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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.
Forget difficult territories
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
