It is very possible that only someone like Xavier Trias would have gone to lunch with the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, to agree on a constructive approach to the upcoming municipal election campaign, with the city and its future as protagonists of the public debate. Anyone else, after the crude use made by Colau herself of the media campaign centred on a fake Swiss bank account, at the local elections of 2015, which ultimately cost the incumbent Trias his position as mayor, would not have met with her and, much less, would not have advertised it and invited her by publicizing the lunch at a well-known restaurant in the Eixample. The Trias style includes these aspects, with which many of his own people do not agree at times, but the ex-mayor, who has his own approach, is free to do what he wants, and those who know him know that he won't give it up.
Trias is not only unworried about a polarization between himself and Colau but will try to look for it. Colau is even less worried, as she knows her options will fall as the elections approach and, above all, if the PSC, the favourites for the moment, play their cards right. The politician who has it hardest now that Trias has entered the race is ERC's Ernest Maragall who, despite winning the 2019 municipal elections, runs the risk of having less chance than in the elections of four years ago. No matter how you look at it, Trias is not Quim Forn - who, moreover, was in Lledoners prison - nor Elsa Artadi, the former Catalan minister of the Presidency and the leader of the Junts municipal group during this second term of Colau. Trias has stripes won in a thousand battles, he knows the city like the back of his hand, he has four successful years behind him (2011-2015) as mayor and, beyond a polite luncheon, he is the only candidate clearly anti-Colau.
Neither PSC candidate Collboni nor Maragall can wave that flag. The former, because out of Colau's eight years as mayor, he has spent practically all of them as her deputy mayor and, the latter, because in this legislature he has voted in favour of all the municipal budgets that, after all, end up reflecting a city project. In Maragall's defence, it must be said that this support came after the Commons helped president Aragonès in the Catalan government and that he ended up having to act as a counterweight in a situation that he had no choice but to accept due to the demands of his party. In any case, it will not be an easy election for Maragall and this is already being seen somewhat in a certain loss of media prominence since Trias made public his desire to return to politics and contest the mayoralty against Colau. The polls that have been published up till now, and that have the importance that everyone wants to attribute to them, already show a four-way tie, something that seemed impossible until Xavier Trias entered the scene.
We are, therefore, facing municipal elections in the city of Barcelona with a great uncertainty, since never before have four candidates all had the opportunity to get their hands on the mayoral staff and take command of the city. A tie which is uneven but is unlikely to tilt far enough to throw any of the four mayoral aspirants definitively and irreversibly off the trail. Everyone has their options depending on the municipal narrative that ends up being imposed, in a campaign that, beyond fair play, will be fierce. It will, without a doubt, be the most intense and exciting electoral battle in recent years, as the winner will significantly shape the Barcelona of the coming years and the city model that the people of Barcelona opt for. A city model that must not carry on expelling its citizens, but which must also offer economic growth, a revenue system, administrative bureaucracy, housing policy, environmentalism and many other things. The game has begun.