In the year 2019, Ciudadanos touched the sky and Albert Rivera was seen in La Moncloa. Instead of allowing Pedro Sánchez to form a government and perhaps run for some ministries, he preferred to play everything on one card: beat the PP in new elections and run for the presidency of the government. From there came all his subsequent ills and his fall into hell, or what is the same, his practical disappearance four years later, which led him not to stand in the general elections on July 23.
The orange party, which had been founded in Catalonia in 2006 to confront the Catalanist consensus that they attributed to pujolist-style nationalism, made its first successful leap into Spanish politics in 2015 in the municipal and regional elections that were held on 24 May obtaining representation in various regional parliaments.
Previously, in 2014, it had already achieved two deputies in the European Parliament and in Parliament it already had nine.
Undoubtedly, 2015 was the year Ciudadanos took off. In the Parliamentary elections held on September 27, already in full swing of the independence process -the previous year the 9-N referendum had taken place- and in which ERC and CDC concurred together under the acronym of JuntsxSÃ, the oranges, already With the help of Inés Arrimadas, they managed to be the second force in the Catalan Chamber with 25 seats.
A success that was consolidated three months later, in the general elections on December 20, when Albert Rivera, who had left Arrimadas in charge of Catalonia, took control of 40 deputies in Congress, achieving fourth position, behind Podemos. These seats, however, were not used to invest either Pedro Sánchez or Mariano Rajoy and the elections were repeated on June 26. This repetition has already choked the orange party, which lost eight deputies, and Rajoy was sworn in as president after the ouster of Pedro Sánchez at the head of the PSOE due to his refusal to allow the PP to govern.
In 2017, the party left behind its center-left ideology with which it had defined itself ten years earlier to define itself as a “constitutionalist, liberal, democratic and progressive” party, a change that would have political consequences since it would distance it from any pact. with the PSOE.
The same year, Arrimadas once again unleashed the euphoria of the already liberals by winning the elections to Parliament called by Mariano Rajoy under article 155 of the Constitution after the 1-0 referendum and the declaration of independence in a context of maximum tension and political polarization with unprecedented levels of participation.
Despite the fact that the 36 Cs deputies were not of much use in Parliament, since the pro-independence parties had an absolute majority, Arrimadas’ victory gave the orange leaders enormous notoriety in the whole of Spain, which in December 2018 translated into the achievement of 21 deputies in the Andalusian Parliament that allowed the PP to unseat the socialist Susana DÃaz, who had already lost the PSOE primaries in favor of Sánchez. Juan MarÃn was the first member of the party to access an autonomous government thanks to the pact with the PP.
A few months later, on April 28, 2019, in the middle of the trial of the procés and almost a year after the motion of no confidence against Rajoy that opened the doors of Moncloa to Sánchez, Ciudadanos achieved 57 deputies in Congress, remaining nine of the PP with a difference of only 220,000 votes. The elections are won by Sánchez but Rivera rules out agreeing with him, after having been photographed in February with Pablo Casado and Santiago Abascal in the well-known photo of Colón against the management of Pedro Sánchez in the Catalan conflict.
In the regional elections of May 26 of the same year, Cs obtained representation in all the regional parliaments, except in the Canary Islands, and those of Rivera accessed the regional governments in coalition with the PP of the Community of Madrid, Castilla y León and the Region of Murcia, which fuels Rivera’s high expectations.
There was no government and the elections were repeated in November marked by the harsh sentence of the Supreme Court against the pro-independence leaders and the serious protests that set Barcelona on fire in October. Despite the high degree of polarization in which Cs had always been like a fish in water, the one who reaped the fruits was not them. Rivera lost the 10-N 47 seats at once while Vox stole third position with 52.
The until then sole and incontestable leader of the formation left politics and Arrimadas took over the baton in the party and the management of the dwindling parliamentary group.
What came next was a chain of electoral disasters one after another. The prelude was the Galician and Basque elections in July 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, in which Cs did not achieve representation. But neither did they.
On February 14, 2021 Carlos Carrizosa loses 30 deputies in Parliament. But the worst was yet to come. A failed motion of no confidence in Murcia to kick out the popular Fernando López Miras with the PSOE leads the president of the Madrid community, Isabel DÃaz Ayuso, to call early elections. Ciudadanos, who was part of the Madrid executive with Ignacio Aguado as vice president, is swept from the Community.
The next to fall was Francisco Igea, who had 12 attorneys in the Cortes and was vice president of the Junta de Castilla y León with the popular Alfonso Fernández Mañueco. In an election called in February 2022 promoted by Pablo Casado, Ciudadanos is left with a single attorney in the Castilla y León Courts and the PP is at the mercy of Vox. The third vice president of Ciudadanos to fall was Juan MarÃn in Andalusia four months later. The orange ones again outside an autonomous Chamber.
The attempts to reformulate the party, led by Arrimadas, and which placed Patricia Guasp and Adrián Vázquez in the leadership, have not yielded results. The lace arrived this Sunday. No seat in the autonomous, barely 300,000 votes in the municipal (1.35% of the votes and 392 councillors). In the previous municipal elections of 2019 they obtained 8.25% of the votes and 2,788 councilors. In addition, they only have one deputy left in the Cortes of Castilla y León and six in the Parliament of Catalonia, which they retain from previous elections.
