A year of electoral results
Today marks one year since municipal elections across the country. Despite the importance of the results in all the municipalities, the parties’ eyes were mainly focused on Barcelona, where the polls placed a tie between Junts, the PSC and the Commons. Although the election night started quite well for the Socialists, in the end, the candidacy of the former mayor of Barcelona Xavier Trias would end up winning the elections with 11 councilors and 149,235 votes, against the 10 of the PSC and the 131,735 votes of Jaume Collboni.
An unexpected support
Results in hand, no one would end up imagining what would happen three weeks later in the investiture plenary, in which, at the last minute, it was announced that the Commons of Ada Colau and the Popular Party would support the investiture of socialist Jaume Collboni to avoid an independence mayor. Faced with this unnatural support and without an agreed program between the three formations that invested Jaume Collboni as mayor of the capital of Catalonia, Xavier Trias assures that the batlle “chose the position instead of the project”.
The change that wasn’t
Trias assures that one year ago today the city of Barcelona “chose change”. “Our candidacy clearly won the elections. Again, thank you very much for that support,” the head of the opposition thanked the Barcelona council. Nevertheless, Trias assures that, a year later, Barcelona has a “weak” city government. “Aimless and he doesn’t know where he’s going, and Barcelona is paying dearly for this blockade,” claimed Trias, who is still the leader of Junts in Barcelona, despite announcing that he would step down after the elections.
A lost year
In fact, Trias has offered during the last months to form a government together with the PSC in Barcelona. Although Collboni has rejected it, Trias is waiting for what moves Collboni makes to expand his government, which is also linked to the investiture negotiations of the president of the Generalitat and alliances in Madrid. Faced with this scenario, Trias insists that “we lost a year”. “Surely, Barcelona will end up losing the 4-year mandate. Everything is propaganda, advertisements and photographs. Collboni follows the inertia of Colau’s 8 years, of which 6 he was deputy mayor. And this is the worst of the options “, he insisted.