The visit of Pedro Sánchez to Barcelona this Sunday to attend an event organized by the Catalan Socialists (PSC) and in particular in support of Jaume Collboni, the PSC mayoral candidate for Barcelona, shows the enormous importance that the conquest of the Catalan capital has for the Spanish Socialist party, the PSOE. The low expectations that Sánchez has in both Madrid and Andalusia force him to try and conquer a city he lost in 2011 and where he has had no option in the last 12 years, despite the fact that when Jordi Hereu was kicked out of Plaça Sant Jaume, the Socialists had been in charge of the council for 32 years and had governed the city successively through Narcís Serra, Pasqual Maragall, Joan Clos and Hereu himself.
It is not an easy election for Collboni, as he can neither capitalize on the performance of the municipal government for which Ada Colau of Barcelona en Comú (Commons) collects all the accodades that are going, nor can he really take a very great part in the criticism of the mayor, because he himself has been part of her council team during the last two legislatures and only abandoned it at the very end, on January 23rd this year, already close to this electoral campaign. In addition, the emergence in the pre-campaign of former mayor Xavier Trias as Together for Catalonia (Junts) candidate, and his strong personality as a moderate candidate compared to the more radical positions of many in his party, negatively affects Collboni.
The fact is that Trias and Collboni are competing for part of the same electorate, something that would obviously not happen in any other type of vote here - such as the Spanish general election or the elections to the Catalan parliament - given the current discourse of many Junts leaders. In this dispute that they maintain for this broad and significant segment of the electorate, the Socialist candidate has in his favour the powerful electoral machinery of the PSC, expanded, on this occasion, by the fact that at Spanish level the Socialists are in government, and that is always a plus for PSC candidacies in the municipalities of metropolitian Barcelona.
But if we pay attention to the surveys, what the PSC has to work on much more than up till now is the space to its left and especially the border with the Commons. In the 2021 Catalan elections, the PSC obtained good results with Salvador Illa in those neighbourhoods of Barcelona that are more left-leaning, but on the other hand, today those areas are more identified with Colau than with Collboni. And this is where Sánchez and television stations such as Antena 3 or Telecinco can come in, with a strong Spanish-speaking emphasis, when, with such difficult municipal elections looming, winning the prize of Barcelona would compensate for the predictable PSOE defeat in other important battlegrounds.