Gerard Melgar Barcelona

Barcelona

Updated Tuesday,16January2024 - 12:38

  • Politics: PP and Vox demand that the socialist Jaume Collboni include Spanish in the communication of the Barcelona City Council
  • Esquerra Ernest Maragall (ERC) leaves Barcelona City Council

After many years of being the subject of debate, Barcelona will soon have a mayor by night. Jaume Collboni has announced that his municipal government will soon incorporate the figure of a person in charge of coordinating the city's night-time activity, one of the commitments of his electoral campaign, and that he will cede that position to the party that becomes his partner, a process still in negotiations.

"It exists in New York, Paris and other European cities and allows us to recognize that, at night, they are cities that have a cultural and leisure life," said the mayor of Barcelona in an interview on RTVE's Cafè d'idees program, where he confirmed that he is willing to give up that position loaded with symbolism.

In the first half year of the socialist mandate, the initiative of the mayor at night has been paralyzed by the minority situation in which the PSC governs (10 councilors out of the 41 that make up the plenary session of the City Council).

Budgets

Collboni has been negotiating for months a pact for this year's municipal budgets that is linked to the entry of some other party into his Executive. Despite the fact that, initially, the mayor said he preferred a tripartite agreement with Barcelona en Comú and Esquerra Republicana, the option that today has the most progress in the negotiations is the alliance with Junts, which won the elections of May 28 with the list headed by the former mayor of CiU Xavier Trias.

By agreeing with the neo-convergents, the local government would reach an absolute majority (21 councillors), while an entente with the left wing of the Consistory would only manage to overcome that threshold with the unitary concurrence of the commons and the republicans, a group led by Ernest Maragall until the end of last year, when he left politics.

The other option would be to govern with only one of these two forces, something that would bring him oxygen, but would not clear the way for a calm governance. With the party of former mayor Ada Colau it would reach 19 councillors and with ERC, only 15.