No one would have said, when the election results for the city of Barcelona were announced, on the night of May 28th, that the Socialist (PSC) candidate Jaume Collboni would maintain his candidacy for the mayoralty of the Catalan capital, after his third electoral defeat, and that he would now be desperately begging for the votes of the People's Party (PP) councillors to add them to the nine of Ada Colau's Comuns (BComú). But here we are: once again, with a curious and surprising tripartite promoted by Collboni as he strives to move forward on the circus high-wire on which he has placed himself. It's hard to imagine that the Socialist's insistence will come to fruition, but, in politics, stranger things have happened. Although such an amalgam of acronyms to prevent Xavier Trias from becoming mayor of the Catalan capital would certainly be scandalous.
Collboni's balloon has been punctured in the first instance by both the Comuns and the PP. The former, assuring that they won't take part in anything with the participation or agreement of the Partido Popular and inviting the Catalan Socialists to keep on until the last minute the attempts to negotiate a left-wing government of which the Republican Left (ERC) would also be a component. The latter, demanding that, in order to vote for Collboni, in the first place, it would have to be ruled out that the new city government team led by the Socialists would include BComú. Will Ada Colau's group swallow the PP's demand? Will they do a Valls, part two? And, if we turn to the ranks of the PP: will the Spanish rightists maintain the whole line-up of the Comuns who hold positions of responsibility in the city council? Could the PP really go into the Spanish general election after having voted for what they contemptuously call a socialcomunista government or are they confident that voters forget everything? What will it cost the people of Barcelona for Colau's policies to be maintained when their voters have expressed themselves radically against them?
We're going to see the juggling tricks that different groups are capable of in the next few hours, which will be crucial. In the case of Xavier Trias, his story since 2015, when he lost the mayoralty due to murky manoeuvres, has some substance to it. Or was it not foul play that fake bank accounts of his were invented in Switzerland to derail his candidacy? Was it ethical for Colau, more than any other candidate, to jump on that horse of infamy and ride it, even though Trias himself had denied it from the beginning and showed it with documentation? We are now in the second season of an infrequent political manoeuvre involving the Socialists, Comuns and the PP. All you have to do is read, listen or watch any newspaper, radio or television channel to see what they say to each other, and you only need to look at the Valencian Country, where PP and Vox have shaken hands on a government agreement against the Catalan language and with a bullfighter from the far-right as vice-president and minister of culture. And that's it: those same people who have removed the Socialist Ximo Puig from the government in Valencia are being implored by Collboni to vote for him as mayor of Barcelona.
The last-minute moves of Collboni, who has already announced that he will continue until the deadline, have coincided with the agreement between Xavier Trias and Ernest Maragall to govern the city council of Barcelona. This is an important accord for the distribution of municipal power in which the Republican leader will be, if Trias ends up as mayor, the first deputy mayor of the city council. It is an agreement that essentially responds to what is expected in the relaunch of a city that needs to move at another velocity if it is going to make up for lost time. It is also a purely local policy and management document without any consideration of more conflicting issues that are contentious in other administrations and spaces, such as the Parliament of Catalonia and the Congress of Deputies. In this aspect, just as if this pact had been made by other political parties, nothing should change.