Podemos and Ciudadanos face the future without their two founding leaders, Pablo Iglesias and Albert Rivera, and with the worst electoral support in their history. Ione Belarra's party will tend to be diluted in the project of Yolanda Díaz and Arrimadas aspiring to resist as a minority urban formation.
This is the story of a party come to less; and here are the data. From 2015 to 2016, Podemos lost a million voters in the rehearsal for the general elections (it coincides here that they went from running alone to going in coalition with the United Left). In April 2019, the flight of voters increased: they fell to 3.732.929. With the repetition of November, that same year, they emporan it:
3.119.364. The collapse is a fact. In representation in Congress: from 71 to 35 deputies in four years. And the ruin expands at the regional level; in the last electoral cycle they lost support in (almost) all of Spain.
United We Can enter the coalition government with its worst historical result, but with the hope of reversing the precipitous fall through "progressive policies". No. From 2019 to today, two issues are demonstrated: the decline of Podemos is not prevented by Pablo Iglesias becoming the second vice president of a coalition Executive with the PSOE, and neither does he save anyone by abandoning politics, already converted into a solvent rather than mobilizer. "I no longer contribute to adding," he said in his goodbye.
In 2019, in Castilla y León, Podemos and Izquierda Unida added 68.787 and 31.575 votes, respectively, and presented themselves for separation. This February 13, in coalition, they lost one of their two prosecutors and obtained 61.290 ballots. Which means that together they were voted for less than the separate purple party three years earlier.
They were also harmed by the participation of the Soria ¡YA! and Union of Pueblo Leones (UPL). "It is a reality that we have had a setback," admitted the candidate Pablo Fernández, at the time spokesman for the Podemos Executive. And he not only referred to the results in his community, but also responded when asked about the general fall.
The issue is that since they came to the Government until the advancement of Castilla y León, comedians were held in four autonomous communities and in all of them they admitted having to do "self-criticism" after some negative results compared to the previous ones. In 2020, we will disappear from the Galician Parliament. A hard knock. From having 271.418 votes and 14 deputies under the umbrella of En Marea to collecting only 51.630 with the acronym Galicia in Common, a handful that is not attributed to resist with representation.
The Basque Country held the same elections in 2020 and all the same losers could: from 157.334 votes to 72.113, support that translates into a fagot of 11 to 6 seats. Regarding the Catalan elections of February 2021, Podemos and En Comú Podem say they are "satisfied" because they kept their eight seats in Parliament. However, the loss of votes there is also unquestionable: from 326.360 to 194.626. In these three territories there is the circumstance that as Podemos loses weight, the left-wing regionalist and nationalist alternative gains it; See BNG, Bildu and ERC.
Iglesias appeared last year in the elections in the Community of Madrid to try to stop this trend and avoid a regional government of the PP. They came from having suffered in the capital with the appearance of More Country and the polls announced that they could disappear. Iglesias launched and improved the results: from 181.231 votes to 261.010, from 7 votes to 10. But he was unable to stop the right and resigned. The data from the other regional polls in 2019 are also negative. Except Andalusia, where they went with another number and stamp, today dynamited.
But this 13-F noted the difficulties of Podemos to recover a brand that was dying. They were the first elections without churches (that was the solution, wasn't it? Give way to new leaders...), and neither the labor reform nor the increase in the SMI to a thousand euros announced a few days after dedicating himself to being a catalyst. This script made it easier for the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, to plant her new project, but that weakness also affected her because of one leg of it. The day after the elections, the vice president suggested it on Twitter. As a post-election reflection, Díaz called for a "new country project", considering the United We Can cycle closed: "Citizens who want changes (...) We just have to look at the right place and live up to it." She only attended a campaign event in which, by the way, she had no decision-making power.
Podemos understands that his future consists of being part of his candidacy. But the tension for the greatest possible protagonism pits the management against the vice president, who does not have organic positions. Iglesias presses from outside so that Podemos has a preferential gap. But Díaz wants the parties to be "secondary."
Citizens, learn to compete in all categories
Ciudadanos (Cs) has gone in just four years from leading the polls in Spain, having won the elections in Catalonia and entering part of the governments of important communities and municipalities, including those of the capital of Spain or Madrid, Murcia, Andalusia and Castilla y León, to consider that achieving a single attorney for Valladolid in the last of these regions is almost a success.
An important leader of the orange party defines this change with a football simile: “We have dropped to second, and it is very good that we have the aspiration to return, one day, to first, but in the meantime we have to start knowing how to compete in second”. The current leadership of Inés Arrimadas is clear that one cannot be triumphalist or throw the bells on the fly, but believes that the result of last February 13, when Francisco Igea broke up keeping at least his certificate of attorney in Castilla y León, can be the beginning of a comeback.
An optimism that is based on various data compared between the elections of the past 4-M of 2021 in the Community of Madrid, when Cs disappeared from the Vallecas Assembly, and the elections in Castilla y León. “In Madrid we focused our strategy on specific neighborhoods where we had traditionally had a lot of votes, and there was no way. Neither Las Mesas [affluent area in the north of the capital of Spain] nor noses”, they explain colloquially. But that same strategy has had an effect in four neighborhoods of the Castilian capital, where Cs was above 10% of the vote, precisely the areas in which the orange campaign and where it was decided to send almost exclusively the electoral mailing.
Twenty-four after the elections, the Secretary of Communication, Daniel Pérez, tried to put the situation of the party in context hours by referring, although without naming him, to the inheritance left by Albert Rivera after his resignation in 2019. The party was then, Pérez said, "in the autopsy room"
Between April and November of that year it fell from fifty-seven to ten deputies. But that did not mean, they argue in the orange dome, touching bottom, but the beginning of a deeper fall. Anyone admits that the decision to declare a motion of censure in Murcia in March 2021 was due to the "biggest mistake" of the Arrimadas era, they believe that they received a party in a very big decline and with a very damaged brand.
While the reality of the internal polls throughout 2020 and part of 2021, the first two years of the Arrimadas era, drew a reality even worse than the almost 4% of votes obtained last year in the Community of Madrid or the 5% that , above or below, was obtained in the nine provinces of Castilla y León.
Looking to the future Ciudadanos believes that it can compete and well in that second division of politics. Although being less ambitious in the objectives, focusing with a high level of precision the voter pool and marking its own profile even against the center-right parties with which, a priori, there are more coincidences.
Whenever first, Ciudadanos will forget about the territories in which it was always difficult to penetrate, even at the time of greatest boom, very high in the north of the peninsula, as evidenced by its inability, even in good times, to enter the Parliament of Galicia . And it could even review pacts to which they brought the pressing need but that blurred part of their ideological profile. This is the case of the Navarra Suma coalition with the UPN and the PP, which led the Liberals to renounce their outright rejection of the special Basque and Navarre tax regimes.
In addition, Cs is unequivocally committed to being a party with an urban profile and professional middle classes, as evidenced by the results discussed in four neighborhoods of Valladolid. "That is our voter and many of them went to abstain, but not to other parties," they emphasize from the Arrimadas team. And as for their own profile, the oranges believe that in the past the demoscopy marked some decisions in excess that forced notable swerves. One of the most notorious, years ago, was that of the reviewable permanent prison, which as soon as "punitive populism", as an orange deputy in Congress came to say, became a measure that was defended without hesitation. Now, both the vote in favor of the labor reform on February 3 and the differentiated positions of the PP and especially Vox on immigration or other matters such as euthanasia, whose current law Ciudadanos supported, will not be changed regardless of what the probes
