Following last May's parliamentary elections, negotiations to form a government in Barcelona's city council have accelerated. More than a year after the municipal elections, Mayor Jaume Collboni has reached a provisional agreement with ERC to integrate them into his government team.
The pact, which the Republicans will put to a vote among their bases, means that they will manage areas such as tourism, economic promotion, social rights or youth. In a statement after the meeting of the Barcelona ERC Federation board, they defended their agreement with Collboni on “a joint and progressive government program for Barcelona.”
The preliminary agreement, which both parties have been working on for months, comes in the middle of negotiations on the inauguration of the new president of the Generalitat. which ERC must decide whether to support the socialist Salvador Illa. Although this Monday the Republicans They opted for a presidency of the Parlament de JuntsAnd while the party's Barcelona federation is not always aligned with the executive, the news in the Catalan capital confirms once again that the division between supporters and opponents of independence has been left behind.
The Barcelona ERC Federation met on Tuesday afternoon to discuss Collboni's proposal and decide how the final decision will be made. Finally, the Republicans are betting on joining the Barcelona executive, but they leave the final decision in the hands of the militants.
If the bases say yes, it would end months of negotiations that Mayor Collboni has conducted since he took charge last July and started a government alone, with just 10 councilors out of 41. From the start, he maintained cross-talks with both the ERC and the ERC. , Comuns and Junts, although it didn't take long before those from Trias left the playing field.
His priority, he said, was to put together a tripartite, but poor relations between Colau and Collboni cooled talks. That gave an advantage an ERC that came to vote in favor of Collboni's budgets without asking to join the government in return. The Comuns, for their part, decided to cancel the bills because the mayor did not offer them access to the Executive in exchange for their yes. This gesture has increased hostilities between the leaders of both formations and the possibility of a tripartite is not being considered, at least for the time being.
In this way, if the preliminary agreement is concluded, the municipal government would have 15 seats (10 from the PSC and 5 from the ERC). Yet it is a figure that is still far from the majority. For this year's bills, in which he only counted on votes in favor of the Republicans, he already had to resort to the question of confidence, a tool that can only be used twice per legislative term and which has not been used so far . mayor should have used during his first year at the head of the city council.