The two weeks of an election campaign here have three phases. First, starting from the launch on a Thursday night, with the traditional pasting up of posters and which usually lasts around a week. The second section is the one that usually goes from about day seven to day eleven or twelve, important days when the results are seen of the last polls able to be published, there is the final candidate debate on TV3 and there is a clear impression given of a winner or winners, and of the losers. And, finally, the third block, about 72 hours long, in which those who are in the lead dedicate themselves to asking for the useful vote and those who are at the tail end make all kinds of efforts to avoid being swept away and to simply survive in conditions that are not easy. We have thus entered the final stretch of a particularly interesting campaign in which in many cities, starting with Barcelona, more than one candidate has options for victory on Sunday, something that was unthinkable years ago, but with the current Catalan political map, much more fragmented, it is a fact.
In many moments of the TV3 debate - which had a 12% audience share and 210,000 viewers, one percentage point less than the Valladolid-Barça match - the useful vote card was played by all three of the main contenders, Xavier Trias, Jaume Collboni and Ada Colau. Trias and Colau did it more successfully and more easily, since the first is the embodiment of real change in the city and the second the continuity of the project of these last eight years. Collboni, on the other hand, was both in the government team and also not there, depending on the issues, and this situation, which both of the others pointed out, blurred his prominence. ElNacional.cat's readers were emphatically of the view that Trias was the winner of the debate, an opinion I share, since his discourse was the most transversal and least ideological when it came to capturing the discontent which the polls say exists among the people of Barcelona. It was paradoxical, for example, that in the two subjects of most concern to Barcelona residents - law and order, and the cleanliness of the city - neither Colau nor Collboni refuted the general sentiment. Trias thus had free rein to make criticisms, something he took advantage of, while the mayor resorted to giving deadly bear-hugs to her municipal partner, who in turn tried to get out of her clutches.
From this point on we will see how the useful vote functions. The only indicator we have is that published in one of those surveys that appear in foreign media, this time coming from Australia, to avoid the stupidity of the Spanish electoral law that prohibits the publication of polls five days before elections. Well, this tracking poll seems to be a carbon copy of what ElNacional.cat published on Sunday, giving a slight advantage to Trias over Collboni and Colau in what is, in practice, a triple tie. The number of undecideds is still very high, indicating that there are still many votes to be decided and that these last 48 hours will not be a waste of time by any means.
The hand-to-hand fighting for the useful vote will be more contested than ever in Barcelona, where three candidates have never before contested victory. The key is in the frontier spaces, location of those voters who, without being yours, can lend you a vote on this occasion because you are the candidate they want to rise to victory. Whoever best appeals to this broad segment and generates more trust - here leadership is indeed important and that is why Trias took the opportunity to call Collboni a schoolboy, just as the Socialist aimed to portray him as dependent on Puigdemont - will end up winning. Collboni plays this last hand from another point of view, with the usual disembarkation of PSOE leaders in the final stretch. On this occasion, he will have, in addition to Pedro Sánchez, the preceding Socialist to occupy the Moncloa, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The PSOE is working hard to take away one victory from the three targets it aspires to win on May 28th: Barcelona, Sevilla and the Valencian Country. Thus, what is in play is the party's counterpoint to the predicted defeat in Madrid, with the results in Aragón and Castilla-La Mancha still in the air.