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Who's Who in Barcelona’s 2019 Local Elections

Get to know the people opting in to govern the city for the next four years.

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Photo by Jordi Play, courtesy of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, 2012. (Wikimedia).

On May previous to every leap year, Barcelona celebrates local elections to designate its government officials for a period of four years. In 2019, our local elections will be held together with the elections for the European Parliament.

The Ciutat Comtal enjoys a special political status (see Municipal Charter) that provides to its governing bodies with power to rule over a wide range of subjects not common to other Spanish cities.

Our city has two levels of government. A central body—the city council— to manage city-wide issues and ten district councils, decentralized entities to act over specific geographical areas. Barcelona's city council has 41 seats and all are up for election.

If you are not familiar with Spain's local elections system, here are some of its key features:

2019 mayoral election posters for Barcelona en Comú - En Comú Guanyem (top) and Barcelona pel Canvi - Ciutadans (bottom).

2019 mayoral election poster for Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya - Ernest Maragall Alcalde + BCN - NOVA - Acord Municipal.

2019 mayoral election poster for Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya - Compromís per Barcelona - Units - Candidatura de Progrés.

2019 mayoral election poster for Junts per Catalunya.

The Lists

As any list has the potential to fulfill all the seats in the Council (41), all of them are comprised of the names of 41 people.

For 2019 local elections 25 candidate lists were presented but the list from platform Barcelona Ets Tu (You are Barcelona) didn't make the cut.

The candidate lists (ordered as published in the oficial bulletin) and their heads are:

Platform & Head of List

The arithmetic for this year’s election leaves us with 984 candidates to fill 41 seats.

We vote for lists but that doesn’t mean that the most voted list will get all of the seats. Or that, in our case, every seat has 24 contenders. The city's demographics and the number of seats to be filled determine a threshold of voters a list should reach to be considered in the distribution of seats. In the case of Barcelona this number is set to 5%.

After this sieve, to assign the seats in a way that reflects more accurately the results of the elections, seats in the council are assigned proportionally using the d'Hondt method. This method picks people from the lists in an orderly fashion based on the percentage of votes a list received.

Some Heads of Lists:

The new mayor will be elected by a plenary assembly of the members of the newly formed city council, voting for the heads of the lists. This will happen immediately after the entity is formed. The law dictates that if an absolute majority is not reached for this purpose, the head of the most voted list in the elections will become the new mayor.

We have prepared a short summary of the candidates with the greatest chances to become the next mayor of the Ciutat Comtal. All of them are Barcelonians, and have experience in local government. Again, in the order provided by the official bulletin, they are:

Press conference with Ernest Maragall and Andreu Van Den Eynde, 2017 (Wikimedia).

Ernest Maragall

Among the best positioned candidates in the mayoral race, Maragall is the one with the longest political career. A former employee of the city council occupying technical positions, he participated in local elections in 1995 and became a member of the city council for the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) up until 2004. During his tenure he presided over the Sant Andreu District and several other municipal institutes and committees. Later, Maragall was a member of the Catalan Parliament for three terms representing PSC. He was appointed minister of education in the Catalan government in the 2006-2010 term. He was a deputy in the European Parliament with the Group of the Greens 2014-2016. Later in the second half of 2018 he was appointed minister of foreign affairs under the current regional government.

An activist against Franco in his youth, he was one of the founders of PSC in 1978. He left the party in 2014 due to disagreements over matters related to the independence movement. He started a new party and, after a semi-retirement, he became politically active again, most recently with the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC).

Manuel Valls campaigning for mayor 2019 (Facebook).

Manuel Valls

Valls has devoted his life to a political career and has experience in almost all levels of the French Government with the French Socialist Party (Parti socialiste). Valls entered the party in 1980 and was elected a Member of National Assembly for Essonne in 2002, a position he held until 2018. From 2001 to 2012 he was mayor of Évry, a commune close to Paris. He was designated minister of interior in 2012 and prime minister of France in 2014 under the presidency of François Hollande. Later he lost in the primaries of his party to run as candidate in the 2017 presidential election.

Valls’ reformist agenda as well as the procedures his government used to pass bills alienated him from his party and from workers. In France, Valls became one of the most recognizable voices pushing what has been known as the Third Way (as proposed by Tony Blair) inside the SP. His efforts to renovate (or relocate) the socialist party took him closer to the principles of social liberalism, a circumstance that led him to be labeled as a neo-conservative inside his party and to an apparent dead end in his political career.

Valls’ sudden arrival in Barcelona’s political race and the discrepancies between his beliefs and the leaning towards the right of its main supporters (Ciutadans) have not allowed him to project a clear message other than he is looking for “a fresh start after a significant political defeat”.

Jaume Collboni in an open assembly with Pedro Sánchez in 2015. Photo by PSCBarcelona (Flickr).

Jaume Collboni

Collboni is a lawyer by profession that started his political activism while at university and later in the ranks of the Unió General de Treballadors (UGT), one of the two principal trade unions in Spain. In UGT he held a position in its national executive board. He joined the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) in 1994 and became an executive chair in 2008. He was an elected member of the Catalonian Parliament between 2010 and 2014, a position he left to contend in Barcelona’s mayoral race of 2015. As a result, he became a member of the city council.

Collboni is part of a new generation of leaders called to replace the current executive board of the PSC. His time to shine as spokesperson for his party in the regional parliament clashed with the economic crisis, which turned voters to the right and brought an insurgence of new voices in Spain’s political spectrum. In 2015, Collboni was asked to retake his seat in city hall for his party. He lost the mayoral race to Colau but a year into the term, he came to an agreement with her and, as a result, PSC joined Colau’s government and Collboni was appointed second deputy to the mayor's office and in charge of Business, Culture and Innovation areas of government. The independence movement didn’t leave the Ajuntament untouched. After the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) supported Congress’ motion to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy (under article 155 of the Spanish Constitution), members of En Comú pushed Colau to end any agreement with PSC. Colau delegated the decision to an internal vote that consummated the breakup.

A balance of Collboni’s performance in city hall is challenging. For more than a third of the term he was in charge of one of Colau’s government’s star projects, the PEUAT plan, to reorder the touristic sector. This plan suspended the issuing of permits for the development of new hotels in old town neighborhood. Once Collboni became part of the opposition, the first motion he introduced to the chamber (approved, weakening Colau’s government), was one that precisely called for the change of the PEUAT, a project he had championed just months before.

Junts per Catalunya (Facebook 2019).

Joaquim Forn

Forn is a lawyer that has been elected repeatedly as a member of the city council between the years of 1999 and 2017 with Convergència i Unió (CiU) alliance. Forn reached the position of deputy mayor after his party won the 2011 Barcelona local elections. As such, he held the presidency of several municipal entities until his party lost control of the council in the 2015 local elections. Forn was reelected that year and stayed in the city council until he was appointed minister of interior for the regional government between the months of July and October of 2017. Shortly after he became a member of the Catalan Parliament in 2017 but resigned in 2018.

In spite of having a long career inside the city council, Forn’s name only became prominent in this body when he was appointed deputy mayor and spokesperson for Xavier Trias in 2011. But Forn’s biggest headlines would arrive after he was appointed regional minister of interior by Carles Puigdemont in 2017. First, as the Generalitat's head of security and emergencies during the terrorist attacks that took place in Barcelona and Cambrils in August 2017. And, later, when in October of that year the regional parliament declared a Catalan Republic triggering a sequence of events that led to the preventive detention of eight members of the regional government, Forn included. Forn is participating in the 2019 elections from jail while the trial for the events of October is still in development. Due to this state of affairs, his candidacy has been challenged in court. Preventing a possible reverse outcome from this challenge, former spokesperson of the regional government Elsa Artadi and former Vice President of Catalonia Neus Munté, are listed second and third on their platform.

Ada Colau speaking at a Barcelona en Comú event (2016). Photo by Barcelona En Comú (Flickr).

Ada Colau

Colau is the youngest of this set of contenders; she is a former student of philosophy that developed her social and political activism around Barcelona’s housing problems. First linked to the okupa (squatter) movement, she created a group called V de Vivienda in 2006 to protest the effects the crisis in the housing market had on Spanish families. This led her to then participate in the foundation of Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca—PAH) in 2009. There, she acted as spokesperson for the organization. In order to avoid conflicts of interests, in May 2014 she resigned from the PAH and founded Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform that participated in the local elections and subsequently led her to be sworn in as mayor in May 2015.

The crisis of representation faced by the political establishment after 2008’s economic crash made Colau’s name known not only in Spain. Colau’s access to the mayoral chair allowed her to practice a bottom-up approach to politics that places local governments as the engine of political action in what has been called municipalism. However, this approach challenges the current status quo in a way that puts to the test the skills of any political operative.

Even though Colau was elected mayor by an absolute majority of the votes in the council, her government has been marked by instability derived from a lack of a majority in the council and a reluctance to participate in government with the established parties. In spite of a short lived covenant with PSC, her program which is strongly centered on social policies, has faced a rocky path and delays that leave the balance of the incumbent mayor of Barcelona with a noticeable lack of effectiveness and a set of promises unkept.

Final Notes

As we are voting for lists it is important to pay attention to each list’s members. It is not unheard of that the presence of a person in one team may alter your perception of a group. Also, it is not unusual for parties to reshuffle their operatives between different bodies or levels of government. In 2019’s election lists you’ll find:

At the beginning of the year the main contenders to become the 120th Mayor of Barcelona seemed to be Colau and Valls. However, the big competitors would be Collboni and Maragall if you subscribe to what has been called (after the saint) the Matthew effect—those parties with the most voters in the general elections will get more voters in the local event. Political analysts disagree with this idea and point out that the closeness of the voters to the challenges of the cities and to candidates pose a different dynamic to local elections.

Whatever the case, and wherever your sympathies fall, go vote! The improvement of our world starts in our neighborhoods.

Héctor Cols.

Héctor Cols is an occasional contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan, covering human or geographical landscapes and helping with data related issues. Héctor is a curious software developer that finds no joy in conversation with Siri or Alexa and prefers to mingle with other kinds of outsiders. A fan of all things Barcelona, Héctor was in charge of the culture section of Resident Aliens, a podcast of the American Society of Barcelona.

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