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They put together three tables and a dozen chairs and proceeded to start the meeting of the Ciudadanos leadership in Alicante. It is assumed that in the first place they approved the minutes of the previous meeting before going on to talk about their things. They had met at a McDonald’s, because it’s the kind of place where they don’t look down on you if you only order a coffee. In November 2022, and after leaving the headquarters in a central area of the city for not being able to pay for it, the leaders offered the image that illustrates the obituary of the party that in 2018 believed it was going to govern Spain.
The photograph – what was the person who took it thinking – was greeted with mockery and laughter. Edmundo Bal became dignified and tried to boast of the vow of poverty: “Better in a McDonald’s than in a reformed headquarters with black money or eating shrimp with the money from the EREs.” He preferred not to remember that Ciudadanos governs in the Alicante City Council and in the Provincial Council with the party that reformed its headquarters with black money. You can’t digest that irony even if you accompany it with a Big Mac that you can’t even afford.
When they die, political parties do it in slow motion. As long as they have elected positions in parliaments, they continue their activity pulling dignity and striving to maintain their relevance. You are lying on the canvas bleeding all over the place and with your face made of chrome and you tell your coach that you can continue, not to throw in the towel. Easy, coach, I’ve got it where I want it. You’re missing a couple of teeth and can barely open your right eye, but you’re reluctant to admit the inevitable.
For this reason, Ciudadanos celebrates its primaries this week to elect the new national leadership a few months before the regional and municipal elections that can certify his death. You have to pretend that you have one more opportunity, one more fight to fight. They face three candidacies of which the two main ones are led by Edmundo Bal, parliamentary spokesman, and Adrián Vázquez, MEP, who has gathered twice as many endorsements as his rival.
Inés Arrimadas is part of Vázquez’s list in a symbolic position. It is not yet clear if she appears there as a cameo from an old star who only aspires to small roles or if it is a maneuver to prevent Bal from being elected, which would make it difficult for him to be a candidate again in the general elections. She’s like Gloria Swanson in ‘Twilight of the Gods’ saying, “I’m big. It’s the movies that have gotten small.” And Ciudadanos has become a very small party.
In these moments of agony, the parties can put on a noisier show than their real strength. Ciudadanos has accomplished a singular feat. There are nine deputies in Congress – they lost one who fled to the mixed group – and they are fighting. Arrimadas and Bal sit together in the chamber, which makes everything more tragicomic.
The primaries are the final chapter of a “refounding” process that was said to end even with the change of the party’s name. The expectations are now not so high. Curiously, the two opposing sides agree that the reason for the decline is to be found in the fact that the party does not have a very different message from that of the PP. So why should voters pay attention to it when deciding their vote? Better to choose the brand that has been in the supermarket the longest if the new one tastes the same.
“Today everyone tells you that we are a right-wing party,” said Bal. It will be because this is how the party has manifested itself on the only front in which they retain a certain public relevance, the parliamentary group of Congress in which Bal is number two, so something must have had to do with that drift.
The truth is that his great rival does not make a very different analysis. “One of the main mistakes was to agree exclusively with the PP at the regional level,” said Adrián Vázquez. In the same interview, the MEP almost denied himself: “With Sánchez we cannot even go around the corner, which does not mean that at the municipal and regional level we can agree to the left and right.” In other words, if they don’t want to see Sánchez even in the paint, it’s because they are comfortable in the block on the right.
As in all self-respecting intense primaries, Vázquez’s candidacy dealt with linking Bal to absolute evil. “I will never be in the Popular Party. We will have to see if you will be in the Socialist Party,” Patricia Guasp told Bal in the debate on the candidacies, demonstrating that in terms of verbal knives, those who aspire to replace the leaders of Ciudadanos will not They have nothing to envy to the previous ones.
In reality, Arrimadas, Vázquez and Bal are only playing the roles that were assigned some time ago, at the time when Albert Rivera presided over the party. His greatest failure has been not being able to change the direction in which Ciudadanos was going, which caused him a spectacular defeat in November 2019 and which condemned him to suffer an even worse one in the following elections.
It must be admitted that Arrimadas initially tried to reorient the party to the point it was in before Rivera decided that he was the charismatic leader who should lead the bloc of the right against the aging Mariano Rajoy. It was not a radical turn, but a threat to recover the role of Ciudadanos as a liberal reference different from conservatives and social democrats.
He had the audacity to announce that he was willing to negotiate the budgets at the end of 2020 in the midst of a pandemic that was forcing the parties to make unprecedented decisions. The response from part of her party and from the right-wing press was fierce.
Rivera was the one who delivered the fatal blow. “You can be lax, you can have a waist, but you have to have dignity,” he said when presenting her book, implying that Arrimadas risked being left without her. The former president commented that if he had done the same, he would have had to be accompanied by bodyguards to protect himself from his voters.
The internal rebellion had already subdued Arrimadas, forcing her to back down. From that moment on, she had no choice but to continue walking towards self-destruction. Fate had been sealed since Rivera had turned off an attempt at dissent in 2019 when a few leaders demanded that the party recover the idea of a centrist party willing to influence with pacts to the left or the right. Rivera then responded with an act of reaffirmation of his leadership in which everyone applauded the Dear Leader.
The unknowns about Ciudadanos have ceased to have a great impact on Spanish politics. Now everything seems to depend on whether Arrimadas will keep her job as head of the parliamentary group and possible candidate on the Madrid list in the general elections. For everything else, there is the employment office that the PP has opened to collect the remains of Citizens that interest them.
“Our only red line is the parties that want to break Spain”, said Adrián Vázquez. The bad thing is that Spain is already clear about it and seems to have made the decision to break Ciudadanos and send the party to the history books.
