pre-campaign.
Rufián has it difficult: in 2019, before the 18 towns where the PSC won, ERC got five, like the common ones. A second position also reinforced by some good results in a homogeneous way throughout the area.
"Parlón will gobble it up", they reply in the PSC, because the candidate "does not live in Santa Coloma and does not know the needs of the neighbors". But the Socialists are aware of the danger of what ERC intends with the Ruffian strategy. Sources close to the city's mayor's office, who denounce the belligerence with which the Republican municipal group has acted since the arrival of the deputy, express this maneuver with unease: "ERC only has Rufián as a candidate?" This attitude is also seen in l'Hospitalet, where Esquerra has signed up as a candidate the ex-edil of the PSC who denounced the case of the Sports Council.
But in the socialist leadership there is no unease, and even less because of what could happen in the metropolitan area. They see "illusion", as "it has been a while" that they have not seen and "a lot of mobilization" in their bases.
The threat is that drought is used as a throwing weapon. The fight will be close even after the elections, at the time of agreements to govern consistories and councils. The Socialists are open to "agree with the whole world in favor of stability", if possible, with progressive pacts, but "sometimes the progressive pacts are with Junts", they warn. In fact, in the PSC they value understanding with Junts better than with ERC, "perhaps because of party culture", but the moderate and focused seal of the leader, Salvador Illa, has a lot to do with it.
The PSC has also woven pacts with ERC that have worked, like the one in Figueres, but far from the metropolitan area.
