Although there hasn't been much room for surprise for several months, the official announcement by Xavier Trias that he will attempt to win back the mayoralty of Barcelona in the municipal elections of May 28th seems to represent, at least, a change - we'll see how large - in the existing spaces of the different electoral options. There are polls that assert that the battle for Barcelona is no longer a three-way tussle - between ERC, Comuns and the PSC - to become a struggle between four contenders, with the Junts candidate entering directly into the leading group, emerging from the residual position of the party in the previous municipal elections, in 2019, when it was only able to obtain five councillors, a far cry from the ten of Ernest Maragall and Ada Colau, and also well short of the eight of Jaume Collboni. Trias's discourse will have two key lines: presenting himself as the guarantee that Colau will not continue at the head of the city council, since he does not plan to support her continuation in office under any circumstances; and a commitment to recovering the energy, dynamism and public-private understanding that he championed as the key axes of his mandate between 2011 and 2015.
But obviously, not everything is on the plus side for Trias. When he became mayor he had behind him a party that was united, Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (Catalan Democratic Convergence, CDC), part of a coalition that was discrepancy-proof and only obsessed with winning elections, Convergència i Unió, and his political party occupied the presidency of the Generalitat, which Artur Mas had achieved at the end of 2010, after two failed attempts in 2003 and 2006. Now, Together for Catalonia (Junts) does not offer him the basic cushion of votes necessary to be calm and everything will depend, to a large extent, on what he is able to gather around him. To put it simply, in 2011 the party acronym was a help to the candidate and, in 2022, in the city of Barcelona, the acronyms only add up, at best, to the five councillors of 2019. There will therefore be a lot that depends on the candidate Trias himself, if he wants to win back the electorate that has been lost, and undoubtedly this implies a very personalised campaign, not especially ideological, and including the recovery of a capital idea that Colau has left in pieces after two mandates and eight years at the head of city hall.
Be that as it may, the question in the air, whose resolution will be seen over the months ahead, is whether there really exists a Trias space, a playing field in which he can act as a magnet for a centrist, somewhat cosmopolitan vote and one that is really willing to take a strong stand. If he is able to seduce this zone of the electorate, proud to be broad and transversal, he will be in with a chance of final victory. If, on the contrary, there are those in his political space who hope that Trias will simply be electoral bait, but continue with the nonsense of the last few months, the ex-mayor's struggle will be totally fruitless. His first letter of introduction, stating that he is only running to be mayor and that if, in the end, he does not win, he will support ERC or the PSC if they come first, is a coherent statement of intent that brings the Socialists into the equation of a scenario of subsequent pacts and with the polls already open on the night of May 28th.
One of the tasks that Trias has pending and will have to tackle in the coming weeks is to try to distance both the PDeCAT and the former president of Futbol Club Barcelona, Sandro Rosell, from the Barcelona mayoral battle. It is possible for him to achieve both goals, but also for him to fail in both and if that happened, the result would not be the same. No matter that the PDeCAT and Rosell have few options to obtain representation; the key is their ability to steal a few tens of thousands of votes that could be decisive. The fact that Artur Mas, the main point of reference for public opinion in this political space, supports Trias, and that so does the incombustible enfant terrible of this sector, Santi Vila, are also cards in his favour. He has not yet seen Rosell, but the ex-FCB leader's circles feel it's likely that he will let step aside, since, in addition, his personal and political relationship with the former mayor is excellent.
Part of the electoral race will, therefore, take place on the edges of the political spaces, and will depend on the capacity for resistance that ERC and the PSC have to avoid voter leakage, because they are, a priori, the two most solid political organizations in the Catalan political scene, with very robust structures and disciplined pyramids that leave little room for unforeseen political situations. It can be now be said that the battle for Barcelona has truly begun, and if it was exciting in 2015 and 2019, this time the prospects seem almost momentous and definitive over the rescue of the city from the agonizing situation in which it finds itself.