Local elections: Battle for the left in Barcelona

With less than two weeks until local elections on May 26, how things might look in Catalonia afterwards is becoming clearer as campaigning parties and candidates draw their red lines.

While voters in 948 municipalities around Catalonia will get a chance to choose who governs them on a local level, the most important result will be how things turn out in Barcelona.

Victory for the left, first place up for grabs

Whether mayor Ada Colau holds on to office or is replaced by pro-independence Esquerra (ERC) candidate Ernest Maragall, it looks as if Barcelona will get a left-wing city council.

In a televised debate on Sunday, Colau, non-partisan on the Catalan sovereignty issue, reiterated her call for a "progressive government" within the city, but said she would only be willing to work together with left-wing parties.

But Maragall ruled out any agreement with the Catalan Socialists (PSC) due to their unionist stance and expressed his intention to "replace" Colau rather than reach a deal with her.

An opinion poll last week put Colau (BComú) and Maragall neck-and-neck on 23% and 22.9% of the vote respectively, with PSC coming third on 12.9%.

What looks clear is that, whichever candidates win outright, parties explicitly defining themselves as left-wing are on course to amass roughly two-thirds of the vote in total.

From French prime minister to Barcelona mayor?

With between 7% and 11% of the vote, depending on the pollsters, former French prime minister Manuel Valls runs as an independent backed by the unionist Ciutadans party.

While Valls is unlikely to garner enough votes to become mayor, he is putting himself forward as "the only change possible" in a potential coalition with Jaume Collboni's Socialists.

Independence issue

Valls and Collboni agree on their opposition to independence, predicting that a coalition with ERC and Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) would be a "disaster" for Barcelona.

The JxCat candidate, former minister Joaquim Forn, is running his campaign for mayor from prison, as a defendant in the Catalan trial.

With some polls giving Forn as much as 11% of the vote, JxCat could ally with ERC to form the first-ever pro-independence coalition in the city, the same coalition governing Catalonia.

Parties in favor of a Catalan republic have never reached the milestone of 21 seats in the local council, which guarantees a majority. In the previous election, they got an all-time high of 18, and they end up even closer to a majority now.

PP hoping to hang on

The recent general election was a blow to the conservative People's Party (PP), which saw its seats in the Spanish parliament fall from 137 to 66, with only one seat in Catalonia.

With the polls putting PP's Josep Bou on no more than 6%, the party's priority in the Catalan capital will be to hold on to one or two of its three seats to avoid being erased from the map.

Esquerra seeking control across Catalonia

Elsewhere in Catalonia, the likely pattern is set to be tight races and complicated post-electoral scenarios due to the rise of multi-party politics.

After ERC historic win in the recent Spanish election, the party also hopes to gain significant numbers of councilors in the towns across the territory.

At each of the elections in the 40 years since the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, the Socialists had consistently won the most overall votes until 2011 when Convergència i Unió, the predecessor of Junts per Catalunya, overtook them.

The latter was also the most successful party in 2015 and have always won in terms of the number of local councilors, but this is now at risk, as ERC almost doubled its tally last time around and is set to continue the upward trend on May 26.