The socialist Guijarro will be the seventh mayor of Badalona since 2008, a city governed by all colors, from the PP to the CUP
The socialist Rubén Guijarro will be invested as mayor of Badalona on November 8, if the motion of censure against Xavier García Albiol succeeds, as is expected. Since 2008, Guijarro will be the seventh mayor of the neighboring town of the Catalan capital. That year, the then mayor, Maite Arqué, put an end to a ten-year term, by abandoning the command staff to be a senator in Madrid, buried political stability and began a turbulent period for the town, the fourth in Catalonia in number. of inhabitants (223,000), in which there will be two motions of censure and an eventful resignation.
Badalona has had mayors of all colors in this decade: Maite Arqué (PSC), Jordi Serra (PSC), Xavier García Albiol (PP), Dolors Sabater (Guanyem-CUP), Alex Pastor (PSC), Aida Llaudaró (common) and Rubén Guijarro (PSC).
Albiol has won three elections (2011, 2015 and 2019) and has governed twice: from 2011 to 2015 and from 2020 to 2021. With the loss of that mayor’s office, the PP disappears from the map of power in Catalonia. It currently has two municipalities –Badalona and Pontons, a small Barcelona municipality of 500 inhabitants– out of a total of 900 municipalities. Badalona is the jewel in the crown of an almost residual party in Catalonia, with just three regional deputies (out of 135), the last force in the Parliament and two deputies in the Barcelona Provincial Council (none in the other three councils). Albiol, however, has already been confirmed by Genoa to perform again.
The city is divided between albiolistas and antialbiolistas, in the same way that there are two Badalonas: the affluent of the central zone and the coast, which votes for independence (a three-room apartment in the Olympic port is around 750,000 euros) and the neighborhoods denser and punished by the crisis, where the popular leader has his fiefdom and in which there are foreign population rates of 25%. The mayor still hopes to win again. Since 2011 it has not stopped growing. That year he won with 33% of the votes and in 2019 it rose to 37%. In their fiefdoms, neighborhoods such as Sant Joan de Llefià, Sant Mori de Llefià or La Salut exceed 51% of the votes. They are the developmental districts of the sixties.
Instead, those same neighborhoods turn their backs on the PP in the general or regional elections. In 2017, Ciudadanos was imposed and in 2021, the PSC. In Badalona Xavi wins – as his supporters call him – the PP does not win. His work in the face of the next elections will be to try to convince his people that the president of the PP mayors’ committee does not fall into the category of ‘all politicians are equal’. It will have an added difficulty, after appearing in the ‘Pandora papers’ as a proxy in 2005 of a company in the tax haven of Belize. He says that it is all legal and that that year he had no government responsibilities, but he has ignored the ethical question.
‘Cleaning Badalona’
Personalist and populist, he has won over an important part of the Badalonese electorate with a very harsh speech against immigration. Not surprisingly, in its municipal fiefdoms, for example, Vox was second force in the last Catalan elections. The popular leader with the advice of Iván Redondo, until July 10, Pedro Sánchez’s right hand in Moncloa, reached the mayor’s office in 2011 with a forceful campaign slogan: ‘Hard hand against those who do not adapt and against criminals’ . Four years later, he went one step further: ‘Cleaning Badalona’. He declares himself a “right wing radical.” For his opponents he is a xenophobe of volume and back.
The popular leader has won the last three municipal elections and in 2023 will aspire to the fourth victory
Before his arrival at the mayor’s office, he distributed electoral propaganda linking Romanians to crime. “We don’t want Romanians,” said the diptych. He was tried and acquitted for a hate crime. In a controversial video in 2007 he linked immigration with insecurity, denounced the increase in patera floors and criticized the construction of a mosque. He denies the accusations of racism. In the PP, after the controversial slogan, they said that a wrong reading was made, since the objective was to appeal to order, civility and security and not to clean the city of immigrants.
The mayor was president of the Catalan PP between 2017 and 2018. He replaced Alicia Sánchez Camacho in office. He was also a deputy in Parliament and a senator. He has been a councilor in Badalona since 1991.
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