The deputy spokesman for Ciudadanos in Congress, Edmundo Bal, does not plan to stand in the primaries that will decide the Cs candidate in the next general elections and will leave politics when this legislature ends to return to his position in the State Lawyer's Office.
Edmundo Bal, who was the deputy secretary general of Ciudadanos, surprised last December by stepping forward to run for party leadership, against the then president, Inés Arrimadas, who wanted another candidacy.
In this internal process, Bal was defeated by the "government" list promoted by Arrimadas, which won with 53% of the votes against 40% of the State lawyer. The result was a new Executive headed by Patricia Guasp and Adrián Vázquez.
Four months later, in statements to The Objective, Bal admits his disappointment with what he experienced in that process and announces his intention to leave politics as soon as the legislature ends. Thus, he highlights that the surveys predict very bad results for Ciudadanos and believes, therefore, that it is a "reasonable" option, as he has indicated to Europa Press.
The statutes approved in the Extraordinary Assembly with which the re-founding was put to an end in January establish that the next candidate for the Presidency of the Government must come out of primaries that, for the moment, do not have a date, although everything indicates that will be held in the second half of this year. Although Bal initially did not rule out running again, with this announcement of his withdrawal from politics, he has already ruled out the race.
There are no defined candidates for this vote yet. The natural candidate is the national spokesperson, Patricia Guasp, party leader, but she refuses to clarify whether she will stand for election. She does advance that she considers herself "legitimized" to continue being the leader of her formation regardless of whether she, as a candidate in the Balearic Islands, obtains bad results on May 28.
Apart from Guasp, there are no known clear candidates, although the name of the spokesperson for Ciudadanos in Congress and former leader, Inés Arrimadas, is the first to appear in the pools.
Former Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera signed Edmundo Bal as an independent for the April 28, 2019 elections, after being dismissed by the PSOE government after directing the State Attorney's Office against the Catalan independence process.
Over time, the State lawyer joined Cs and after the resignation of Rivera and his team he was promoted to deputy spokesman for the parliamentary group in Congress. When early elections were called in Madrid and Ignacio Aguado resigned, the leadership appointed him as a candidate, but he was not represented in the Assembly.
However, in recognition of his work, Bal was appointed deputy secretary general of the party in May 2021, a position he lost in the January primaries. He still continues as deputy spokesman in Congress, although the leadership placed a coordinator close to Arrimadas, congressman Guillermo Díaz, over him.
Although Bal is going to exhaust the legislature, it is not ruled out that there will be casualties in the parliamentary group before the general elections, since several deputies have already dropped their intention to return to the exercise of their professional activities.
