Barcelona will know the name of its new mayor this Saturday. In the end, the inaugural meeting of the new city council elected on May 28th, at which the mayor will be chosen, is to go ahead as originally scheduled this Saturday, June 17th, now that the far-right Vox party has decided against continuing its legal action over the vote count, which would have automatically postponed the critical council meeting until July 7th. As reported by El Periódico and confirmed by ElNacional.cat, the Central Electoral Commission has this Wednesday rejected the second appeal over the Barcelona election presented by Vox, which requested the recounting of more than 6,000 invalid votes with the intention of validating enough votes for get a third councillor to the detriment of the Socialists (PSC). The electoral body's refusal left the door open for the party to present a new appeal, but the party has declined to take the step.
This decision by the far-right party now brings the pressure back onto the other parties to speed up negotiations in order to conclude some kind of city government agreement, since, with the inaugural council plenum just three days away, it is still not clear whether the future mayor will be Trias for Barcelona leader Xavier Trias, winner of the elections, or the Catalan Socialist candidate Jaume Collboni, if he is able to articulate an alternative absolute majority - which would be 21 votes on the 41 seat council. Trias, on the other hand, as leader of the winning candidacy on election night, will become mayor with just his 11 councillors unless Collboni can reach the total of 21.
Above, Results of Barcelona mayoral elections 2023 (outer circle) compared with 2019 (inner circle). Numbers of council seats won.
In fact, at this point the only thing that is known for sure about proceedings for Saturday is that Vox has called its supporters to gather in Plaça de Sant Jaume at 4:30pm, with the intention of welcoming its two councillors who will take the far-right party into Barcelona city hall for the first time. But beyond this, with respect to the choice of the new council head, nothing is decided, since Xavier Trias, despite being the winner of the May 28th elections, still does not have guaranteed that he will be invested as mayor again, since he has not closed any agreement, although he has held several apparently-positive meetings with Republican Left (ERC) candidate Ernest Maragall, whose party has five votes on council.
This very afternoon, Jordi Martí Grau, the number two of the Barcelona en Comú candidacy, which led the council for the last eight years but finished third on election night, launched yet another call to articulate a progressive government formed by the PSC, BComú and ERC, but warning that Ada Colau's party will not "give away" its votes to Jaume Collboni in exchange for nothing - an assertion that would make impossible the proposal by Spain's conservative opposition party, the PP, to use its four votes to bring the Socialists to power under a single condition: that the Comuns do not enter the government. For its part, the PSC has asked for "generosity" from the Comuns, asserting that the Socialists themselves showed this quality in 2015 and 2019 when they finished behind Ada Colau's party, but voted in favour of her as mayor, and subsequently served as part of the city government.
Below, the Central Electoral Commission's decision to deny the Vox appeal for a vote recount in Barcelona.