Dhe election thriller only ended when the last vote had been counted in the plenary hall of Barcelona City Hall. Three weeks after the election, it was clear that the conservative People’s Party (PP) had made the socialist Jaume Collboni mayor of Spain’s second largest city. “Better a socialist than a separatist,” was the maxim of the PP, which is actually working on replacing the minority government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in the early parliamentary elections on July 23.
But in Barcelona, opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo showed his pragmatic side: without the votes of the four PP city councilors for the Socialist, Catalan independence supporters would have taken over the city hall for the first time, because the election winner was Xavier Trias from the “Junts” party of the former Catalan Prime Minister Carles Puigdemont. The 76-year-old pediatrician wanted to form a coalition with the governing separatist ERC party in Catalonia in the town hall. But according to the municipal electoral code in Spain, the candidate with the most votes does not automatically get the mayorship if another alliance secures an absolute majority.
Coalition with right-wing populists possible
The PP wanted neither to help the separatists to rise nor to provide political support to the previous mayor, Ada Colau. The condition for her four votes was therefore the final resignation of the mayor, who had been in office for eight years; the former urban warfare activist is a politically attractive figure for the Spanish right. Colau is now going into opposition with her party (Barcelona En Comú), which came in third in the local elections. Together with the PP, Colau voted on Saturday for the socialist Collboni, with whom she had governed together in the previous legislative period. In the future, the new mayor can only rely on 10 of the 41 city councillors.
Ada Colau was the last prominent representative of left-wing alternative parties that won numerous town halls in 2015: In Madrid, the PP has even governed with an absolute majority since Saturday, while left-wing strongholds such as Valencia and Cádiz were lost. After the heavy defeat of the left in the local and regional elections on May 28, more than 8,000 local parliaments were constituted across the country on Saturday and the mayors were elected.
The surprising success of the Socialists in Barcelona could not hide the fact that it was another black day for the ruling left, as the PP and the right-wing populist Vox party continued their advance. Around 3,200 municipalities, home to almost half of Spain’s population, now have a PP mayor. In the former socialist stronghold of Andalusia, where the conservatives have had an absolute majority in the regional parliament for a year now, the PP runs all the town halls in the provincial capitals. Newcomers were Seville, Cadiz and Huelva. In 26 Spanish cities with more than 30,000 inhabitants, the PP allied with Vox and was able to partially defeat the Socialists there, although they were the strongest party.
Such a coalition, which could also be a model for Spain if the parliamentary elections were close, was formed by both parties in Toledo, Burgos, Valladolid and Castellón. In the Basque capital Vitoria, however, the PP followed the example of Barcelona, supported the socialist candidate and prevented the Basque left nationalists (EH Bildu) from becoming the mayor.
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