No one single person is responsible for the insanity that took place this Tuesday in Badalona among the parties of the left, which, despite having a majority on the city council, have left the management of the city for the next three years in the hands of Xavier Garcia Albiol. The People's Party (PP) returns to the mayoralty of the fourth largest city of Catalonia and thus now rules over two municipalities in Catalonia, in a map clearly dominated by pro-independence mayors. To put it more precisely: until now 453 Catalans, residents of Pontons, a municipality in Alt Penedès county, had a mayor from the PP, but now 220,440 more people have joined this category. The jump is more than remarkable.
Albiol has returned to the mayoralty which he had thought was lost just minutes earlier and which, after the agreement in June 2019 to hand it to a member of the Catalan Socialists (PSC), he never dreamed of recovering until, who knows, the next election. That Socialist mayor had to fall spectacularly before he would have options again, and that is exactly what ended up happening on April 22nd to the incumbent Àlex Pastor after a few drinks too many and a physical assault on a policeman. The truth is that you have to be from Badalona to really understand the flavour of what went on and the sad spectacle of all of those leaders mutually disqualifying one another.
From the end result, it is easy to pick out that among the winners, in addition to Albiol, is Catalan Socialist chief Miquel Iceta. The PSC had two objectives: first, to retain the mayoralty, and second, for former mayor Dolors Sabater, from Guanyem Badalona, to not win it. The first they were only going to achieve through a fluke which did not happen. The second was easier and all that had to be done was spin an entangling web of lines which gave the impression that the party supported the former mayor even though the opposite was the case. We had already seen it in Barcelona, where the pact between PSC and the Commons - with the invaluable support of Manuel Valls - displaced the election-night winner Ernest Maragall, of ERC. The important thing was that the pro-independence parties did not run the mayoralty of the Catalan capital and one did not have to pay much attention to minor issues such as the votes that made it possible. Something similar has now happened in Badalona: in the end, Iceta went to demonstrations with Albiol and not with Dolors Sabater. And that counts.
Among the losers, the left, the independence movement and Sabater. Thus ends the penultimate chapter of this series of quarrels and battles, because surely in Badalona the last episode is still to be written.