Will Rivera's plan sink Ciudadanos at the next election?
(30/07/2019) Leader pushes the party to the right and stays on course, despite high-level protest resignations.
(Original published: 30/07/2019)
The FT published an editorial on Spain two days ago but appears to have missed the past two months of Spanish politics. While correctly noting the situation is in "gridlock", the paper recommended Ciudadanos "rethink its opposition to a coalition" to give Sánchez a stable majority and that such a coalition could allow "greater regional autonomy, while keeping the sovereignty of the Spanish state intact" and "tensions over Catalan independence might dissipate".
Having started off in Catalonia with roots on the left, and having officially ditched social democracy for liberalism in 2017, it has become clear since the general election in April that Albert Rivera is sticking to his new grand strategic shift towards dominating the Spanish right. Sánchez cottoned on before the campaign began—"he must have a wardrobe full of jackets, last Sunday he took off the supposedly liberal jacket and now he has put on a far-right jacket that smells of mothballs"—and since then they have not stopped.
The two men are not even on speaking terms, never mind coalition partner terms. The Ciudadanos tax spokesman, Francisco de la Torre, joined an increasingly long list of senior centrist leaders and founders—favourable to a deal with the PSOE—and resigned at the end of last week with a searing farewell letter and a bombshell interview with El Confidencial: "My party leader did not go to a meeting with the Prime Minister and did not answer the phone".
Ciudadanos founder Francesc de Carreras, a professor of constitutional law, published an open letter to Mr. Rivera in June: "I can't understand how you are failing us now, Albert, how Ciudadanos is failing us, that that once mature, responsible leader has become a fickle teenager doing a 180º strategic u-turn, putting alleged party interests before the general interest of Spain".
It later turned out that Mr. Carreras had already left the party in April, before the general election. Underlining the ideological shift are the regional deals Ciudadanos is doing, or allowing to be done, with Santiago Abascal's ultra-conservative party Vox, despite a public refusal to embrace them.
From the perspective of this new major shift in the party's basic ideology, Sánchez is "the enemy to take down" says Mr. de la Torre, whom Mr. Rivera had not spoken to for two months either before he jumped ship. The former tax spokesman—himself a tax inspector—does not now know what the party's economic plan now is. He describes the confidence debate the country has just witnessed, to try to reappoint Sánchez as Prime Minister, as "total distrust". Mr. Rivera's most tiresome tag line, repeated during the debate, was "Sánchez's gang".
El Mundo reported in February, indeed, that it was Ciudadanos' decision to take part in a right-wing rally in Colón (Madrid) that encouraged Sánchez to bring forward the general election to the end of April. In his resignation letter, Mr. de la Torre said the new version of the party was now wasting all of the talent and hard work it had spent time building up in the previous parliament. Rivera's new hardline stance was forcing the socialist to choose between "repeating the election or putting together the most radical government in the history of Spain".
"We have to swear to undo Pedro Sánchez's plan", Mr. Rivera told a new intake of leaders loyal to Mr. Rivera yesterday. He believes the party has increased its number of MPs from 32 to 57 because they want to "govern Spain and undo Sánchez's plan, which is the same thing".
The Ciudadanos leader has now stuck to his new long-term plan to dominate the right—not dissimilar to Pablo Iglesias's wish to attempt to dominate the left a few years ago—through a round of senior centrist resignations and a whole confidence debate in Congress. Those are real consequences, so he clearly believes that is the path forward.
Only the next elections will now prove him right or wrong. Having obtained 16% of the vote at the ballot in April, the party has lost 3-4 points in the polls since then and is trending downwards, at around 12.5%.