After what Barcelona went through in 2019, when, thanks to a pact as inconceivable in advance as it was understandable with the results in hand, Ada Colau returned to the mayoralty of the Catalan capital again, preventing the most-voted candidate on election night, Ernest Maragall, from taking the reins of the city, with the argument that it was necessary to prevent the arrival of a pro-independence mayor at city hall, one might have thought that the issues of alliances would be much more transparent in this campaign. The pact between Colau's Barcelona en Comú (BComú), the Catalan Socialists (PSC) and the three councillors won by the Manuel Valls ticket was not natural and one aspect became very evident: the shame lasted just a few hours, the power for four years. As one expects when an agreement is born with such weakness, Barcelona city came out on the losing end and those who played a role in it have distanced themselves from it. Valls returned to Paris, fed up with Barcelona and its elites, whom he served and with whom he never got along, and Jaume Collboni ended up leaving the city government team a few months ago in order to project a profile of his own, with greater independence.
Jaume Collboni and Ernest Maragall have now participated in individual debates conducted by ElNacional.cat, and over the question of coalition or support deals that they might make after the elections, they have hidden their cards. The PSC candidate might come to an agreement, more or less, with Colau or Trias, and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) nominee with Colau, although he does not explicitly renounce Together for Catalonia (Junts) or the PSC. The mayor of Barcelona, therefore, enters into all the options of a future government of the city, except in the case that Trias wins the elections and achieves a political majority that prevents it. It remains to be seen if the campaign will help to resolve any of the mysteries, but with only a few hours until it opens, which will happen at 12 midnight as Thursday becomes Friday, the night of the traditional poster pasting sessions, it seems very unlikely that this will happen.
Thus, we won't be talking very much about pacts over the two long weeks until the May 28th vote - unless it is because different candidates want to throw speculative views at each other - since the only interested party in this is Xavier Trias, and his opponents, as you'd expect, will not play that game. We will also talk very little, or less than the subject deserves, about law and order, which has turned into a real fist fight in which some defend themselves by pointing out that the public's perception does not match the official crime statistics and that Barcelona is really not in such bad shape, while the opposition stresses that crime is rising and Barcelona is an unsafe city. There can hardly be a serious and orderly debate when the points of view are so far apart that the candidates seem to live in different cities.
Not to mention the issue of illegal squatting in homes, an undoubtedly slippery issue that is of concern to a part of Barcelona, as much as it makes the candidates uncomfortable, since any mis-step could be a boost for an opponent. Why, if in private they have radically different positions, do they not explain them in public? Over in a different corner, the Spanish and Catalan governments, have ended up stepping into the housing dabate, based on promises of public housing or a guarantee of 20% of a first-home mortgage for young buyers, as Pedro Sánchez has promised. The Pere Aragonès government then took another route, through the forced expropriation of empty houses in 14 Catalan municipalities where the homes are in the hands of large landlords - that is, under the new housing law agreed between the Spanish government, ERC and EH Bildu, those persons or legal entities who own five or more homes intended for rent.
Housing is a serious problem, but the best solution would be to take a serious approach to the construction of public housing stock within the reach of young people and families in need. Shortcuts are a temporary solution, a patch, not the final resolution of the problem. Will this be talked about or announced? There are just over two weeks to go and the polls say the vote is still very volatile and many are undecided. With the vote looking so tight, the campaign may indeed be important on this occasion in the definition of the city model that Barcelona people want.