On January 12, 2018, on the cusp of success, Albert Rivera he woke up with the news of his life: a Metroscopia survey gave it as the first strength in voting intention in the general elections that were to be held in just over a year. The data was spectacular: Ciudadanos would have obtained then 27.1% of the votes, compared to 23.2% for the PP and 21% for the PSOE. It was the moment of glory de Rivera, that boy who had become famous in his day for posing nude in the Catalan regional elections of 2006, in which he won a modest but significant three seats, from which he built his slow but irresistible rise. When Albert Rivera broke into Catalan politics, he did so hand in hand with a few frustrated intellectuals because of the irrelevance to which Pujolismo had first left them and, later, Maragallismo. Rivera was skillful because he understood that he could build his growth with a frontal speech to the Catalanist hegemony, and he realized that in the Catalan oasis it was profitable to be an agitator, even if it was based on lies: The leader of Ciudadanos understood before anyone else that the truth was the least important thing, what mattered was explaining to the media in the rest of Spain what they wanted to hear, even if it wasn’t true.
And that was how a party began to grow with one of the first ‘fake news’ in the modern history of Spain, which consisted of keep repeating that the Castilian was persecuted in Catalonia, a lie that was gladly buying, without contrasting it with reality, a part of the state press. This is how Ciudadanos grew, but always within an autonomous community, and always with the banner of controversy and tension.
Until 15-M arrived, and a far-reaching social movement found political form in Podemos, and from the center of economic and political power the idea began to take shape that, in order to counteract Pablo Iglsias, the best thing was to make Albert Rivera grow. But it wasn’t until emergence of independence that Cs became truly relevant as a state party, because the idea definitely caught on among influential businessmen and journalists that it was the only formula to stop the two ‘bugs’ of Spain at the same time, the ‘podemismo’ and the independence movement.
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In the April 2019 elections, Rivera achieved his electoral Everest, with 57 seats and 15% of the vote, with the aim of stopping the rise of Podemos (which won 42 seats), but already very far from the polls. that they had given him as the winner a year before. That was a preview of the decline that had to come, and the appearance of Voxin November 2019, quickly returned him to the margins and replaced him with 52 deputies.
In the elections in Castilla y León, VOX has gone from 1 to 13 prosecutors, and Cs from 12 to 1, confirming a mathematical transfer. The disintegration of Ciudadanos is basically due to their own self-deception: they told us that they were a party of the center when in reality they only collected votes from the right and the extreme right, as has been demoscopically demonstrated. They told us that they were dealing with real problems, when in reality they only lived off nationalism, like Vox. And they told us that its ideological solidity transcended its leader, but when a semi-anonymous law firm in Madrid has stripped Albert Rivera, his play, already very poorly performed by Inés Arrrimadas, has fallen like a house of cards. Ciudadanos is ending for many reasons, but the main one is that he has ended up devoured by his own ‘fake news’.