why this 28M convinced the whole city

Albiol got, for the first time, conquer the wealthy neighborhoods, traditionally nationalistthus ending the hegemony of the pro-independence parties in strongholds such as the neighborhoods of center, casagemes either Dalt de la Vila.

In percentage, the PP of Albiol has passed from 14% of the votes in 2019 in Casagemes to 32%. In Coll i Pujol, from 18% to 39%. In Dalt de la Vila, from 17% to 33%. And in the Center neighborhood, from 13% to 33%. In all these neighborhoods, the victory in 2019 went to the coalition ‘The Brave Badalona’, formed by ERC and Guanyem. In the elections last Sunday, the candidacies (this time they were presented separately) of CKD and Guanyemled by Àlex Montornès and Dolors Sabater respectively, almost 35% of the votes were left on average in those three neighborhoods, while Albiol increased 18% in votes in the same area.

The conquest of the center cannot be understood without taking into account the political disenchantment of the most independent sectors (It is in these neighborhoods where participation has dropped the most compared to 2019). In addition, even having lowered the tone in the campaign on issues related to insecurity, Albiol has touched a mobilizing key in the heart of the city, insisting that “there is no longer any neighborhood in Badalona safe from illegal occupation.”

Albiol was counting on the fact that if he broke the Catalanist hegemony in the neighborhoods in the center of the city, he would achieve an absolute majority. However, his victory was so overwhelming in the peripheral, popular and densely populated neighborhoods (70.13% in Pomar and 67% in Sant Joan de Llefiàfor example), which actually He did not need to grow a single vote in the center to reach an absolute majority. If Albiol had repeated the 2019 results in the eight electoral demarcations where he did not win at the elections this Sunday (counting, yes, the increase in votes harvested last Sunday in the rest of the city), he would have achieved a 53.42% of the votes throughout the city and 16 councilorsthus maintaining the absolute majority.

In the most humble neighborhoods, with the lowest incomes in the city (Sant Roc, La Pau, Artigues either the health), Albiol has never stopped campaigning. It is here where the 32 years that he has been kicking around the city is most noticeable, always focusing on complex social problems -such as occupations- and establishing himself as a simple solution to them.

The expert in political communication Miquel Urmeneta he describes it as “presidentialist” behavior. “I have the impression that Albiol has been communicating as if he were the mayor, when it wasn’t. Other candidates would never make videos like the ones he has made, facing squatters,” says Urmeneta.

Given the lack of nationalist connection with the downtown neighborhoods, the political artifact of motto ‘Badalonisme’ has served as a local claim (a kind of gentle, low-intensity nationalism). Furthermore, the design of the election poster (including the colors of all political formations of the Badalonian consistory except Guanyem), has facilitated the clear transmission of the message, much repeated during the campaign, of wanting to “erase the ideological borders”. “Neither left nor right”he brandished appealing to Albiol’s transversality in the presentation of his electoral slogan, which has insisted a lot on “not wanting to change anyone’s ideology.”

In the opinion of Miquel Urmeneta“the image and the leadership of the Albiol brand is indisputable. The candidate’s personalism has had a lot of weight in a very coherent campaign“. None of the political rivals of the next mayor enjoys a charisma even similar to that of Xavier García Albiol. The popular has managed to install the idea that he represents Badalona, ​​similarly to how he did Jordi Pujol in his day with Catalonia and his own figure.

With Albiol, the middle term is difficult: it generates admiration and hate in equal parts. That lack of gray has been able to use it skilfully, installing the message that the quadripartite government was a government “against Albiol, and not a government for Badalona”.

All this has successfully permeated an electorate that no longer takes into account the motto with which it was presented to the municipal elections of 2011, that “Cleaning Badalona“. Asked recently on the city’s public television about that campaign, Albiol offered an important clue as an answer: “If I spoke now the same as I spoke ten years ago, that would mean that I don’t know how things are going“.

Albiol has managed to establish himself as the only politician in the city who can solve the lack of stability of the consistory, which has known four mayors since 2015, something that has caused many city ​​themes have been pulled forward. It has been skilful accusing the quadripartite government that emerged in 2021 of the motion of no confidence, the “losers pact“, as the first cause of instability.

In addition, the situation of the city’s services is, in many cases, clearly improvable. The outgoing coalition government has not managed to solve the local problems that outrage the people of Badalona (precarious maintenance of public facilities, inoperative municipal services or a library closed more than 1,000 days, for example). However, Albiol has been criticizing this situation for 18 months and successfully postulating himself as the only solution to the problem.

During the campaign, the PP candidate has served as “pre-mayor”, a nickname that many residents gave him. For their part, the parties in the municipal government have seemed a kind of premature opposition. The ‘everyone against Albiol’ has blurred the political alternatives in contention.

The political scientist Ricard Vilaregutwho was part of the government team of Dolors Sabater in 2015, maintains that the parties in the outgoing municipal government “have done fatal“. “They wanted to keep their piece of cake, handing out councillors, with small party logicalmost always Complexed before the figure of Albiol”, assumes Vilaregut.

Once again, Albiol has also dominated the field of social networks, which he controls perfectly, not only during the campaign but for months. He has known how to adapt to the formats of each of them and, far from using them only for purely political issues, he has known how to generate appropriate content for each platform, which has positioned his publications very well practically as ‘pop icon’ among a large part of the electorate.

“He has managed to correctly stage his presence in TikTok, which has allowed it to sneak into an always difficult segment of the population, the youngestaway from the traditional media”, explains Michael Urmeneta, which during this electoral campaign has analyzed the use of social networks by various candidates in the Barcelona area. “At the same time, it has successfully conveyed the message of always being at the foot of the canyon, with the impetus to solve the city’s problems,” concludes Urmeneta.

Not in vain, during the campaign some of the videos that Albiol has published went viral. On the one hand, those in which young people from Badalona explained that 28M would be the first time they could vote, and that they would do so precisely for him. Another series of videos that had an impact has been that of citizens who declared themselves independent, but who assured that they would vote for Albiol (with special mention to the video of the lady with the star on the balcony, who loudly announced his vote for the popular candidate). Finally, the video in which the widow and the daughter of the former socialist mayor Joan Blanch (who got, by the way, the to date first absolute majority in democratic history of the city in 1991) showed their electoral support for Albiol. Young people, ‘indepes’ and socialists, all with Albiol.