BABY BLUE

It’s all over now, as of May the 28th last. The de­bates, the ban­ners, the hoard­ings, the vot­ing. In short, the mu­nic­i­pal elec­tions, in both Cat­alo­nia and Spain. Barcelona now has a Mayor who be­longs to a pro-in­de­pen­dence party, whereas the other three Cata­lan cap­i­tals (Tar­rag­ona, Lleida, and Girona) have slipped back into the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ist fold of the Cata­lan So­cial­ist Party (PSC) which takes most of its or­ders from the mother party, the PSOE, cur­rently in power in Madrid. It should be pointed out that mu­nic­i­pal elec­tions here are not the small deal they are in so many other coun­tries: no sooner had Franco started push­ing up daisies than town coun­cils great and small, es­pe­cially in Cat­alo­nia, laid the ground­work which made a work­ing democ­racy pos­si­ble, and are still taken very se­ri­ously. A week or so be­fore the elec­tions, there was a tele­vised de­bate on Cata­lan pub­lic tele­vi­sion be­tween the can­di­dates from par­ties al­ready rep­re­sented in City Hall. The then Mayor, Ada Colau (49) was placed be­tween two of the old­est can­di­dates, the now cur­rent Mayor Xavier Trias (76) and Ernest Mara­gall (80), whose may­or­ship was snatched away at the last mo­ment in the 2019 elec­tions by an un­usual pact be­tween the left-wing Colau and Manuel Valls, the for­mer prime min­is­ter of France, who was then run­ning as a may­oral can­di­date in Barcelona. On screen, Colau looked like a be­at­if­i­cally smil­ing niece stuck be­tween two cur­mud­geonly great-un­cles. Also in the stu­dio were the can­di­date for Ciu­tadans, a har­rowed look­ing woman who has now van­ished from the po­lit­i­cal world along with the rest of her party, and the PSC rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Jaume Coll­boni, who spent most of his time crit­i­cis­ing - in a supremely smug way - Colau’s achieve­ments (of which he, as part of her coali­tion, had been an eager co-achiever). That left Daniel Sir­era - who looks like a ver­ti­cally chal­lenged Michael Stipe with pen­cilled eye­brows - the can­di­date for the Pop­u­lar Party (PP), which is big in whole swathes of Spain but lit­tle more than tes­ti­mo­nial in Cat­alo­nia; and a vir­tu­ally un­known per­son called Eva Par­era who fronts a small party called Va­lents (The Brave), a con­tin­u­a­tion of the party founded by the afore­men­tioned Manuel Valls, who aban­doned it in 2021. These can­di­dates spent most of the time hurl­ing im­prov­able sta­tis­tics at each other. The ’anti-na­tion­al­ists’ (PP, Va­lents and Ciu­tadans) also in­sisted on speak­ing a halt­ing mix­ture of Cata­lan and Span­ish (some­thing which nor­mal cit­i­zens do not usu­ally do).

And now that the mu­nic­i­pal die has been cast, the pro-in­de­pen­dence par­ties (there are three: cen­tre-lib­eral, left-wing, and far left) held their own or got good re­sults in a ma­jor­ity of towns and vil­lages, which is re­mark­able given that they have been at each other’s throats for the last cou­ple of years. On the other hand, the far-right party Vox crept into al­most every major town coun­cil, al­beit with just one or two coun­cil­lors. Vox was founded by dis­grun­tled mem­bers of the PP who, in­cred­i­bly, felt that their ul­tra­con­ser­v­a­tive, ul­tra­p­a­tri­otic party was too mod­er­ate and not ’Span­ish’ enough. Vox wishes to ’re­gen­er­ate’ Spain (which, among other things, means elim­i­nat­ing the po­lit­i­cal au­ton­omy of bilin­gual coun­tries like Eu­skadi and Cat­alo­nia) and is Is­lam­o­pho­bic, anti-fem­i­nist, anti-abor­tion and ultra-catholic; it may well find it­self in power in both mu­nic­i­pal, au­tonomous and even state-wide gov­ern­ments, given that the PP will need it to ob­tain an ab­solute ma­jor­ity (as is now the case in the Balearics and Va­len­cia). Should Cat­alo­nia find it­self fac­ing a state gov­ern­ment run by two hard-line right-wing par­ties which only a mi­nus­cule mi­nor­ity of Cata­lans vote for, things might get in­ter­est­ing. Again.

OPIN­ION