Ciudadanos is going to zero in 2023 if they keep this up
Losers in Castilla y León, losers in Andalusia, senior figures jumping ship, no ideas and no plan. What will Arrimadas do?
Another former senior Ciudadanos leader has jumped from what is left of the sinking ship. Ignacio Aguado, the former Deputy First Minister of Madrid (with Ayuso, PP, until the motion of no confidence crisis in Murcia last year), has announced he's off and he wanted to have a bit of a rant on his way out in case anyone wasn't paying attention, which they mostly weren't. He is leaving because of the "awful election results" in the regional elections in Andalusia in June, which came after the "terrible results" in the regional elections in Castilla y León in February; a series of "electoral debacles" that demanded the "immediate resignation" of Arrimadas who, instead, opted to "kick the ball into the long grass" with "a total lack of strategy" that "does damage to the brand" and all with "a lack of leadership". No one listened to him so he's going home and that's that. Aguado goes a month after Luis Garicano left the European Parliament, with less resentment: "despite it sometimes seeming impossible for us to understand each other in the midst of the polarised noise, I am convinced that progress will come with the recovery of the broad consensus and values of the [1970s post-Franco] transition". He didn't say when he hoped that consensus and mutual understanding would come back, which is an understandable omission in Spain's bitter partisan politics in 2022.
In 2021, one of their 10 MPs in Congress in Madrid, Pablo Cambronero, left the party but stayed on in parliament, reducing their total to nine. In Castilla y León at the start of this year, they lost 150,000 votes and twelve out of thirteen seats. In Andalusia, they lost 550,000 votes and all of their seats. Begoña Villacís, the Deputy Mayor of Madrid, said in a radio interview in July that she did not rule out changing the party's name and that they no longer aspired to being a majority option for voters, just proposing "the debates Spain needs". Party leader Inés Arrimadas said in an interview with ABC a couple of weeks ago that she hoped she would know what Ciudadanos was in six-months time: "As we have been working on it for five months, I hope that in the next six months we will be able to see that renewed Ciudadanos". She added that this is not the first time the party has been through a "renovation process". If the leader of the party cannot explain right now what the party stands for in two simple senteces every time a journalist puts a microphone in front of her, how are MPs and grassroots members going to know?
At this stage of the game, is it an ideas problem, a voters problem or a leadership and execution problem, or is it all three now? Can Arrimadas bring the party back from going to zero in this year's regional elections, with nine MPs nationally, when she won't know what Ciudadanos means until Christmas at the earliest, after she has spent all year thinking about it? 2023 is a general election year in Spain. What is she going to offer Spanish voters, beyond a debating society? What ideology is the party going to defend, if it failed to reform Spanish politics from the liberal centre? What is their political strategy going to be in practice, if their previous one of being the junior partner in coalition has failed? What is the point of their MPs? If they cannot energetically find quick answers to these questions, the answer will be that they're going to zero nationally too, and Spain will be left to the radical right and the radical left and the old right and left establishment parties, with no centre party.
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