A last minute surprise. The People's Party (PP) under Xavier García Albiol has regained the mayoralty of Badalona - the only major Catalan city where the right wing Spanish party has been successful - five years after losing it. Although an attempt had been made to form a pact between leftist and progressive groups, based on the sharing of the mayoralty between former left-wing mayor Dolors Sabater and the socialist Rubén Guijarro, negotiations failed in the end and the divided electorial arithmetic of Catalonia's fourth largest city allowed the controversial Albiol to be elected mayor because his party was the most voted at the last election.
In the end, Albiol obtained 11 votes, while Dolors Sabater's bloc obtained 10, and the Catalan Socialists (PSC) were left with 6. Smaller parties on the Badalona council, ERC (3), the Commons (2) and JxCat (1), all supported Sabater's Guanyem group (4) in the vote, but were highly critical as by this time the writing was already on the wall: Sabater had failed to come to an agreement with the Socialists for the shared mayoralty, even though the other parties had signed the accord.
The Commons even called for the resignation of Sabater, accusing her of "betraying" voters and making a "historic mistake" and "political suicide", the PSC used similar expressions, saying the Guanyem leader was "to blame" for the outcome and asked her to "accept responsibilities". ERC also spoke of its "disappointment" and said that from today "Dolors Sabater no longer has the confidence" of the pro-independence party, even though they ran together in the last elections before splitting into two municipal groups.
Albiol, visibly emotional
The new PP mayor took hold of the mayoral staff with tears in his eyes. Until the final votes were cast, Albiol had seen the pact between the progressive and left-wing parties as likely to deny him a possible return to the post. But the surprise was consummated, and in his first speech as mayor, Albiol asserted that he is "more militant for Badalona" than for his party and assured that he will not use the city council in a "partisan" way and for an "ideology". In addition, he promised that he would end what he has called the city's "greyest period".
In the midst of the coronavirus crisis and its effects, the PP leader, notorious in the past for his anti-immigrant campaigning, affirmed he "assumes the greatest possible responsibility" and pledged to "give his all" for the city. For this reason, he asked the other groups to leave behind "the period of confrontation of 'all against one'" and to work together for the "neighbourhoods and residents" of Badalona. "If someone wants to continue like that, they won't find us there," said Albiol, who also made it clear that he is not asking for a "blank cheque", but for "collaboration" and "consensus to take on the great challenges of the city ".
The left, tearing its hair out
After a race to negotiate a deal within the time limit of today's vote and then the realization that it had failed, the various left-wing parties publicly displayed their discrepancies. One of the harshest critics was Aïda Llauradó, of the Commons, who said that it was "shameful not to have reached an agreement when the sticking point was six months of the mayoralty" - in reference to the inability of the PSC and Sabater to agree on the respective time periods that each would serve as mayor. Calling for Sabater's resignation, she said that "those who claimed they were part of the new politics have today delivered the government of Badalona on a tray to the PP".
Similarly, Àlex Montornès of ERC expressed his "disappointment" and said that "no one has the right to block a negotiation because of a comma, a sentence or [in this case] a period of six months". The PSC, for its part, took heart that it had managed to sign an agreement with 12 progressive councilors, but also pointed at Sabater as the "culprit" responsible for Albiol's victory in the vote.
Finally, councilor Carme Martínez of Sabater's Guanyem Badalona team defended the group, accusing the other left and progressive parties of fighting the "battle for the narrative" and leaving Sabater as the one who was "guilty" for the disagreement. "We are all to blame," said Martínez in a very strongly worded speech which took aim at all the left-wing parties. "We don't win elections by going against each other. We have a lot of work to do," the councillor asserted.
PSC-Sabater: what went wrong?
Three weeks after the resignation of the former Socialist mayor of Badalona, Àlex Pastor, after being arrested for breaching lockdown, driving drunk and assaulting a police officer, the fraught attempts to negotiate a deal between the PSC and Guanyem Badalona finally failed.
The main obstacle was the division of the mandate and the refusal of Guanyem to sign a firm agreement, without being able to submit the deal to its party assembly. The Socialists proposed 18 months in office for Dolors Sabater and 18 for the Socialist Rubén Guijarro, while Guanyem had argued for two years for Sabater and one for the Socialists, since they considered that the PSC had already governed for a year in this mandate.
What is, however, clear is that beyond these discrepancies, which at first glance might seem petty, was a whole sea of disagreements, suspicions and long-broken confidences that finally ended up making the agreement impossible. The Socialists expelled Sabater from the municipal government two years ago through a motion of no-confidence with the PP and last year forced the investiture of Alex Pastor as mayor with a blank check - a mistake that Sabater was not willing to repeat. The disagreements, finally, were insurmountable.
The partially-signed document
The PSC had sent the proposed accord to the different political groups in the city who were involved in the deal. ERC, Commons and JxCat signed, but the four Guanyem councillors did not. The Socialists thus considered that no pact was possible and decided to present their own candidacy, leading to the division of the votes of the left and the victory of Albiol - with only 11 out of 27 seats.