Ada Colau is presented for the third time in the municipal elections of Barcelona and for the third time the voters who go to the polling stations will find his face on the Barcelona en Comú ballot. The first time, in 2015, the decision had a clear reason: so that no one was confused, given that the initials of the party were not known.
There was a precedent: the candidacy of Can to the Europeans, who wore the face of Pablo Iglesias. In 2019, Colau repeated, and this time she will, but she will not be the only one among the main candidates in Barcelona.
Those who put their faces on their ballot papers in these municipal elections are Colau and Xavier Trias. It’s not a metaphor, it’s literal. The mayor of Junts has opted for stamp his face and not the initials of her party on the ballot, the mayoress of Barcelona also stamped her photo again, as in the two previous elections.
It is a formula to squeeze the figure of the candidatewhich helps to stand out among the other options by incorporating an image and which seeks that the voter easily identify Who do you want to vote for? In addition, it is consistent with the Barcelona en Comú project, which is obviously based on the figure of Colau, to the point that it is difficult to imagine the party without the mayoress.
precedents
Since its irruption on the Barcelona political scene, the confluence of Barcelona in Comú chose to follow in the wake of Pablo Iglesias, an electoral strategy that contributed to popularize his image. So she was a brand new that needed to curdle in the electoral imagination. And she did. He then managed to wrest the mayoralty from Trias. Four years later, despite having propped up his popularitythe mayoress repeated the ballot again with her photo arguing that it was her revalidation, a kind of plebiscite to be able to continue.
It did not help him then to be the most voted – it was the Republican Ernest Maragall-, but he obtained enough support to move agilely and agree with the PSC to continue running the show in the city thanks to the approval of Manuel Valls, who gave him three decisive votes at the investiture. On this third occasion, for Colau it is a all or nothing and his bet has been not to touch any detail that could contribute to his victory. The counterpart of putting all the chips in the projection of the head of the list ends up being the dependence who then has the space of his victory and the difficulty of relay.
against fragmentation
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Aware of this and of the hard blow that losing Barcelona would mean, the Comuns have focused in the last year on consolidating themselves beyond the Catalan capital and sell as a milestone having achieved end fragmentation and the scattering of acronyms in these elections. This time, unlike four years ago, Catalunya en Comú and Podem have sealed an agreement not to compete in separate candidacies in any municipality.
It will not be the only Colau within the space of the Comuns that will put his face on the ballot. So will the mayors of Montcada i Reixac and Santa Perpètua de Mogoda, Laura Fields and isabella garcia (both from the extinct ICV); the mayor in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Lydia Munoz; that of Viladecavalls, carles rodriguez; and that of Altafulla, Montse Castellarnau.