Who will keep the spoils of Citizens on 28-M?

The fight for the orange booty is one of the keys to the elections in twelve regions on May 28. Ciutadans has 69 deputies in these territories, thanks to the 1.2 million votes in the previous elections.

They are seats that are more than threatened, the vast majority of them given up as lost in advance by the party of Inés Arrrimadas, now chaired by Patricia Guasp.

The catastrophic trend of recent years, every time ballot boxes have been cast in Spain, lends credence to polls that point out that Cs could lose all its parliamentarians in the running on 28-M, although there are opinions that attribute to it options to save none in Murcia, Asturias or Aragon.

From the generals of April 2019, Citizens 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 the final collapse. In his case, the turning point took place 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 from 2020, Ciutadans lost 89 of its 96 deputies. In Galicia and Euskadi it stayed as it was, with nothing. But in Catalonia he gave up 30 seats, 26 in Madrid, 21 in Andalusia and 11 in Castile and Leon, where he saved the only one he has left in these territories outside of the Catalan mother house, where he retains six seats in Parliament.

If the polls are correct, the 28-M would reproduce more or less 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 homecoming of the old popular voters, although things are usually more complicated and it should not be ruled out that some of these voters will abstain, while others leave.

On 28-M there are no conditions for it to happen like in Catalonia in 2021, where the major beneficiary of the collapse of Ciutadans, which was the first force in 2017, was the PSC, which took over. Vox was also a second beneficiary of the orange meltdown.

Nor does it seem likely that the case of Castilla y León will be repeated, where while Cs lost 11 seats, Vox gained 12, and the PP, 2.

Although the CIS post-election polls are not very useful, because they show a loyalty to the oranges that does not correspond to the reality of the results, they do show this position of popular advantage to take most of the spoils of Citizens If so, the question would be to what extent, which will vary territorially, since the implementation of Cs was not homogeneous either. In 2019, it oscillated between 7% in the Canary Islands and 17% in Valencia, not counting the 19% then obtained in Madrid, which became less than 4% in the 2021 early elections.

Seen from the present, despite the progress recorded with respect to 2015, the regional elections of 2019 marked the beginning of the decline of Ciutadans, which can now at any rate 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 greater time. In May 2019, a general election had just been held in which this formation, born in 2006 as a Spanish nationalist party in Catalonia, was only seven tenths away from wresting from the PP the leadership of the Spanish center-right, which it has held since 1982 .

As happened to the Podemos of Pablo Iglesias, which in 2015 was close to overtaking the PSOE, the oranges were left with honey on their lips for a smaller difference. And in the regional elections of 2019, Rivera sought to achieve this in several regional governments, especially in those where the popular parties had advanced in the general elections, such as Madrid or Aragon. He didn’t succeed at all, but even so he got 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, this harvest of 69 seats makes up the electoral spoils of 28-M that Cs does not seem to be in a position to defend. It’s the orange effect: going from taking Moscow to trying to save a neighborhood in Paris in just one legislature.