Wenceslao López’s face was a poem that June 13, 2015. Shortly before the municipal inauguration, he learned from the mouth of Ana Taboada, number one of Somos Oviedo, that he was going to be elected mayor of the capital of the Principality. Agustín Díaz Caunedo, the mayor until that day, remained with a burial face. The PP lost Oviedo. The municipalism imposed change —even though it was giving entry to the PSOE— and kicked the board in a, let’s say, traditional capital. The same thing happened in a handful of cities. Pamplona, Coruña, Santiago, Ferrol, Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Valencia. New actors and actresses, who had never stepped on the carpet or touched the staff before, rebelled against the old policy. You only had to look at the clothes, at the language used, or it was just enough to see the smiles, triumphant, but also terribly naive.
But the old policy always comes back and the change is no longer what it was. On May 27 of this year, after the elections, Vox launched a provocative “we have already passed” on social networks. Celia Gámez’s song for after a war. A remembrance prior to ’78, the starting point of “constitutionalism”, although that brand was coined many years later. As in Oviedo, Madrid and Pamplona, the change is reversing today without concessions. If there are triumphant smiles, they are anything but naive.
The way to the covenants
The “chicken game” that popularized the film Rebel without a cause and that is that two motorists are heading towards a precipice – and the one that previously stops, loses – was repeated yesterday, with less personal risks, in negotiations between parties to scratch the greatest amount of power for the next four years. The episode of Oviedo in 2015 is a sample of what today’s event could give of itself in the constitution of the 8,000 municipalities of the Spanish State.
Until the late afternoon of June 14, several unknowns remained. One of those municipalities in the running is precisely Oviedo, where Ciudadanos had the key to keep López in the mayor’s office or return it, four years later, to the Popular Party, which he announced he will do. In Madrid, the PP and Citizens agreement was made public shortly before dawn.
José Luis Martínez Almeida and Ada Colau, if there are no more surprises, will be today mayor and mayor of the two most populous cities in the State. They are two paths without any common point. Colau, well known, to the point of basing part of her campaign on the support of references from international social movements and transformation; Almeida Martinez almost unknown, a State lawyer raised in the laboratory of Esperanza Aguirre. Before 2015, the most important role in politics of the future mayor is to have received Sheldon Adelson’s men on the land where the millionaire one day wanted to build Eurovegas.
The two names symbolize the new stage after the shipwrecks of the municipalities of change in the past local elections. Also, the growing distance between Madrid, recovered by the right in an exhibition of the “spirit of 155”, and Barcelona, marked by Procés and on October 1, vaccinated against Spanish nationalism, but with enormous tensions between the reality of the global metropolis and the capital of a Catalonia in permanent construction of its history.
Madrid, goodbye to change
Attempts by Íñigo Errejón, as head of Más Madrid, to introduce his party to the trading of cards at the highest levels have been unsuccessful. Manuela Carmena will leave the mayor’s office in favor of José Luis Martínez Almeida, a new profile within the old policy of the Castellana-Salamanca diagonal.
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Madrid Assembly
It happened in Madrid
The agreement for the formation of the Madrid Assembly table, made to annul the autonomous left, clarifies the future of the pacts and paints a picture for the next four years of confrontation of the three rights with the central government.
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The arrival of Martínez Almeida at the City Hall has two immediate effects. The reversal of Central Madrid – the low emission zone in the center of the capital, Now Madrid’s main landmark – is a promise from the three representatives of the right, although it will lead to fines and admonitions from the European Union. Less disruptive will be the approval of the Chamartín operation, a project shared essentially with the previous mayor.
The second effect is symbolic: even with shadows since its inception, Madrid now carried the banner of the City Councils of change in 2015. Despite its frontal distancing, Madrid City Council was identified with Podemos or at least with the label “populisms”, a container of evil for common sense on the right. Four years after Carmena’s arrival and four months after Colón’s photo, that common sense conquers a place of enormous public projection to defeat Pedro Sánchez’s project or, at least, to continue forcing the creation of a sanitary cord that keep Podemos – the main embodiment of ‘populism’ – away from the springs of power.
High politics and bad precedents
In Barcelona, Ada Colau will rely on the votes of Manuel Valls and the PSC to repeat in the mayor’s office. Ernest Maragall’s last-minute attempt to “reset the counter to zero” and divide the legislature into two-year mayoralties collided with the consultation of those registered in Barcelona in Comú, who decided on the sign of the Government. 71% of the more than 4,000 people who voted did so by the only way for Colau to repeat in the mayoralty.
After the irruption of “the commons” in 2015, the pact places the party before the contradictions of the old policy. The support of Barcelona pel Canvi-Ciudadanos, a tailor-made party for Manuel Valls that has had the approval of the Ibex 35, as Ara.Cat showed yesterday with an investigation piece on financing the former French prime minister. Among the most active donors of Valls is Claudio Boada, senior advisor from the investment and shark fund of the largest home buyer in Spain, Blackstone. Viscosities of politics: to consolidate the Barcelona project in Comú, Ada Colau ends up owing her votes to a party financed by the main shark of the house.
But it has not been the fundamental factor. The debate between the commons regarding the right of self-determination and independence has been surrounded by pressure from the independence parties from the beginning. The last legislature, except in specific aspects, the clashes between BeC and Esquerra were strident.
The campaign was presented as a confrontation between Colau and Maragall, so that the pact – which with the results in hand would have been possible – seemed impossible because it encompassed moods very different regarding the situation of the “country Catalonia”. Maragall’s effort to start from scratch has come late after a long month of attacks in which Colau has left enough hair in the cat flap, but after which he achieves his goal of maintaining the change project that began in 2015. In Lleida, Girona and Tarragona the independence parties will govern. The independence movement, however, is played in October in the Supreme Court ruling, in Brussels and, especially, in the long term.
The three rights agree square by square
Yesterday, June 14, did not clarify the picture in Zaragoza, where the PP announced an agreement with Citizens that the national spokesman for Vox said he did not know. If the mess is fixed in the hours that remain before the investiture, Jorge Azcón will be mayor of the capital of Aragon, despite the victory at the polls of the socialist Pilar Alegría. Zaragoza would thus go from having a government of change — incarnated in the councilor, from today, Pedro Santiesteve, from Zaragoza en Común — to being another of the pieces of the three-rights agreement.
Three ride together
Yesterday, June 14, also clarified the panorama in Zaragoza, where the PP announced an agreement with Citizens that the national spokesman for Vox said he did not know. Fixed the mess during the Madrid negotiation, the three right-wing parties will make Jorge Azcón mayor of the capital of Aragon, despite the victory at the polls of the socialist Pilar Alegría. Zaragoza would thus go from having a government of change – incarnated in the councilor, from today, Pedro Santiesteve – to be another of the pieces of the agreement of the three rights.
Granada and Jaén are two other provincial capitals within range of a pact between PP, Ciudadanos and Vox. In both, the PSOE was the most voted list, but the socialists, who will govern in Seville and Huelva, are locked in by the same formula that the Andalusian Government gave to Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla in December. Malaga, where Francisco de la Torre will repeat as mayor with the votes of Citizens, Almería and Córdoba complete the loot of the PP in a very favorable community for the right. After decades tied to the power of the socialists of Manuel Chaves, Juan Antonio Griñán and Susana Díaz, the “change” took shape this week with the withdrawal of the amendments to the budgets by Vox. The understanding of the three parties, even though Ciudadanos has continued to cover itself, is increasingly explicit.
The PSOE, which with 22,335 councilors was the winner on the night of May 26, has almost tied the mayoralties of Valladolid —with the municipality of Toma la Palabra—, Ibiza, Toledo, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Ciudad Real, Logroño, Castellón, Las Palmas, Lugo, Palma Cáceres or Badajoz, although in a handful of cases, Ciudadanos can tip the balance towards the PP. Segovia and León are delayed in the investiture, due to resources after the terrible count of the night of 26M.
Basque municipalities are exceptions to the rule. The PNV will govern in Bilbao and Donosti, and most likely in Vitoria, where the investiture agreement with the PSE, second force, seems a fact. Navarra is the example of the limits that the socialists have set: there will be no coalition to dislodge Navarra Suma —which includes PP, Citizens and the People’s Union of Navarro— from the mayor’s office and give the government to Joseba Asiron. The Socialist Party of Navarra has preferred that its name is not associated with that of Bildu and, therefore, renounce the possibility of helping to maintain a progress Council in the foral community.
The three A Coruña municipalities of change were left without a new policy on May 26 and will exercise critical support for the PSOE in the following legislature, which is advancing in the Galician municipalities —from Vigo to Ourense and Lugo— to counter the autonomous presidency of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, one of the few supporters at the state level of understanding with the PSOE de Sánchez.
The political irrelevance of Vox and Citizens in Galicia, large areas of Catalonia and the Basque Country has vaccinated these territories from the cold fusion of the three right-wing parties that has operated in the rest of the territories. The Balearic and Canary archipelagos also seem immune to the 155 roller that has spread in Castillas, Murcia and Andalusia.
València, where Joan Ribó will be re-elected mayor for Compromís, Zamora, where Izquierda Unida obtained the absolute majority, and above all Cádiz, where José Manuel González ‘Kichi’ remains at the controls of the projects of the 2015 change, are the corporations that accompany Barcelona in having governments “to the left of the PSOE”. All this panorama, except for a major surprise throughout a day in which the balance of forces for the next four years begins to be clarified.
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