The PSC wins the battle for the mayoralty of Barcelona against Colau and Vox manages to enter for the first time

The tightness of the three leading positions means that it can practically be ensured that whoever wins, in this case Jaume Collboni, will be able to govern in the face of the difficulty of putting together a alternative block to achieve an absolute majority in the plenary vote to choose the first mayor of the city. The situation now is different from that of 2019. So, an Ernest Maragall (ERC) who achieved victory in votes saw how the support of the PSC and Manuel Valls (who presented himself under the acronym of Cs) gave the mayoralty to Ada Colau . Valls then opted for the ‘lesser evil’ and prevented the city from falling into the hands of the independence movement when there were a few months to go before the 1-O ruling and the streets were on fire in Barcelona.

Now, with the ‘procés’ only as an argument for nostalgics – secessionism has been completely absent as a campaign theme – the battle for Barcelona has in fact become a plebiscite on Colau’s management in which the PSC, Despite governing with her in coalition for the last eight years, she manages to get ahead. Thus, the ten councilors – two more than in the last elections – who would be brought out by a Jaume Collboni who jumped from the municipal executive in January they will be enough to be elected mayor. The crossed vetoes and the ideological incompatibility make any other alternative improbable, ruling out the impossible cocktail of Colau, or Trias, relying on the ERC or the PP, not to mention Vox, to prevent a socialist government.

Colau: support among young people

The victory of the PSC, however, is not assured. The leader of the commons, despite the obvious wear and tear of her management, and the majority desire for change reflected in the survey, manages to retain the thickness of supports –he goes back just one point and one councilor–, confirming that all the noise and stridency generated by his opponents barely make a dent in him, especially among the younger electorate, where support for his management is greater. At 1.4 points behind Collboni, Ada Colau still has options to run for a third term if she manages to mobilize a little more to an electorate that remains loyal to her and hardly suffers vote leakage to other parties.

In this scenario, the big losers in the elections are Ernest Maragall and Xavier Trias. The Republican achieved seven points and three councilors less than in 2019, and despite starting in the lead just a year ago, he suffered a massive vote leak towards Junts (17%) and Comunes (12%). For his part, Xavier Trias head of Junts list, comfortably retired, responded to the call of his party, which trusted the former mayor despite the latter’s willingness to campaign hiding the estelada. Despite the great progress compared to 2019 -7.6 points and up to four more councilors in the best of cases-, Junts is left without options, also sinking the hopes of a victory for Puigdemont’s party among those who aspired to revive the embers of the ‘process’.

The elections in Barcelona confirm, on the other hand, the reconfiguration of the space of the right. On the one hand, there is the collapse of Ciudadanos, which of the 13.2 points and six councilors that it achieved in 2019 with Manuel Valls collapses to 2.3% of the journalist’s voting intention Anna Grau, very far from the minimum 5% to achieve representation. Their volume of lost votes is capitalized by the PSC (12%), Trias (13%) and, above all, the PP (24%).

The popular, after achieving representation in 2019 with Josep Bou by exceeding the minimum required by a few dozen votes, advanced remarkably to 9.7% of the votes, achieving four councilors with Daniel Sirera as a headliner and entering comfortably. The Valents experiment crashes in Barcelona with 0.6%, quite the opposite of Vox, which with Gonzalo de Oro-Pulido As mayor, he achieved representation for the first time with a 6% vote intention and between two and three councilors in plenary. At the other ideological extreme, the CUP, as in the past mandate, does not achieve representation either, although it obtains 4% support. The independence movement (Junts and ERC) is left with just 15, 16 councilors at most, out of a plenary session of 41.

The new political map in Barcelona –actually a slight recomposition of the current scenario– occurs in a paradoxical way in a context of great desire for change in the city, where 66.9% of those surveyed consider positive that there is a change in the government compared to 19.5% who advocate continuity. He desire for change It is parallel to the negative evaluation that is made of the management of the municipal executive (37.3% bad and 32.9% regular), a suspense, however, that is also extensible to the Government and the Generalitat. Regarding the general evolution of the city, 60.9% consider that it has worsened, 12.1% see it as the same and only 24.9% say that it has improved.

The disputed race to win the Barcelona mayor’s office is also reflected in the degree of knowledge and leader assessmentwith Jaume Collboni and Ernest Maragall with a 4.3 mark, and Ada Colau and Xavier Trias with a 4.2, all of them suspended in any case.