The former mayor will participate in a dinner of the Catalan capital’s federation of Junts per Catalunya
It has taken his time to confirm it, but finally Xavier Trias will announce this Monday night that he is running for the municipal elections on May 28 with the intention of recovering the mayoralty of Barcelona. He is expected to verbalize his plans, which everyone has taken for granted for weeks, if not months, at a dinner of the Barcelona federation of Junts per Catalunya to be held at the Cotxeres de Sants.
According to party sources, Trias will take the floor to greet the militancy and he will take advantage of the intervention to announce that he intends to run for municipal elections. A decision that will be made official on Tuesday. From here, Junts must organize some primary elections to designate the mayor, and no one doubts that Trias will win them, if he ever has a rival.
The former mayor has made it clear in Catalonia Radio that he will pronounce definitively at dinner this Monday and has assured that he is “closer to yes than no”. As planned, the municipal group in Barcelona you will not receive official confirmation of the candidacy before dinner. Several of its members are called to appear on the Trias list by 2023.
The spokesperson for Junts per Catalunya, Joseph Riusexplained that Trias’s announcement “has not been commented on in the executive committee,” which met this morning. , he added. Rius did not want to enter into the possibility of Junts presenting itself to the municipal elections in coalition with the PDECAt, as Trias has suggested in Catalunya Ràdio.
The conditions
After the cessation of Elsa Artadi As leader of Junts and mayor for the party for 2023, the former mayor stated that he had no intention of running again. Over the months he reconsidered and did not rule out the possibility, although he imposed some conditions on his own. One was stability in the party and in the Government, that is, that there was no break with ERC. The outcome was the opposite of what he wanted, and in fact he went so far as to affirm that he was freezing his candidacy for this reason, but in the end it has not prevented him from running for mayor again.
Mayor of the Catalan capital from 2011 to 2015, he is the only one who achieved the position representing Convergència i Unió after three decades of failed attempts. With that brand he won the elections 12 years ago and with it he governed the city for a single term. In 2015, he was defeated by 17,000 votes and one councilor, 11-10, by the candidacy led by Ada Colau, who then became the city’s first female mayor.
Convergència i Unió gave way to PDECat -Trias continued with those acronyms in his last term in opposition, until 2019- and then to Junts, the brand with which he will now present himself to the electoral battle.
Collboni, from rival to proto-partner
Colau’s victory in 2015 surprised his own party, newly born at the time, Barcelona in Comúand also to Trias and his team, convinced that the main rival was the mayor of the PSC, Jaume Collboni. Curiously, the former mayor is now presenting himself to the 2023 municipal elections without hiding that among his potential plans, depending on the result of the polls, he highlights the option of agreeing with Collboni to agree on a government that leaves Colau without the municipal command rod.
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A hypothetical alliance between Trias and Collboni It is seen today as the main bet of the people of Barcelona who want Colau not to repeat. However, it has also been argued that Trias could cut votes for the socialist, as well as the mayor of ERC, Ernest Maragall, and thus favor the candidate of Barcelona in Comú.
The municipal ones of 2023, already very close in 2015 and in 2019, when Colau lost by 5,000 votes to Maragall and could only reissue the municipal command rod with the three votes offered by the candidacy of Manuel Valls, Barcelona pel Canvi, to prevent Maragall from ruling the city.