Collboni will face a vote of confidence after another budget defeat

Barcelona"Three attempts, zero agreements." With this epitaph, Gemma Tarafa, spokesperson for Barcelona en Comú in the City Council, announced her group's abstention on the Catalan capital's 2026 budget. This stance has meant that, for the third year in a row, Mayor Jaume Collboni has failed to secure a majority vote for the budget. This time, he will get it approved through a vote of confidence, which he has won due to the other groups' inability to form an alternative majority. However, barring any surprises—the final year of a term, with parties already focused on the election campaign, makes it more difficult to forge broad agreements—Collboni is on track to become the first mayor without a budget. Once the defeat was confirmed, Collboni announced that he will sign the decree to submit to a vote of confidence, which will be debated next week. Unless there is an unexpected turn of events, the mayor will also lose that vote. A one-month period will then begin, during which, if the opposition groups have not reached an agreement to bring forward a motion of no confidence with an alternative candidate, the budget will be automatically approved. This will repeat the scenario under which Collboni passed the 2024 budget.

This time, however, an agreement was closer than in previous years. This is demonstrated by the fact that the Comuns opted for abstention rather than a vote against. For this reason, Tarafa criticized Collboni's "haste" and reproached him for choosing to bring the budget to the plenary session immediately when he could have waited and allowed more time for negotiations. "When a negotiation is progressing, there's no point in stopping it," he said, emphasizing that during Ada Colau's last term, the budgets that were approved were always put to a vote in the December plenary session. The fourth deputy mayor for Economy, Jordi Valls, responded that "it's pointless to delay the negotiation when there are aspects on which an agreement is impossible."

As Tarafa explained, despite making concessions on some points, the municipal government has not budged on some issues that are "key" for the left-wing coalition. For example, on the need to stop investing in the city's tourism promotion.

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