After the collapse of Andalusia, the word refoundation, despite the reluctance of some bigwigs, skeptical about "that kind of Fierabrás balm to cure all ills", makes its way in Ciudadanos as the mantra to rebuild on what little remains in Create a center and liberal party that will once again capture the interest of the voters.
Inés Arrimadas has shaken off the ghosts of the past and, admitting that she was there too, has pointed out the "many mistakes" that led to Albert Rivera's downfall. “From those powders, these muds”, she has come to say in the marathon of interviews in which she has tried to establish herself in a space between the PP and the PSOE whose necessary existence voters do not see as clearly as she does.
“I am never going to throw in the towel”, the leader of Ciudadanos has repeated these days over and over again, who, despite the “tempting charges” that the PP has offered her since she launched the boarding, insists on taking the orange ship to safe harbor before relinquishing command. If the militancy so decides.
Even so, he assumes that the brand is "burned out" and proposes a "total renovation" to update a project born with a different ideology and context. The program, the internal organization, the teams and even the name itself will be subject to review. "I want the party to become a useful and seductive tool again, that means changing everything," he says.
Before the conclaves that this week will bring together the "thinking heads" to discuss new proposals with which to reactivate the party, the defense of nuclear energy, in the face of the high cost of hydrocarbons, and the pension reform, due to its difficult sustainability , appear as claims to reconnect with urban youth.
For something they were the ones who most enthusiastically assumed the technocratic and regeneration postulates that promoted the right-wing Podemos in which, under the protection of the Ibex 35 to compensate for the leftward leaning of Spanish society in the previous economic crisis, became Citizens as of 2015.
“Liberalism is by definition complex”, a leader settles the “Byzantine debate” raised by those who, like the former deputy in Parliament Sergio Sanz, claim a return to social democratic origins. "If a liberal party were needed in Spain, it would have been founded before," he explains.
But the hinge without “unnecessary dogmatism” that that Citizens disciple of the OECD aspired to be has only opened to the right since 2019. “We negotiated very badly,” admit sources from the executive, who regret having given so much power to the PP in instead of facilitating alternation. Arrimadas, however, reiterates that the "common objective" is to collaborate with the popular to "evict sanchismo" from Moncloa.
That the mechanism remains blocked to the left, therefore, is no longer attributable to Rivera's excess, which set in motion the inexorable decline of the formation, very difficult to reverse no matter how much it is entrusted to the experience of European liberals.
"The offer generates the demand, the parties create the spaces," says political scientist Pablo Simón, who denies the pre-existence of the center that Ciudadanos wants to occupy. "When everyone discounts your disappearance, it is impossible to stop the inertia, because the voter does not know for sure if it is throwing the vote", he adds.
In addition, explains the professor at the Carlos III University, Ciudadanos has lost steam as a Jacobin anti-nationalist party at the hands of Vox and its situation in the ideological axis forces it to fight "double" in a traditionally Catholic country in which social rights , like the LGTBI agenda or abortion, are associated with the left and economic liberalism with the right.
Less optimistic, if possible, is his colleague from the UAB Oriol Bartomeus, for whom the options of Ciudadanos, except perhaps in Catalonia, where it has a more solid structure, are nil. "It's an organization of cadres that can only exist if they get paid, like any organization of cadres," he says, predicting a disbandment. If so, the orange ship would be reduced to an empty shell.
