The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, has signed the decree extending municipal accounts. “When you do not have an approved budget you have to sign the extension accordingly. I already did it last week. I hope that the city will have budgets at the latest in the spring of next year with a majority,” Collboni explained this Thursday.
Last June, the PSC formed a government with only 10 of the 41 councilors that make up the full Council. In October, the full opposition: Junts (11 councilors), Commons (9), ERC (5), PP (4) and Vox (2) voted against the draft tax ordinances in the City Council's Economy Commission. The PSC withdrew, at the last minute, the item from the agenda so that the budgets would not also end up being overturned. Since then, those from Collboni have held various meetings seeking support that would allow them to approve the accounts. In fact, with the vote in favor of the 11 Junts councilors they would be able to approve them or with the vote of the commons plus two councilors. It has not been possible and Barcelona will begin the year without the approved budgets.
One of the obstacles that the PSC has encountered is that the negotiation of the approval of the budgets is linked – as the opposition demanded – to a possible coalition government pact. Collboni now hopes to buy time to try to reach an agreement either with Junts or with Comuns and ERC. The limit, spring.
The problem that the socialist now faces is that some of the actions and works that were announced lack a budget item, so they will either be delayed or will require surgical political agreements to be carried out. Collboni is aware of this burden and intends to sign the accounts in the first quarter of 2024 so as not to jeopardize the main actions.
The first deputy mayor of the PSC, Laia Bonet, already warned Ada Colau in the last plenary session of the year – after the mayor put to a vote a covert disapproval of Collboni's management – that with the opposition that the commons were “boycotting the possibility of Barcelona having a future government formed by a left-wing coalition.” The disapproval went ahead with the only favorable votes from the Commons and Junts. The two formations that are negotiating a government coalition with the PSC.
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