Barcelona looks to the left. It is enough to review the list of mayors since the first democratic elections to verify it. Only trias, a CiU centrist, he was alien to the left. And, Trias aside, just colau It’s not from the PSC.
What is new and strange is that now, when Colau collects detractors, there are no center-right candidates with a hook. Elsa Artadi, de Junts, has just thrown in the towel by surprise and the PP is still ‘he doesn’t know, he doesn’t answer’. years ago, Josep Maria Cullell Y Arthur Mas, by CiU, or Enrique Lacalle Y Alberto Fernandez-Diaz, by the PP, stood up to the socialist mayors. Curious, against the mayor of Podemos, the center-right has been eclipsed.
If everything goes on like this only the three candidates with the most votes in 2019, Ernest Maragall, Ada Colau and Jaume Collboni, They will have options in the municipal ones within a year. None of them will have an absolute majority and the mayor can be the one who later achieves the most allies. In 2019 it was Ada Colau with 10 councilors (the same as Ernest Maragall but with fewer votes), because she achieved the support of the PSC and of Manuel Valles.
The battle between these three it will be hard Maragall has already accused Colau and Collboni of having benefited from espionage by the CNI, as if the wiretaps also had the power to twist wills.
Ada Colau is not at her best. She is still the mayor of the protest, elected in 2015 after the angry reaction against the long crisis of 2008-2014. It has unconditional supporters of those who sympathize with degrowth (not the airport, not the Olympics…), but the city wants to recover joy. My impression is that it will not have a bad result, but it will drop from the 10 seats and it will be difficult for him to repeat his mandate.
The other two -Maragall and Collboni- come from the PSC, but today they are water and oil. Maragall is recognized as having a good knowledge of the city, the economic world prefers Colau, he is the brother of the Olympic mayor and ERC is a brand with drive. He has age against him (79 years old), but Trump and Biden won despite it. And there is talk of the competent Ester Capella, former Minister of Justice and current delegate of the Generalitat in Madrid as her Kamela Harris. Maragall is determined, he can repeat results and even raise something.
The other candidate is Jaume Collboni, who came third, with eight councilors, in 2019. Collboni has made an effort and consolidated as the man of dialogue with civil society in the Colau town hall. And it can join the socialist votes (a recent survey says that the PSC is on the rise in Catalonia) the moderate or centrist votes that do not find a candidate like Trias or even Lacalle. There was already a lot of center-right who voted for Pasqual Maragall, oa Joan Clos when it was first introduced.
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But It is not easy to embody the alternative to Colau after having shared a mandate. Collboni knows it, marks distances and is sheathing himself in the flag of the ‘Barcelona of Yes’ (to the airport, to the Olympic Games, to technological investment) in front of the one of suspicion and the one not wielded by many supporters of Colau.
It is not easy for Collboni to beat Maragall and it is even more difficult for the two to understand each other. Everything can depend then, as in 2019, on the alliances that are later articulated. And that is difficult to predict. So some naive (with money) believed that Manuel Valls would win Few saw -except Iceta- that it would be key for Colau to be mayor and thus prevent the independence movement from ruling on both sides of Plaça de Sant Jaume.