MADRID’LL FIX IT

Last month’s ar­ti­cle claimed the new Mayor of Barcelona would be Xavier Trias, who be­longs to a cen­tre-lib­eral party called Junts per Catalunya, (To­gether for Cat­alo­nia) nor­mally ab­bre­vi­ated to Junts. After all, his list was the most voted one and he had the full sup­port of Ernest Mara­gall’s party Es­querra Re­pub­li­cana de Catalunya (Cata­lan Re­pub­li­can Left) aka ERC, whose five left-wing coun­cil­lors added to Trias’s 11 would have given the lat­ter a fairly strong mi­nor­ity gov­ern­ment. In­stead, The Cata­lan So­cial­ist Party’s man, Jaume Coll­boni, was given the may­or­ship with the sup­port of Ada Colau (the out­go­ing Mayor and leader of a left-wing for­ma­tion called Barcelona en Comú) but also with the sup­port of the Par­tido Pop­u­lar’s four coun­cil­lors, led by one Daniel Sir­era. To ex­plain why this sur­prised every­one and shocked not a few, it needs to be borne in mind that Coll­boni and Colau had run the city as a coali­tion until Coll­boni aban­doned his seat sev­eral months ago to pre­pare his elec­toral cam­paign, a sub­stan­tial part of which was ded­i­cated to bad-mouthing Colau’s ad­min­is­tra­tion, even though he had been an ac­tive part of it for sev­eral years. So: no love lost there. But for the Par­tido Pop­u­lar to give their sup­port to Mr Coll­boni was even more un­usual: this is an un­abashedly right-wing party which is cur­rently mak­ing pact after pact around Spain with the ultra-right for­ma­tion Vox (which is anti-abor­tion, op­posed to im­proved leg­is­la­tion on do­mes­tic vi­o­lence and fa­nat­i­cally Catholic-na­tion­al­ist, among other things). This un­holy al­liance be­tween Coll­boni, Colau and Sir­era makes chalk and cheese look pos­i­tively ho­moge­nous. So how did it come to pass? The an­swer my friends, is blow­ing on Madrid’s meseta, where a day be­fore the ex­pected in­vesti­ture of Trias, the na­tional co­or­di­na­tor of the PP, Elías Ben­dodo, phoned San­tos Cerdán, the sec­re­tary gen­eral of the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party (to which Coll­boni’s Cata­lan So­cial­ist Party is af­fil­i­ated) and of­fered the votes of the four PP coun­cil­lors in Barcelona, which, to­gether with Colau’s votes, would be enough to make Coll­boni Mayor. The rea­son for such ur­gency is that both Junts and ERC are pro-in­de­pen­dence and the very thought that ‘Spain’s sec­ond city’ might fall into the hands of Cata­lan se­ces­sion­ists sends shiv­ers of hor­ror down the spines of the pow­ers that be. We know this, be­cause four years ago, Mara­gall’s ERC won the Barcelona elec­tions out­right, but was pre­vented from tak­ing of­fice when Colau (under heavy pres­sure from cen­tral gov­ern­ment, she claimed, weep­ing, in a radio in­ter­view) ac­cepted the votes of the shady, op­por­tunist, right-lean­ing in­de­pen­dent coun­cil­lor Manuel Valls in order to be­come Mayor. And four years be­fore that, when Trias was Mayor and Colau his rival (and a ref­er­en­dum for in­de­pen­dence was just two years away) the state’s chief cloak-and-dag­ger fac­to­tum, the now no­to­ri­ous po­lice­man José Manuel Vil­larejo, planted a false re­port in El Mundo news­pa­per claim­ing that Trias had 12 mil­lion il­le­gal euros stashed away in a Swiss bank: Colau used this lie in her cam­paign against him and won.

So Spain, at least as far as Cat­alo­nia is con­cerned, is one of those democ­ra­cies that moves the goal posts when­ever the ‘wrong’ peo­ple win an elec­tion. After being told just one hour be­fore his ex­pected in­vesti­ture that he had been pipped to the post by an elec­toral sleight of hand, Trias came out with an ex­pres­sion that has since be­come some­thing of a catch­phrase in parts of Cat­alo­nia: ‘Que us bombin a tots!’, a rough trans­la­tion of which would be ‘You can all go to hell!’. Which, given the cir­cum­stances, sounds un­nec­es­sar­ily mild.

Opin­ion