Of the "neither red nor blue" The crutch of Trumpism: the decline of Ciudadanos

Albert Rivera was never a great speaker. And he starred in an anecdote in an electoral debate with Pablo Iglesias in November 2015 when he, after recommending Kant, was unable to cite one of his books and admitted not having read it. What distinguished Rivera was the sense of launching a new party in Catalonia, with people who came from the more Jacobin PSC, to form a political project that would combine progressive values ​​with liberal economic principles, well in agreement with the economic elites and a discourse of regeneration. against cases of corruption of traditional parties.

Rivera called this Iberian liberalism, which had more castizo overtones than anything else, and he distanced himself from his first allies –Miguel Durán was the head of the Libertas-Ciudadanos candidacy for the 2009 European elections, an extreme right-wing platform– to inserting himself into the European liberal family in full hangover of 15M and presenting himself in those elections of 20D 2015 as that “kind of right-wing Podemos” that Josep Oliu, president of Sabadell, demanded in June 2014.

Although Rivera was never a great orator and lived by his sense of smell until he lost it after the general elections of April 2019, it is also true that he made a fortune among his own with some famous jokes, such as, for example, that of “not even red nor blue”.

“How are we going to overcome the confrontation of reds and blues if we become blues?” asked former leader Toni Roldán when he left the party in June 2019: “How are we going to build a liberal project if we are not capable of confront with the extreme right that defends the exact opposite of what we defend? How are we going to defeat nationalism if we don’t put everything on our side, even if others don’t, to evacuate it from power? How are we going to build a liberal project in Spain if we are not capable of confronting the extreme right that is in the antipodes of everything we think?”

Indeed, Ciudadanos had decided that abandoning the center of the field to play on the right, forming sanitary cordons with the PSOE throughout Spain to prop up PP fiefs with the vote of the extreme right and, with this, resign, as Roldán said to “build a liberal project for Spain” to the point of being a crutch of Spanish Trumpism, embodied by Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Exactly four years after those municipal and regional elections in which he decided to share power with the PP and Vox, Ciudadanos suffered such a collapse last Sunday that he has given up running for the next general elections, advanced by Pedro Sánchez for 54 days from now. .

Albert Rivera had attended a liberal summit in Brussels before a European Council. It was June 20, 2019, there were four days left before Toni Roldán’s march and Rivera was rubbing shoulders with European prime ministers, presidents and commissioners. He came from having achieved 16% in the general elections in April, and was closing town halls and autonomous communities with the PP. Only with the PP.

That day, the liberal European family met, as they usually do, at the Egmont Palace in Brussels. It is a building built in 1532 by order of Françoise of Luxembourg, the widow of Jean, the Count of Egmont and the mother of the famous Count Lamoral of Egmont, commander, diplomat, participant in the Compromis des Nobles, a movement of Flemish and Protestant nobles who demanded a bit of a soft hand with the counter-reformation. Egmont, therefore, was someone little loved by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, governor of the Netherlands in the 16th century.

And in that building built by a family little loved by the Spanish 500 years ago, Rivera defended before a couple of Spanish journalists that it was a good idea, for whom he had coined the motto “neither red nor blue”, alliances only with the blue ; that it was a good idea to occupy seats with the votes of the extreme right; that it was a good idea for someone who presented himself as a regenerator to prop up the PP in Madrid, Castilla y León or Murcia, where he had been leading the institutions for decades.

The then president of Ciudadanos was convinced that the bet was good: there were still five months left for him to lose 47 seats and his political career would come to an end. And he was so euphoric that he even said that he had the endorsement of the Élysée for this, something that the French presidency hastened to deny.

But the course of events has not stopped challenging that bet of the Ciudadanos leadership from exactly four years ago. And, since then, there have been electoral disasters and the flight of leaders to the Popular Party, from the former Secretary of Organization, Fran Hervías, to the head of the European list, Luis Garicano.

Nothing has been able to stop the bleeding, neither the extraordinary congresses nor the replacements in the leadership nor the new faces that are trying to show their faces when the ship sinks.

Everyone who claims to be a liberal in Spain seeks to be linked to the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812, and Rivera tried, but the attempt ran out. The Cádiz Constitution is the first attempt to bury the Old Regime and give birth to a new country of citizen rights. Those Spanish liberals saw themselves in the Enlightenment, in the English, French and American revolutions, they even showed sympathy with the Latin American emancipatory movements. Even if it was to the detriment of an imperial Spain.

Spanish liberalism lived its best moments in the 19th century, to the extent that it was the thought that opposed absolute monarchies and the conservatism that fed them. He promoted confiscations, census suffrages, reduction of commercial obstacles, advances in press, printing, political and union freedoms. And he did it like the conservatives: sometimes, in collusion with the Crown, other times, in the Cortes, and, sometimes also, with broadswords –Espartero, Narváez, Pavía…–.

In the 20D electoral campaign, in 2015, the first for the Ciudadanos generals, Albert Rivera presented his “New common project for Spain” in Cádiz, in what is assumed to be the cradle of Spanish liberalism. Those were the days when Albert Rivera kept quoting Adolfo Suárez, he even had good words for Felipe González and José María Aznar; Those were the times in which the equidistance between “reds and blues” was sought rather than the old-new axis.

Ciudadanos wanted for a time to represent that bridge: with the agreement of the Transition –Rivera signed an investiture agreement with Pedro Sánchez in 2016 against the Abrazo, by Juan Genovés–; with cleanliness against corruption –before the Gürtel and the ERE–; with austerity against the waste of the political bubble –end of the Senate, of the Provincial Councils, etc–; from interventionism in the public sphere to institutional independence –of Justice, economic regulatory bodies…–. And the European mirror.

In this mirror, patterns are recognized that Rivera was losing in his transit from that November in Cádiz in 2015 to the “Iberian liberal” of 2019, an expression used by Ciudadanos in the campaign of the last generals, those of 10N of 2019, and that It came to be a kind of 21st century Lerrouxism. They talked about deepening democracy, the rule of law, human rights; of open, free and fair societies; of economic prosperity; sustainable development; and of a Europe that is accountable.

European liberals, unlike Ciudadanos, agree to both the left and the right. Or left and right at the same time. They are heterogeneous, but they have something in common: their pragmatism and their ability to adapt. Their agenda is to agree in exchange for influence, either through institutional positions or through programmatic lines. It is up to this point, that the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, came to the government of Belgium being the fifth most voted party.

But this was not understood by Rivera or Ciudadanos. And Manuel Valls, a reduced mirror of the figure of Emmanuel Macron, warned him: allying with the extreme right is expensive, closing to agreeing only with the right is not centrist. “You don’t agree with the extreme right, you defeat them at the polls,” the then Minister of European Affairs, Nathalie Loiseau, told him after the Andalusian agreement with Vox.

Ciudadanos thought that his move was the hegemony of the right by way of national hardness. But, precisely, European liberalism is the opposite: it consists in seeking synthesis, in becoming a bridge, in observing the institutional order, in economic liberalism and in hoisting the European flag as an overcoming symbol instead of “go for them”. “with the rojigualda in hand.

Why doesn’t a liberal alternative finish turning on in Spain as in Europe? Because the leadership of Ciudadanos lost the compass – or was it reunited with it? because the plurinationality of the State makes it difficult for an alternative to the peripheral nationalist historical hinges –PNV and CiU– to last if it is Spanish nationalist; because European liberalism hardly matches national nationalism; because that directly takes you to the right corner of the board; because if you want to present yourself to society as a regenerator, you cannot perpetuate regional governments dotted with corruption; and because there are still reds and blues and Ciudadanos decided that it was a good idea to lean on the almost black dark blues.

Until this Tuesday he looked in the mirror and found himself unable to compete in a general election.

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