The struggle for the orange loot is one of the keys to the elections in twelve autonomies on May 28. Ciudadanos has 69 deputies in them, backed by 1.2 million votes from previous elections. They are more than threatened seats, lost in their vast majority in advance by the Inés Arrrimadas party, now chaired by Patricia Guasp.
The catastrophic trend of recent years every time ballot boxes have been placed in Spain gives credence to the surveys that indicate that Cs could lose all their parliamentarians at stake on 28-M, although there are some that attribute options to save some in Murcia , Asturias or Aragon.
As of the April 2019 general elections, Ciudadanos experienced the closest thing to the invasion of Russia by Napoleonic troops in the 19th century. After the great advance that took them to Moscow, they did not stop accumulating disasters, until they collapsed. In his case, the turnaround occurred in the general elections of November 10, 2019, when the fall from 57 to 10 deputies took away the leadership of Albert Rivera.
In the six communities that voted as of 2020, Ciudadanos lost 89 of its 96 deputies. In Galicia and Euskadi he stayed as he already was, with nothing. But in Catalonia it gave up 30 seats, 26 in Madrid, 21 in Andalusia and 11 in Castilla y León, where it saved the only one that remains in these territories outside the Catalan mother house, in which it retains six seats in Parliament.
If the polls are correct, 28-M would more or less reproduce the model of Madrid and Andalusia, in which the PP occupied all the space of the oranges, with slight advances by Vox. It would be like a return home for the old popular voters, although things tend to be more complicated and it should not be ruled out that part of those voters will abstain, while others do so.
There are no conditions in 28-M for it to happen like in Catalonia in 2021, in which the great beneficiary of the collapse of a Ciudadanos that had been the first force in 2017 was the PSC that took over. Vox was also a second beneficiary of the orange debacle.
Nor does it seem likely that the case of Castilla y León will be reproduced, where while Cs lost 11 seats, Vox rose 12 and the PP 2.
Although the CIS post-election surveys are not very useful, because a fidelity to the oranges appears that does not correspond to the reality of the results, that position of popular advantage is observed to take most of the Ciudadanos loot. If so, the question would be to what extent, which will vary territorially, since the implantation of Cs was not homogeneous either. In 2019 it fluctuated between 7% in the Canary Islands and 17% in Valencia, without counting the 19% obtained then in Madrid, which became less than 4% in the early elections of 2021.
Seen from the present, despite the progress made compared to 2015, the regional elections of 2019 marked the beginning of the decline of Ciudadanos, which now at most can aspire to sneak into Congress through Madrid or Barcelona.
These four years are equivalent, in the fast-paced history of the rise and fall of the orange party, to an infinitely superior time. In May 2019, general elections had just been held in which this formation born in 2006, as a Spanish nationalist party from Catalonia, was only 7 tenths of a point away from wresting from the PP the leadership in the Spanish center-right that it has maintained since 1982.
As happened to Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos, which was close in 2015 to give the PSOE a sorpasso, the oranges were left with honey on their lips by a minor difference. And in the regional elections of 2019 Rivera sought to achieve it in various regions, especially in those where he had advanced the popular ones in the general elections, such as Madrid or Aragón. He did not achieve it in any, but, nevertheless, he obtained a spectacular result for a formation alien to bipartisanship, only comparable to that of Podemos in 2015.
After the losses already registered in Madrid and Castilla y León, that harvest of 69 seats makes up the electoral loot of 28-M from which Cs hardly seems in a position to defend. It is the orange effect, of going from taking over Moscow to trying to save a neighborhood in Paris in just one legislature.