The countdown to the disappearance of Citizens (Cs) started four years ago, when Albert Rivera it was believed that he could surpass the PP and become the new leader of the Spanish right and a candidate for the presidency of the Government until came face to face with reality. From then until today, Cs has been a party without leadership, with a erratic policywhich fell back in each election until the decision made on Tuesday not to run in the early elections on July 23.
citizens was founded in 2006 to combat Catalan nationalism and debuted in Parliament with three deputies, later it obtained nine and in the 2017 elections, called after the application of article 155 of the Constitution to abort the unilateral declaration of independence (DUI), it was erected, with 36 deputies, in the first political force in Catalonia. It was the first time that a party far from the Catalan tradition had won an election to Parliament.
Two years earlier, in 2015, Rivera had already given the leap into Spanish politics, with unexpected success, by getting 40 deputies and 3.5 million votes. In April 2019, Cs reached the top with 57 deputies and more than four million votes, just 200,000 behind reaching the PP, which had the worst result in its history. This situation dazzled Rivera, who rejected a pact with the PSOE and gave the party a sharp right turn, with a language -“the Sánchez gang”- that overflowed the PP itself and an image -the photo of the Plaza de Colón- of an ally of the right and of the extreme right. The voters of the liberal center, who wanted a pivotal party -the natural state of the project with which Cs presented himself in Spanish politics, which could have contributed to governability-, abandoned him and those clearly on the right returned to their natural niche. The setback in November of that year was enormous: it went from 57 to 10 deputies.
Since then, the Cs votes only served to prop up the right, without any differential value. For that the PP was already there. Rivera abandoned politics and took over Ines Arrimadaswho, after flirting again with the PSOE -which he supported in the failed vote of no confidence in Murcia-, returned to the right and became a militant anti-Sanchista, chaining defeat after defeat. Arrimadas resigned and the new leadership of two unknown militants He faced failure in the municipal and regional elections: Cs has gone from two million to 300,000 votes in four years and from 2,787 councilors to 392. In Catalonia, he only has 10 of the 239 he had left.
In the process of self-destruction, the votes of Cs were escaping to the PP, the PSOE and also to Vox, which demonstrates the hardly viable heterogeneity of its electorate and the double component of its electoral base, the disappointment of the traditional parties and the rejection of nationalism. But in the last stage, he only had right-wing voters left, who are the ones who went en masse to the PP on Sunday. The decision, then, to withdraw from the electoral race was inevitable once a consensus had been reached. situation of irrelevance. What seems like a self-deception is to present the resignation as a parenthesis to return with a refounded party in the 2024 European elections. As Francisco Igea, the only attorney in the Leonese Courts and opposed to the withdrawal, has said, “either a party presents itself or it dissolves».