Although the candidacy will not be official until September, former mayor of Barcelona Xavier Trias has taken the first step to opt for the candidacy of Junts per Catalunya in the next Barcelona municipal elections, to be held on the last Sunday of May next year. His words during the round of interviews he granted this Wednesday, after he was again the focus of the conspiracy concocted in 2015 by the Spanish patriotic police with newspaper El Mundo to remove him from mayoralty using fake news of an account in Switzerland, which would ultimately end up costing him the position after the dirty election campaign practised by Ada Colau, have opened the doors for the former mayor's return to the political front line. His statements focused on Junts' disorder rather than the step he is willing to take: "I am not running to lose; if I run, it means things have to go a certain way". A word to the wise is enough.
What does Trias want? An orderly party, an explicit request of the political organization of which he is a member, and carte blanche in all decisions in his condition of former mayor, his political trajectory and his knowledge of the city. The bar is high, certainly, but no one like him ensures an exit of the irrelevance his political formation is currently in, while the poles give him between four and five councillors out of the 41, in fourth position behind Esquerra Republicana, Barcelona en Comú and the PSC. In the elections that saw him removed from the mayor's office, he had 10 councillors and was just under 15,000 votes behind Colau, refusing to establish an alliance with other parties as he understood that the mayoralty corresponded to the winner of the elections, although it would have been a situation as anomalous as the distortion that being harmed by fake news, sufficiently elaborated to penalize him on election day, entailed.
Curiously, what crushed him in 2015 is what encumbrances him now that he tries to return. Without forgetting, of course, a much worse managed city than the one he left, in all aspects: from cleanliness to security, including relations with traders or the different agents of economic growth in the city. Internally, Junts' Barcelona federation sighs for the return of Xavier Trias, it would not pose the slightest problem when it comes to giving him carte blanche for the elaboration of the electoral list and would support, without hesitation, the Trias-Argimon ticket, and the incorporation in second place of the list of a woman who should surely should manage the economic area to try to return the city to the numbers it presented when he left it.
Catalan minister of Health, Josep Maria Argimon, a well valued politician in the polls, has the best valuation among the ministers of the Catalan government —ahead of minister of economy Jaume Giró, minister of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda Teresa Jordà and minister of the Interior Joan Ignasi Elena—, and is considered a permanent member in this list, since he has informed his trusted circles that his time as minister is coming to an end and that the municipal adventure does not displease him. Argimon has in his favour a successful management throughout the pandemic crisis and, above all, some very professional and common sense explanations when implementing difficult measures during these years, which has given him a patina of credibility.
Ten months before the municipal elections, the arrival of Trias may introduce a new card deal against the already designated candidates, Ada Colau and Ernest Maragall, the best placed in the municipal elections of 2019, and Jaume Collboni, the PSC candidate if the socialists do not choose to remove the board again and incorporate a person of greater weight who could only be Salvador Illa or, with some doubt whether he can improve the result, Miquel Iceta. The game gets, a priori, interesting.