The struggle to gain control of Ciudadanos after its agonizing refounding is taking on Shakespearean overtones. The challenge launched by Edmundo Bal, until recently his faithful squire, to Inés Arrimadas could bleed a formation already tremendously weakened by the succession of escapes and abandonments of the last three years in an internal struggle.
Yesterday, during the celebration of Constitution Day in Congress, the distance between the two became evident. They were not seen together and the loneliness of the president in her appearance before the media in the courtyard contrasted with the smile of the spokesperson, accompanied by two other deputies from her group, on the stairs of the Puerta de los Leones.
Despite the "advances" towards consensus that Arrimadas had seen after his meeting with Bal on Monday, his former squire refused to withdraw the candidacy with which he intends to challenge the current president for leadership in the next congress in January. "It is too late for a pact: that Inés joins my candidacy and convinces Begoña Villacís", was the headline of the interview that Bal gave to El Español, the digital website of Pedro J. Ramírez.
The deputy mayor of Madrid had warned of the intentions of the spokesperson in Congress, with whom she maintains serious discrepancies on issues such as the only yes is yes law and the trans law, seeing them as too far removed from liberalism, to try to wrest power from the president . With everything, Villacís, who even threatened not to appear with Ciudadanos and attend to the persistent siren songs of the PP if Bal took control of the party, has tried to mediate between him and Arrimadas to achieve a "third way" that, today For today, it seems far away.
In the middle of the electoral campaign for the municipal and regional elections of May 2023, the flying goal of the general elections at the end of the year, the surveys point to the disappearance of Ciudadanos, so this internal war can have devastating consequences. Bal accuses Arrimadas of wanting to continue pulling the strings of the party in the shadows after the refoundation process and of having turned it into a PP comparsa, although the president continues to believe that there is time, when there are still twenty days left to formalize the candidacies, to negotiate a joint list and awaits a rectification.
As a compromise solution, Arrimadas proposes that neither of them lead the unitary candidacy, neither in the organic part nor in the political part of the new two-headed leadership that the statutory report provides for, arguing that neither she nor he, the faces most visible of the party in Congress, represent the renovation that Ciudadanos must undertake to recover the pulse before the existential electoral cycle of next year.
Thus, all eyes turn to Brussels, where in addition to Jordi Cañas, whose name was mentioned in the early stages of this pre-congress position-taking to lead the organization in a kind of organic triumvirate, MEP Adrián Vázquez is gaining strength, who He has been on the team that has piloted the re-foundation process and has emerged as a figure of consensus.
"Since the liberal refoundation, we have always defended that a united project is the only way. But it must not only be said, it must be done. Let's set a date and time, and let's all sit down to make it happen. I will always be on the side of the solution. We owe it to our militants." With this tweet, Vázquez offered himself on Monday as a possible alternative to the division.
From Catalonia, the regional executive has hinted that her bet is Arrimadas, of whom Carlos Carrizosa, his leader in Parliament, praised yesterday the "deed" of having won the regional elections of 2017 and to which he attributed a "great political capital" in the face of the "personalisms" of other members of the party, alluding to Bal, whom Ciudadanos sources point out as someone whose "ego" has been hurt by the severe parliamentary rebuke of its president.
