Who is going to vote for Ciudadanos in 2023?
💰🔊 The decline of Spain's liberal centre party and what it might have represented is bad news for voters in an age of populism and conspiracy.
🔊 AUDIO
Ciudadanos is at less than 2% of the vote in the polls. Spain’s electoral law sets the threshold for obtaining a seat at 3% in each constituency. In 2018, former party leader Albert Rivera suggested setting that three-percent threshold for the total vote at the national level for getting that first seat, in an attempt to keep regional separatists out of parliament. Those are the very low levels of attention and enthusiasm among Spanish voters that Ciudadanos is currently managing. They have been announcing all year that they are going to reestablish themselves, all while the most recognisable faces have jumped ship: Aguado in Madrid, Garicano in Europe, Marin in Andalusia. At the regional elections in Castilla y León in February, they managed to save one seat out of the thirteen they previously held. In Andalusia in June, they lost all of them, from 21 seats to zero. The conservative Popular Party is offering itself as a lifeboat. "I believe," said PP leader Feijóo this week, "that Ciudadanos is now a party that must say goodbye to the political sphere in the most dignified manner possible because if not, they won’t win any seats at the elections." He sees them as sharing the "ideological basis" and "strategic orientation" of the PP, even though Ciudadanos began as an alternative to the Socialist Party in Catalonia.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Spain Report to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.