With the first face-to-face between the Catalan Socialist (PSC) candidate for the mayoralty of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, and the readers of ElNacional.cat, this newspaper kicks off the campaign for crucial elections in the Catalan capital. The elections on May 28th will define the future of Barcelona and will serve to reveal whether it really is true, as all the polls published to date say, that there is an enormous desire for change with respect to the council that has been in power for the last eight years. On Thursday, the discussion will be with the Together for Catalonia (Junts) candidate, former mayor Xavier Trias, who is running for a new mandate after his term at the helm of the city between 2011 and 2015. And on May 9th, this newspaper will put readers' questions to the candidate of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), the winner of the last municipal elections in Barcelona, Ernest Maragall.
It was our aim, and it will continue to be until the day before the electoral campaign officially starts, on Friday 12th May, for readers of ElNacional.cat to also put questions to the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau. Unless there is a change from her Barcelona en Comú (BComú) campaign team, this will not be possible, as all attempts made to change this situation have so far been unsuccessful. It's a shame, because the more confrontation of ideas there is, the healthier the state of a democratic society. But one of the things that one ends up learning over time is that just as the machinery of power devours projects, programmes and proposals, it also ends up, quite often, changing people. And the projects aimed at transparency, open doors and dialogue with citizens end up being closed-off compartments which, above all, are not at all permeable to criticism.
It was the intention of ElNacional.cat that the four candidates with real possibilities of occupying the mayoralty of Barcelona for the next four years submit themselves, live, to the scrutiny of our readers. We will be live streaming from the CaixaForum Macaya with three of them and we thank Collboni, Trias and Maragall and their respective campaign teams for accepting this format of pre-electoral debate in agendas that are, undoubtedly, already very crowded. In the coming days we will be explaining the complete coverage that the newspaper has prepared for these crucial elections, which in addition to being of enormous importance in each municipality, will offer a panoramic view of a country that faces serious political problems in addition to an issue as important as the need to respond to the drought that Catalonia is suffering, which threatens to destroy the important agricultural areas that are still yielding harvests.
It has always been said that there are no elections closer to the public than the municipal ones, because it is the local councils who offer the initial response to many of people's daily problems: from law and order, civic behaviour and mobility, through to education and job offers. It will also be important to know, in the case of Barcelona, what electoral proposals there are for recovering the momentum that the city used to have, and how its economic promotion and international projection are planned. The capital needs to sell itself abroad again in order to compete in the global world with other cities that move into higher gear when it comes to making tangible an ambitious and competitive offer.