Ciudadanos refuses to disappear and vindicates its past without reference leaders

Ciudadanos does not want to definitively close the blinds despite the disaster that they have suffered little by little at the polls, which has practically made them disappear from all institutions, except for a few city councils in which they still have representation. The few leaders who have not abandoned ship have decided to continue until the economic remainder they have left in their coffers runs out, which party sources estimate at more than six million euros.

With that money, the group that Albert Rivera founded in 2006 intends to rise from its ashes and resist for a few more years, although without its references and the visible heads that were its hallmarks both in its beginnings and in the more recent past, such as himself. Rivera, her successor, Inés Arrimadas, or the former parliamentary spokesperson, Edmundo Bal, nor her predecessor, Juan Caros Girauta –now a Vox MEP–, nor the ephemeral and last leaders, Patricia Guasp and the MEP Adrián Vázquez –who already represents in Brussels to the PP–, or the former vice mayor of Madrid, Begoña Villacís, today, like many other of her colleagues, working in private companies.

The emblematic leaders who were part of Rivera’s first executives have also disappeared from the poster, such as the economist Luis Garicano, his pupil Toni Roldán, Francisco de la Torre and Javiert Nart – who, however, repeated on the European lists – , or the former deputies Miguel Gutiérrez, Guillermo Díaz and María Muñoz. Nor are the regional leaders who once managed to seat Ciudadanos in almost all the regional Parliaments, such as the Catalan Carlos Carrizosa, the Andalusian Juan Marín – who ended up throwing himself into the arms of the PP, as did the Valencian Toni Cantó, although with worse luck–; or the Madrid-born Ignacio Aguado, as well as Rivera’s ‘star’ signings: Bal himself, Marcos de Quinto and Sara Giménez, among others. One after another they succumbed to the electoral bloodshed of Ciudadanos, which led them to distance themselves from the project. These failures pushed the party to give up attending the last general elections in July 2023. One of the few leaders who remained ‘alive’ in Ciudadanos was Francisco Igea, he was expelled by the previous leadership along with Bal due to the harsh criticism that both poured against the dome. The same fate, but for different reasons, befell the only regional president that the party had achieved in Melilla, Eduardo de Castro.

Cañas, last head of the European list, says goodbye

The last appointment with the polls to which the party appeared was the European ones, in which they were not represented either with the Catalan Jordi Cañas leading the candidacy after the escape of Vázquez. Precisely, Cañas, until now the party’s political spokesperson, said goodbye to his position at the VII extraordinary General Assembly held between the 26th and 27th of this month in Ciudad Real under the motto ‘Let’s change the Future’, in which he was ratified as general secretary. the Navarrese Carlos Pérez-Nievas, one of the few former officials from the Arrimadas era who remains faithful to the project. The conclave, of course, did not miss Carrizosa, who also said goodbye, nor some of the founders of the party, such as the journalist Arcadi Espada or the actor Albert Boadella whose daughter, Mariana Boadella, former government spokesperson in the La Mancha City Council, took office as Secretary of Organization, and who in his speech at the conclave insisted: “We have been able to change many things, and we will be able to be reborn and change the future.” An idea that was repeatedly repeated by the new leaders who continue to believe that Ciudadanos can continue to be “useful” to Spanish society, capable of “transforming” Spain and “consolidating a political space that banishes the two-party way of doing and being” of the PSOE. and the PP. As they insisted, in these coming months the new leadership “will lay the foundations to offer the electorate a political project on par with Spain.”