It is quite embarrassing to watch the public bidding process that is taking place for the Barcelona mayoralty, in which principles and public commitments made before the elections of May 28th mean very little, and it seems that any agreement at all will do to snatch away the mayoral staff from the winner of the elections, Xavier Trias. At the moment, there are many unknowns, starting with when the Catalan capital's council will be formally constituted, since it is possible that the planned date of this Saturday, as scheduled for all other municipalities, may not apply to Barcelona as a result of the appeal made by Vox in its quest to get a third councillor, which could end up in an administrative disputes court and with the council meeting postponed until the start of July. This doubt will be cleared up in the next few hours, but it already affects the manoeuvres of the parties, who don't know whether to go into overdrive with their strategies or take it easy.
The latest occurrence has been led by Ada Colau, with the proposal to divide up the four years of the mayoral mandate into one year for Ernest Maragall of the Republican Left (ERC), one and a half years for the BComú team she herself leads and the last year and a half for the Socialist (PSC) candidate Jaume Collboni. It must take a great desire to retain power one way or another to propose one last pirouette under a mechanism which would make it very difficult to know who the mayor was at any given moment and would convey a sense of chaos, interminability and mismanagement that would be hard to beat. Although Colau already showed in 2019 that she was ready to reach the mayor's office through an agreement with Manuel Valls to wrest it from Ernest Maragall, this time she is juggling with multiple balls: it is useful for her to bring ERC into the mix of what she calls a left-wing government, but the votes of the People's Party (PP) are also fair game, in this case, to prevent a government between Xavier Trias and Ernest Maragall.
Colau has still not made the final gesture in which, for example, she might step away from power and leave all her councillors behind. This proposal will arrive, or it won't, we'll see. The party that has clarified its position is Vox, with its two councillors announcing that they will vote for themselves, thus distancing themselves from any attempt from the Socialists or Comuns to rope them into an anti-independence majority. But there's movement in the opposite direction by the four councillors of the Catalan PP, with Daniel Sirera at the head, who could also provide an absolute majority if added to the 19 of Collboni and Colau. If during the recent Cercle d'Economia business conference in Barcelona, immediately after the May 28th municipal elections, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo seemed to rule out any operation with the Socialists and Comuns to unseat Xavier Trias, in the last few hours his position has become less forceful as a result of pressures he says he is receiving.
If Feijóo facilitates his votes to Collboni, it will be very difficult for him to explain this to his more anti-Socialist electorate, apart from the fact that he will also have gifted to Pedro Sánchez perhaps the most important centre of Socialist power he will have after the Spanish elections of July 23rd. Feijóo will be able to explain it at gatherings in Madrid, but not among the Catalan business community, who want the Colau army to leave city hall at all costs. You only need to see how the Barcelona districts most favourable to the Spanish conservatives voted in the municipal elections and how they promoted Xavier Trias to unseat the current mayor.
The most worrying thing about this debate over the mayoralty of Barcelona is that it has ended up being another element in the duel between the interests of Pedro Sánchez and Feijóo. And that what matters least is what Barcelona needs to get out of the paralysis and lack of self-esteem in which it finds itself immersed, without any prospects, if it continues like this, of once again being the city it was.