Alice Lopez |
Madrid (EFE) a seat.
The orange party appears in the twelve communities that hold elections in May, in all the provincial capitals, except Zamora, and in other municipalities up to a total of some 800 lists, a figure substantially lower than the 1,900 candidacies with which they concurred in 2019.
But also, they will not even come close to the results they had in those elections four years ago, when they obtained 8.25% of the votes in the municipal elections and 2,788 councilors, entering the governments of several municipalities, including that of the capital.
In the regional elections they also had very good results and managed to govern with the PP in Murcia, Castilla y León and Madrid -they also had Andalusia- and options to do so with the socialists in other territories such as Aragon, but Albert Rivera imposed the veto on the PSOE, the same what he did with Pedro Sánchez, closing doors that, except for surprises, will not open again.
The slogan is to enter governments with the PP and the PSOE
Now the slogan is different: enter governments with the PP and the PSOE and a willingness to reach governance pacts with Podemos and Vox, although everything indicates that they will not have options so that these scenarios can be considered.
In any case, Cs sources are optimistic about their chances in the Balearic Islands, Aragon, Madrid, Murcia, the Valencian Community and Asturias and it is in these places where the oranges are going to do the rest in the campaign to stay afloat, albeit The Madrid institutions already came out in the early elections of 2021, losing the 26 seats they had with a stroke of the pen.
They also claim to be very close to achieving it in eleven provincial capitals, especially in Madrid, Valencia, Alicante, Córdoba or Ávila, although it remains to be seen that this upward trend that the polls reflect since the new management took office in January -with Patricia Guasp and Adrián Vázquez – is enough.
Ciudadanos will open the campaign in Palma, where Guasp aspires to keep his seat in the Balearic Parliament, and will close in the capital trusting that Begoña Villacís will continue to have a pull despite her dalliances with the PP three months ago and the recent leaks she has suffered towards the party of Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Leaks that have been repeated in many places in Spain and that have left Cs decapitalized and with little hope for the future despite the attempts to rescue the party that the executive is making with new guidelines to clearly reposition itself in the center.
Downplay the foreseeable collapse
However, they minimize the importance of the foreseeable collapse that is coming and go back to their beginnings to remember that the situation then was “Chechnya, very tough”, some sources point out, mentioning that Rivera “spent seven years breaking stone” with three deputies in the Parliament of Catalonia.
They also insist that all the European liberal parties have gone through low hours and have come out ahead, some, like the German, came to disappear from parliament and are now part of the coalition government.
Ciudadanos has not stopped losing muscle since the disaster of the general elections of November 2019 and chaining one crisis with another, the last one very deep for control of the leadership, in which the fight between Arrimadas and Edmundo Bal left the party broken especially in Congress.
In this campaign, Cs puts all the focus of his electoral program on families and the middle classes, with measures aimed at solving the problems they are suffering, and also at “widening” the political center.