Gerard Melgar Barcelona

Barcelona

Updated Thursday, March 28, 2024-02:03

  • PSC Jaume Collboni loses the question of trust in Barcelona City Council and opens up to "expand" his Government with partners such as ERC

  • JxCat Junts+ Puigdemont per Catalunya, name of Carles Puigdemont's candidacy for the Catalan elections of 12-M

The

post-electoral pacts

will focus a large part of the campaign for the Catalan elections of

12-M

, whose results are expected to be tight, without clear majorities, and some of these possible alliances were already protagonists yesterday, at the

Barcelona City Council

, where the

PSC

is looking for partners for a government coalition and

Esquerra Republicana

appears in all the pools.

The

question of trust

that Mayor

Jaume Collboni

submitted to, as the only way to approve his Budgets, followed a very predictable script until the last five minutes of a session that lasted less than an hour. After the reproaches between the socialists and the opposition, the councilor took the floor and announced "the next step", once the public accounts come into force, at the beginning of May unless there are surprises: "

Expand the

municipal government."

Collboni did not say with whom, but the Republicans are the only party that supported his Budget last Friday and that yesterday said

yes

on the question of trust. Since February, Esquerra was the only group that had signed a budget pact with Collboni, a situation identical to that of the Generalitat, with the socialist

Salvador Illa

as the sole endorser in the Parliament of the accounts of the Government chaired by

Pere Aragonès

, who He was forced to bring forward the elections by not gaining a majority against the

entire amendments

.

These insufficient supports have had very different outcomes in each case. With the rules of municipal politics, the formula of the

question of confidence

will allow Barcelona, ​​with almost all probability, to have the new Budgets approved within a month. In that period, an agreement to elect an alternative mayor in a

motion of censure

is clearly impossible due to the astronomical ideological distance between

Junts

, the

Ada

Colau

commons

, the

PP

and

Vox

.

The entry into force of the public accounts will coincide with the start of the

12-M campaign

, which is why Collboni prefers to wait until the elections are held to execute any movement to open doors in his Cabinet. However, with his words, the hypothetical alliance between the PSC and Esquerra in the City Council and beyond yesterday became the capital issue of the political day, since it transcended the municipal level.

Puigdemont against "the bipartite"

"If ERC acts as a crutch for the PSC in the City Council, it can also do so in the Generalitat," warned the vice president and spokesperson for Junts,

Josep Rius

, who pointed out that "only a resounding victory for

Carles Puigdemont

can avoid a bipartite" of those features on both sides of the Plaza Sant Jaume.

"ERC speaks for ERC, let no one put in their mouths what Esquerra will do either in Barcelona or in other places," Aragonès was quick to respond to speculation at an institutional event in the Barcelona town of Vilanova i la Geltrú. "There has been a

Budget

agreement for responsibility, as should have been done in other places," said the Republican candidate for re-election, confronting the attitude of his party and the PSC to that of Junts and the

commons,

both in the Consistory and in the Parliament.

Aragonès, however, wanted to highlight the divergences of his formation with the socialists, especially on a national level: "A Budget agreement is very different from a government agreement when there are country model projects that are very different."

Although the ERC spokesperson in the City Council,

Jordi Castellana

, also threw things out and disconnected the accounts with a future coalition, the rest of the groups took the pact for granted. "It is an open secret that the agreement with Esquerra is to govern together and I think it is very good, but let's say things as they are," Colau said during his intervention in the plenary session. The former mayor refused to approve Collboni's Budgets if it were not as part of a global pact to enter her Executive.

The reproaches also came from

Daniel Sirera

(PP), who supported Collboni's investiture in June to prevent the winner

Xavier Trias

(Junts) from being mayor: "He said that he would not agree with those who do not respect Spain

,

but unfortunately we found that it is "one of the unfulfilled promises that has been surrendered to Esquerra, which precisely does not respect Spain much."