[ad_1]
Press play to listen to this article
MADRID — Ciudadanos was the future of Spanish politics … until it wasn’t.
Now, just three years after it seemed on the verge of a major national breakthrough, the party faces a crunch election in Madrid that could decide its future — and according to the polls, it’s not looking great.
In early 2018, Ciudadanos was riding high. In Catalonia, where the party was born a decade earlier, it had just defeated its pro-independence adversaries and won a regional election. On a national level, it was leading in opinion polls. With much of the media, business community and electorate behind him, its young leader, Albert Rivera, looked every bit a future prime minister.
“I’d like to govern this country,” he told a meeting of local leaders in Barcelona, explaining that he envisaged himself heading a “modern, reformist government with a future.”
But there was no such future for him or for Ciudadanos.
Three years later, Rivera has gone, his party crippled by strategic mistakes and humiliated in a string of election debacles. The upcoming regional ballot in Madrid could be the death knell for a party that has experienced a dramatic rise and fall.
Left meets right
Ciudadanos was formed in Catalonia in 2006, as a unionist response to the rising tide of nationalism in the region. Its founding members were politicians, journalists, academics and other public figures from both the left and right. The appointment of their first leader was almost farcically arbitrary: 26-year-old lawyer Rivera was chosen because his name was first on the list in alphabetical order.
“It was created with the conviction that the whole idea of left and right was in the past,” said Arcadi Espada, a journalist who was one of the party’s founders. “The most obvious [current] example of that is [French President Emmanuel] Macron. Is Macron on the left or the right? No, he’s someone who applies what he believes are the right criteria according to the political context.”
After making gradual, but limited, gains in the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, the party went nationwide in 2014. It was a good moment to do so: popular anger was boiling over in the wake of the eurozone crisis and a slew of corruption cases, both of which the leftist Podemos had already capitalized on.
“Their original idea was: We’re here to clean out politics, but we’re doing it from a central position, a position of consensus,” said José Pablo Ferrandiz, senior researcher at polling firm Metroscopia. “In contrast to Podemos they weren’t aspiring to govern but rather to facilitate the formation of governments.”
With that in mind, Ciudadanos formed a series of regional and municipal governing coalitions with both the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (PP), the two forces that had dominated Spain for the previous three decades.
But the 2017-2018 Catalonia crisis, during which Ciudadanos maintained a strident, often fierce, opposition to the region’s independence movement, reshaped the Spanish political landscape. The party gained around two million voters during that period, many of them right-leaning Spaniards who were drawn to an unapologetic defense of national identity.
A strong performance in the April 2019 general election gave Ciudadanos 57 seats and left it just 200,000 votes behind the PP. To many, a governing coalition with the PSOE of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez beckoned.
“It seemed obvious that a social democratic party and a liberal party had to work together at a time of rising populism, of political instability everywhere,” said Toni Roldán, who was the party’s economics spokesman. “This was a unique opportunity.”
Former party figures say Rivera’s personal ambitions were inflated by the electoral result. Fearing that if he did enter government as the minority partner he would never become prime minister himself, he refused to enter a coalition.
Roldán and several other moderate figures in the party resigned in protest. Rivera, meanwhile, cast himself as a new leader of the right, targeting Sánchez as the enemy.
The Socialist PM, he said, was “criminalizing those who believe in the constitution, and making pacts with those who want to liquidate Spain” by engaging with Catalan and Basque nationalists. He also claimed Sánchez was “playing with Franco’s bones” by proposing the transferal of the dictator’s remains from his mausoleum.
Worrying the French
The lurch away from the center caused alarm beyond Spain’s borders. In France, Macron’s government publicly queried Ciudadanos’ willingness to engage in talks with the far-right Vox. Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who had run for mayor of Barcelona with the backing of Ciudadanos, fell out with the party.
In a crowded political right, it was the PP and Vox that made gains in the repeat election of November 2019. Ciudadanos lost 47 of its 57 seats, a result that prompted Rivera’s resignation from politics.
“Albert Rivera has a great deal to do with the success of Ciudadanos,” said Espada. “But he contributed even more to its failure.”
It was the beginning of what appears to be an unstoppable slide. A poor performance in the Basque election in July 2020 was followed by the Catalan election in February, when the party slipped from first place to sixth.
“We stopped exciting people,” Inés Arrimadas, who succeeded Rivera as leader, admitted to El País recently. The 39-year-old has led Ciudadanos back towards its original bridge-building agenda, engaging with the leftist government during the pandemic without being averse to lambasting it.
However, the party was in difficulty again recently, when it split from the PP, its coalition partner, in the Murcia region due to scandals linked to vaccinations and alleged corruption. It staged a no-confidence motion against its erstwhile partner that backfired when three Ciudadanos politicians defected.
In recent months several dozen officials have left the party, 19 of them high-ranking figures. Of those, nine have gone to the PP, including Fran Hervías, formerly party secretary.
While the ongoing collapse of Ciudadanos removes one of the PP’s potential coalition partners, it also creates electoral space for the conservatives.
“With three parties on the right it was very difficult for the right to form a government, given the party system in Spain,” said pollster Ferrandiz. “With two parties [the PP and Vox] it’s much easier.”
The Madrid regional election on May 4 is looking like a crunch moment for Ciudadanos — and quite possibly yet another disaster.
The PP and Ciudadanos have been governing in coalition. But polls show that the conservatives, under regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, are benefitting from the woes of the junior partner, which could struggle to secure the 5 percent of votes needed to remain in the local parliament.
As its national influence wanes, the European Parliament has become something of a safe haven for Ciudadanos, which still has seven MEPs in the liberal Renew Europe group.
“It was the most successful experiment in political innovation and entrepreneurship there has ever been in Spain and one of the most successful experiments Europe has seen in liberal politics,” said Roldán of his old party.
It has also been one of the biggest cautionary tales Spanish — and European — politics has seen.
[ad_2]
Source link
