2023-06-01 07:42:22
BarcelonaMunicipal elections have many ramifications. The first, as reality showed us on Monday, is that they can unexpectedly lead to an early general election in the middle of the summer holidays. But the consequences also reach the world of football. And, specifically, at Barça. The victory of Xavier Trias in the Barcelona elections has been very well received by Arístides Maillol. “Surely, for Barça, it will go better than with Colau”, a source with an important position in the organizational chart of the Barça club tells ARA. “With Colau it was complicated, but with Junts it will be easier”, he adds. It refers, above all, to the tug-of-war that has been and continues to be between Barça and the municipal government for the remodeling of the Camp Nou, whose works must begin in the coming weeks, and for the rental of the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium.
Trias won the elections in the Catalan capital on Sunday by winning 11 councilors. He was followed by the PSC, of Jaume Collboni, with 10; Barcelona en Comú, by Ada Colau, with 9; and ERC, of Ernest Maragall, with 5. With these results, Trias is not yet guaranteed to succeed Colau in the mayor’s office. But it will succeed in the event that the other political parties are not able to agree to add, at least, 21 councilors, or that Junts reaches this number by joining other formations.
Those who know firsthand the Camp Nou remodeling project note that, precisely, it was with Trias as mayor of Barcelona that he began to push forward the Espai Barça project as it is currently understood, after Sandro Rosell rejected the first remodeling project of the Joan Laporta stadium, created by the architect Norman Forster. “When they arrived at the mayor’s office in 2015, Ada Colau and Janet Sanz (responsible for the area of ecology, urban planning, infrastructure and mobility) overturned all the Espai Barça agreements that the club and Trias had reached previously. The General Metropolitan Plan (MPGM) had to be renegotiated almost from scratch,” a worker from the project at the time explains to ARA. “If Trias ends up being the mayor, Barça will have it easier, for sure,” he opines.
Barça still does not have the building permit
However, the fact that Joan Laporta’s board still does not have the construction license for the Camp Nou remodel is not exclusively the fault of the Colau government. The multiple changes that the current president of Barça has made to make the project his own, which have mainly been modeled by the company IDOM, have led to a considerable delay in this procedure. Thus, the Blaugrana club will start the remodeling works during the summer thanks to the demolition license it already has while waiting to obtain the construction license when there is a new mayor. “The licenses must be approved by the municipal government,” explains an expert in this type of work.
Political ties to the board of directors
Leaving aside the fact that Barça might be interested in Trias’s triumph for a practical matter, the Barça board has links with the political formation of Junts. The most obvious is that of the institutional vice-president and director responsible for Espai Barça, Maria Elena Fort, who was a member of Parliament for this party from May 2019 to December 2020. In addition, she integrated the candidacy of Quim Forn in the mayoralty of Barcelona in the 2019 elections.
But there are other political inclinations at the top of Barça. For example, that of social vice-president Antonio Escudero, who was a PSC councilor in La Jonquera, his place of residence and where he has created his business empire. In fact, he is a great friend of the socialist politician José Bono, former Spanish defense minister and former president of the Congress of Deputies. They are united by their birthplace, Salobre, a town of less than 500 inhabitants that belongs to the province of Albacete.
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