Feijóo grants the PSOE to govern Barcelona and Vitoria and compensates his pacts with Vox
Alberto Núñez Feijóo recovers the story of centrality after starring in an unprecedented turn in Barcelona. Less than an hour before the investiture plenary session began, the Commons gave a surprise and announced that they would vote in favor of the PSC candidate, Jaume Collboni. All the pressure was on the shoulders of the PP. They were willing to facilitate a Xavier Trias government if the Socialists did not give them guarantees that they would keep Ada Colau out of their team. But the swerve of the Commons led Genoa to put their votes in the PSC basket, a decision that allows the popular leader to flee from the framework of isolation with Vox and rescue the image of a temperate politician. The statesman who wants to reach Moncloa looking to the right and left.
The historic agreement between the PP and the PSC in Barcelona to stop the independence movement is loaded with implications. Even more so in the run-up to a general election. The only municipal joy that saves Pedro Sánchez from total disaster comes from the hands of Feijóo. And not only in the second city of Spain. In Euskadi, the popular allied with PSOE and PNV to extend sanitary cordons in front of Bildu. He gave away Vitoria to the Socialists and several town halls, such as Durango, to the Basque nationalists, with the aim of reducing the institutional control of the radical Abertzale left.
The municipal map that was printed on Saturday, the date on which the more than 8,000 municipalities in Spain were to be constituted, places Feijóo in a position of strength in the face of 23-J. And not only for a result that will allow him to govern in more than 60% of the big cities. The blow in Barcelona and the cordon in Euskadi allows Genoa to claim the variable geometry with which Feijóo distributes power to the left and right. And it deflates Sánchez's strategy of wearing down his rival for his “shame pacts” with the extreme right. The success of the PP in the last appointment with the polls is cemented, in part, with the support of Vox. But he has also laid out the red carpet for his main political rival in two capitals of vital importance for the PSOE.
It is “adult”, “patriotic”, “common sense”, “generous”, “State” politics. The nicknames used by senior PP officials to define the Barcelona agreement show the discursive trail that the popular leadership will follow in the coming weeks to dilute its dependence on Vox. The renewed position of strength that Genoa will exhibit in the campaign will be based on the ability of its leader to break the granite blocks on the left and right and recover the central lane that had been left in the background due to the already normalized coexistence with those of Santiago Abascal. It must not be forgotten that the closest approach to the ultra-right has occurred under the presidency of Feijóo himself. Vox will touch power in no less than 140 municipal executives and six large capitals, where they have already targeted gender and equality policies.
Barcelona and Vitoria will have a socialist mayor and mayor thanks to the vote of the PP councillors.
It doesn't matter how many recognize it, but this means rising to the occasion and political generosity..
Congratulations @danielsirera and @DomaicaAinhoa for the example
— Borja Sémper (@bsemper) June 17, 2023
All in all, tipping the balance in favor of the PSC in Barcelona has not been an easy decision for Feijóo. The result of the polls placed him from the beginning at a crossroads. The pressure from the Catalan business class to facilitate the investiture of the seny candidate did not go unnoticed in the PP. But assuming the role of collaborator of the independence movement was too high a price to pay, a stain capable of sinking their already squalid electoral prospects in Catalonia.. The pressure led Genoa to telephone Ferraz to force the agreement. Last Thursday, Elías Bendodo raised his red line against Santos Cerdán: either he governed without Colau, or he governed Trias.
The PP did not plan to directly support the sovereignist candidate, but rather they would choose to vote for themselves. Although at the municipal level, it didn't matter. If there is no alternative sum that promotes another candidate, the most voted list prevails, which in this case was that of Junts. The PSC denied the commitment not to include Colau in its executive until the end. The pressure was maximum. But everything changed in a matter of minutes. At the last minute, the commons took a turn announcing the vote in favor of the investiture of Collboni, without the demand to enter his government team. And he put the vote in favor of its four councilors on a silver platter to the PP.
I have come to defend policies and principles that prioritize the Spanish.
If my adversary doesn't have them, that's his problem, but we don't accept moralizing. pic.twitter.com/hi3WzY5YFU
– Popular Party (@ppopular) June 18, 2023
The PP's decision will have immediate implications for Barcelona politics. Jaume Collboni was sworn in as mayor to the great anger of Xavier Trias, who put the icing on the cake on Saturday's unusual plenary session with a resounding “fuck them all!”. The socialist will govern in a minority, no less than eleven votes from an absolute majority, which fills his executive agenda in Barcelona with questions. But the PSC has its baton. And the popular ones, their story. Feijóo displays the image of a “statesman” who has closed the door to “Puigdemont's party” and Colau's “populism”. “We have taken a step forward towards the Spain of dialogue”.
The PSOE makes up its decline
The script twist in Barcelona changes the story for the socialists to a certain extent. Recovering the second city in Spain, especially after Pedro Sánchez's commitment to “pacify” Catalonia, is a symbolic victory. Barcelona makeup, however, does not change reality. The PSOE only governs in six of the 30 most populous Spanish cities after losing strongholds such as Seville or Valladolid to the PP. They are only two examples, but they give a very illustrative image of the situation in which the municipal power of the Socialists remains after a very favorable mandate, started in 2019 with a decayed PP and stalked by Ciudadanos and Vox. Four years later, the tables have turned and the absorption of the oranges by the popular has dyed the country's municipal map blue in the prelude to the general elections on July 23.
Along with Barcelona and Vitoria, the Socialists only control four other cities among the 30 most populous cities. They are Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where the former minister Carolina Darias will be mayoress; the stronghold of Abel Caballero in Vigo; L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, where Nuria Marín lost the absolute; and Sabadell, where Marta Farrés repeats. These six cities add up to 3 million inhabitants, although more than half (1.6 million) correspond to Barcelona, the loot that the PP has given it.
The mark of the popular is much higher. The PP governs 61.4% of the population of cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, almost double what it had up to now (31.8%), while the PSOE goes from 43.3% to 27.4 %. It is important to take into account that before the Barcelona carambola, that percentage stood at a meager 20.9%. That, in absolute numbers, translates into 15.4 million people governed by the PP, compared to the 6.8 million who live in town halls in the hands of the Socialists.. Less than half.
The municipal weakness of the PSOE is almost unprecedented and leaves the party with the spirits on the ground in an uphill pre-campaign. Pedro Sánchez assumed the bad results of his party and thus justified the need to call the elections, but he has placed his party in a difficult situation. The militancy and financial muscle of the party are exhausted after the work prior to the local and regional elections. Discouragement spreads among the affiliates, especially in those cities and towns where the socialists have lost power. And the spoils of the provincial councils still need to be distributed, which will also be dragged down by the popular wave and will cause a significant loss of institutional power to the socialists.
Sánchez will try to change the story with the rally that will take place this Sunday in Dos Hermanas, his fetish city, where the reconquest of power in the PSOE began. This Sevillian town is the only one of the 13 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in Andalusia where the socialists govern since this Saturday. Until now the socialists had 6, but Seville, Granada, Jerez de la Frontera, Huelva and Jaén have been left behind. Another sign of the decline is that while Juanma Moreno was at the investitures of his new mayors in Seville, Granada and Cádiz, the PSOE leader attended the inauguration of the mayor of La Rinconada, a city of about 40,000 inhabitants in the area metropolitan area of Seville where the head of the Sevillian socialists, Javier Fernández de los Ríos, governs.
The fall of the PSOE is the result of the loss of 400,000 votes compared to the municipal elections of 2019, combined with the 1.9 million votes that the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo has won. But in many town halls the Socialists have found themselves without partners to their left to tie up the majorities in places where they have been the most voted for, as is the case of Valladolid, Elche, Burgos or Alcalá de Henares.. In these cities, the popular have allied with Vox to make the PP candidate mayor despite not being the winners in number of votes, a circumstance that also threatens to mortgage the future of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and compromise his credibility when he speaks to “rule alone”.
All this also responds to the weakness of the candidacies of the left to the left of the PSOE. Yolanda Díaz did not want to appear with Sumar in the municipal elections, in a strategy that Podemos already inaugurated in 2015. The objective was not to wear down the brand in an election in which there is an important dual vote. The difference is that in 2015 the political cycle was different and the leftist candidacies led to the so-called change councils: Manuela Carmena in Madrid, Ada Colau in Barcelona, Joan Ribó in Valencia, José María González, Kichi, in Cádiz. Not one of those mayors maintains the baton of command today and the same thing happens in other cities where there were this type of parties, such as Zaragoza, Santiago de Compostela or La Coruña..