Ciudadanos bets on European liberalism and relegates the struggle against Catalan nationalism

Elevation save.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
03 March 2023 Friday 22:26
39 Reads
Ciudadanos bets on European liberalism and relegates the struggle against Catalan nationalism

Elevation save. The new leadership of Ciudadanos has set itself the goal of refounding the party in the image and likeness of its European partners, even if this means leaving behind its original seal: the belligerence against Catalan nationalism that led a group of intellectuals to found the formation in the 2006 in Catalonia.

Once the project, in the hands of Albert Rivera, made the leap to the whole of Spain and grew like foam as an expression of the new politics and thanks to the implosion of bipartisanship, the label "liberal" was imposed on that of "social democrat ", which was also in the first statutes, and the party gradually leaned to the right.

Plunged into a deep crisis that threatens its survival since the end of 2019, when Rivera left the presidency as a result of his resounding electoral failure, and without the replacement of Inés Arrimadas managing to redirect the course during the troubled three-year period that he led, the new executive of Ciudadanos, with Patricia Guasp and Adrián Vázquez at the helm, entrusts the salvation of the project to the letter of European liberalism.

But this new strategy, in which there is hardly any mention of Catalan nationalism and the discourse focuses on defending the interests of the urban middle classes, with special attention to the generation gap between young people and pensioners, has strained the relationship of the national executive with the regional one, headed by Carlos Carrizosa, whose political figure grew up alongside that of Arrimadas at the height of the independence process and refuses to abandon that flag even though there are other actors, such as the ultra-right, who have made it their own.

However, this does not mean that the fight against nationalism has completely disappeared from Ciudadanos' speeches, but rather that it has ceased to have the prominence of the past. In this sense, on Thursday, at the Mobile World Congress, Guasp criticized the "separatists", along with the "populists" and the "anti-system", for their "sectarian and retrograde policies", and he did so alongside Carrizosa and the mayor in Barcelona, ​​Anna Grau, who also charged against the "North Korean criteria" of Ada Colau's Consistory. "Bilingualism or nothing," she exclaimed.

In fact, Carrizosa already raised at the meeting of the national committee held last week in Valencia the "observation" that the "territorial problem" of Spain, which is not manifested only in Catalonia, could not go to the background and was " reassured" about it. For the party leader in Parliament, populism, which includes Vox and Podemos, is also associated with nationalism: "The fact of talking about the constitutional unity of Spain is not the heritage of the right, it does not make us right," holds. In addition, he reminds him, the new orange dome allows the program to be "modulated" in each autonomy, so his "concern" has been resolved.

Proof of the new course that Adrián Vázquez, the new Secretary General of Ciudadanos, has established for the party is the celebration these days in Madrid of a conference led by the liberal group of the European Parliament, Renew Europe, which has traveled to Spain to share objectives and strategy with the orange formation and strengthen collaboration for the election year.

The European delegation, headed by Stéphane Séjourné, Secretary General of Renaissance, the party of French President Emmanuel Macron, is made up of ten vice-presidents, including the Catalan MEP Jordi Cañas, who has participated, along with Soraya Rodríguez, in the round table "A Union of common values", while the also MEPs Eva Poptcheva, José Ramón Bauzá and Susana Solís have done the same in the baptized "Building a Europe with a view to the future. Economic, industrial and environmental transformation". .

The support of European liberals for Ciudadanos, which could already be seen at the refounding congress held in January, where the Irishman Timmy Dooley, president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), participated in addition to Séjourné, seeks to convert the Spanish formation in a party comparable to its partners in the European Union, and for this Vázquez and Guasp have not hesitated to turn the page on the anti-nationalist belligerence of its founders to focus the discourse on eminently economic issues.

Thus, they hope to overcome the current rout, which may end up sweeping Citizens out of a good part of the city councils and autonomous communities in which they still have representation in the May elections, and rise from the ashes in the European elections next year, in the that Adrián Vázquez himself will foreseeably be head of the list. In the elections to the European Parliament, Spain is a single constituency and for a party like Ciudadanos, which aspires to move within 5%-7% of the percentage of the vote, it is easier to enter into the distribution of seats.

However, to get there, with the hope that the European core in Brussels will help to consolidate a liberal and center party in Spain, Ciudadanos will also have to overcome the trance of the general elections at the end of the year, where the parliamentary group , which today has nine members, could be reduced to its minimum expression, with only one deputy, or even disappear. Hence the discouragement that spreads among some of them, who are already listening to job offers, assuming that they will lose their position.

"We are going to present throughout March in different events the master lines of the program for municipal and regional governments and to translate the values ​​of European liberalism into concrete proposals and close to the citizens", Vázquez has advanced, for whom the new strategy offers a " reformist path to change things". "In Europe there are good examples that this path exists and is also possible in Spain", he emphasizes.

"We have come to support Ciudadanos because it must become what we are in Europe: the decisive party that gives majorities in Spain based on our values, policies and ideas. A space that should not be conditioned by nationalism or extremes. A a project with a sense of State and that puts the Spanish people ahead of their own political interests”, highlights Séjourné.

"It cannot be that the governments in Spain are conforming from the extremes towards the center and not from the center towards the sides. Liberal policies are absolutely necessary after so many years depending on this bipartisanship at the mercy of the extremes", concludes Guasp , who, together with Vázquez, accompanied Séjourné on Friday at an informative breakfast at the Nueva Economía Fórum in Madrid.