If on the day of his inauguration as mayor Jaume Collboni had been told that his first three years in office would be politically peaceful, he would not have believed it. Especially because his election was so tense and suspenseful until the last minute. Despite coming in second in the elections, that day Collboni ousted the winner and former mayor Xavier Trias with a Frankenstein majority formed by Ada Colau’s BComú and Daniel Sirera’s PP.
At that time, there was a majority current in Barcelona that wanted a change in the mayoralty after eight years of government by the commons, and Trias capitalized much of that will. But, for the second consecutive time (the first was after Ernest Maragall’s victory leading ERC), an alliance of antagonistic forces prevented Barcelona from having an independentist mayor and broke a Barcelona tradition that the most voted candidate would assume the mayoralty. Trias’s reaction with his famous “que us bombin” still resonates in the Saló de Cent of the City Hall.
Soon after, Collboni was left without his main rivals. Ernest Maragall, Xavier Trias, and Ada Colau resigned their seats and forced their parties to build new leaderships for the 2027 elections. Now only one year remains and those candidacies are still very young. This is the case of Elisenda Alamany (ERC), who is also a preferred partner of the PSC in the City Hall, or Gerardo Pisarello who returns to the council to lead BComú. The PP will repeat the slate with Sirera.
The most striking situation is that of Junts, which still has not designated its mayoral candidate, despite being the largest municipal group. The post-convergent party has been unsuccessfully searching for months for their “white crow” to head the Barcelona list and maintains an internal struggle between the will of the current municipal leader Jordi Martí to be the candidate, as Xavier Trias wanted, and the party leadership’s proposal to promote Josep Rius to the candidacy.
We will see what happens, but within Junts there is fear of a debacle similar to that suffered by Ernest Maragall in the last elections, when he went from being the most voted list to losing half of his councilors and finishing fourth. It is true that a year in politics is a long time, but all parties know that leaderships for local elections are slowly developed and improvisations usually go wrong.
The mayor has appeased the critical sectors that were belligerent with his former partner Colau
So, with the opposition under construction, Collboni has a clear path to renew his position. Meanwhile, his main goals are to avoid mistakes and take as much ground as possible from BComú. The socialists can fish votes in the ponds of Junts or ERC, but the biggest catchment area for the PSC is in the electoral bank of the commons because they compete for a very similar space. Collboni’s message to the commons electorate is that voting for him will be more useful because he has a better chance of being mayor and because he does not do things very differently from theirs. Proof of this is that some sectors of the city accuse Collboni of practicing policies similar to those of Mayor Colau, but with a friendlier discourse.
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The mayor has managed to appease these critical sectors and has pacified the noise they made with Mayor Colau. His predisposition to dialogue and minimal concessions have calmed the atmosphere that was very tense in the previous legislature. Two examples are the Gremi de Restauració and the merchants’ lobby, which have buried the hatchet in this term.
Jaume Collboni has governed with the smallest minority in Barcelona’s democracy. He has approved all his budgets through a vote of confidence and has only managed to weave an alliance with ERC that is insufficient to reach a majority in the plenary. Despite this, the enormous political conflicts in Spain and wars in the world have pushed municipal politics to the background, which has not had shocks or unexpected crises as his predecessors did.
And what about the city’s problems? Security, housing, and incivility top the ranking, according to surveys. The first two do not depend exclusively on the City Hall, and the third is addressed with a newly approved ordinance that now must be enforced. Regarding insecurity, it is expected that the law reform will end multiple recidivism and, along with the reinforcement of the courts, send a message to criminals that committing crimes in Barcelona is no longer cheap.
Collboni has had a politically peaceful term and his rivals are under construction
In the case of housing, the mayor has taken public leadership of the discourse (message to the commons), although the measures applied so far have not yielded the expected results because they were mistakenly presented as the formula to lower prices and this has not happened, nor will it happen because they are designed to slow the rise of rents. This is the real Achilles’ heel. Apartments are not built overnight, especially with the endless bureaucratic obstacles. The failure of the 30% measure in Barcelona, which remains inexplicably in force, also weighs heavily on the real estate market. Therefore, the problem will remain very much alive in 12 months.
Next year’s elections will leave a city council with two more councilors (increasing from 41 to 43) due to population growth and with more parties that will complicate the formation of majorities. But Collboni counts on the advantage that municipal law allows the most voted list to be invested and gives full powers to the mayor to make the city work, as we have seen in the last three years.
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