The mayor who doesn't want to be mayor

BarcelonaCambrils will have a new mayor this Thursday. It will be the fourth government in the last five years. In a city council fragmented by seven political parties, this mandate was not expected to be easy either. And so it was. The socialist Alfredo Clúa announced last Friday his resignation as mayor after Junts decided to leave the municipal government following the expulsion of its spokesperson and was left in a minority with 9 of the 21 councillors. A decision that caught its other government partners, ERC and the Comuns, off guard, who were confident of maintaining the pact in the council.

In fact, even the spokesperson for Junts, Enric Daza, was willing to resign if this served to renew the agreement between the four parties. It has been of no use. Clua has decided to resign as mayor. But, curiously, he is not going home, but will form part of a new executive with Nuevo Movimiento Ciudadano (NMC), the platform that won the elections with six councillors, and the PP, which has two councillors. Oliver Klein, spokesman for this municipalist formation, will be the new mayor.

"Perhaps it would have been easier not to step aside and hold on to the chair, but that is not my way of doing things, Cambrils is above any chair," says Clúa, who admits that it does not usually happen that a mayor leaves the mayor's office without other motions of censure in between. The disagreements with Junts have been key in his resignation. "Differences between colleagues are never aired in the press and blackmail is never a good tool in political negotiations," he criticises. Without a stable majority, nor budgets and with an open conflict with municipal workers, the mayor until now gives up the mayor's baton. "Everything is important, but the math is what it is and now we are a minority government of three parties and there is no such thing," he stressed.

Whatever the case, the mayor's decision has come as a cold shower for the current government colleagues. "The PSC has not fought to try to govern in a minority with external support," laments the Republican Camí Mendoza, first deputy mayor and who has acted as accidental mayor these last few days. "Our surprise came this Monday when it was made public that the PSC would allow Klein to be mayor because we agreed to continue talking, but no meeting has been held," reveals Mendoza, who was to be mayor in the last year of the mandate as the second most voted force with four councillors. "They have not been sincere nor have they been straightforward," she says. Jordi Barberà, spokesman for the Commons and councillor for Culture and Education, also does not mince his words when it comes to attacking Clúa. "She has abandoned the ship and left it adrift," he says.

"It was an unnatural alliance"

The new mayor, Oliver Klein, considers that it was the chronicle of a death foretold: "The Titanic pact. It was an unnatural alliance to block us and the different parties in government have been questioning its continuity, despite trying to deny the evidence." The top leader of NMC justifies the entry of the socialists into his government: "The only alternative to achieve a majority was through us and they will have made their calculations that this is the best option."

Klein will thus recover the mayor's office that he already achieved in 2021, but then in a much more traumatic way. He did so after leaving the ERC and Junts government, unseating Mendoza with a motion of censure that he led with the support of the entire opposition: PSC, Ciutadans, PP and two non-attached councilors who had left Junts and the orange formation. A motion that both pro-independence parties called a betrayal and that opened wounds that caused him to be left out of the government in the last elections, despite winning them. Now he is back and without the need to promote a new motion of censure.