Castration and concentration - Spanish 2023 election

Ciudadanos throw in the towel as Podemos throw their lot in with Sumar.

So, it’s goodbye Ciudadanos and thanks for the memories. The first piece of this series said they were a dead party and it turns out I was two days early, as Ciudadanos announced today (yesterday as you read this) that they would not be presenting candidates at the snap election called for July 23rd – which means, to paraphrase the late Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Jim Callaghan, the party is over.

For British readers, imagine the Liberal Democrat wave in 2010 (even though they got less seats than Charles Kennedy, one of the last great examples of that non-conformist Liberalism that has been erased in Great Britain under a wave of American liberalism) and you will have a similar idea. After the Spanish economic bubble bursting in the late 2000’s, the Spanish electorate’s trust in the duopoly of PSOE and PP (not including a beautiful honeymoon of UCD) was shattered. With rising tension in Catalonia, Ciudadanos broke onto the scene with their unabashed economic liberalism and Spanish Unionism.

It was only in the month of April in 2019 that Ciudadanos, riding the wave of anti-Catalan nationalism after the 2017 UDI declaration (and I’d know, as I was there), had captured over four million votes and 57 seats in the Congress. But, crucially, they had failed to overtake a dilapidated PP (who had fallen to 66 seats). Just six months later, when Pedro Sanchez called a snap election in November 2019 and it was clear that Ciudadanos would prop up a PP government, their electoral bubble had burst. They were relegated in less than seven months to just ten seats, a lower number than ERC, the Catalan nationalists whose rise they had profited from.

In many ways, yesterday’s announcement is merely the end of the long slow four-year electoral cycle that was necessary to confirm their death after their November 2019 result. Criticism has been aimed at Ines Arrimadas, who took over from previous leader Albert Rivera who quit after November 2019, but this is cheap criticism. For Texas Hold’em connoisseurs: it’s one thing to be dealt 7-2 off suit, it’s another to be repeatedly dealt 7-2 off suit, whilst being punched in the face as someone blinds you in every hand. Ines Arrimadas is no more responsible for the decline of Ciudadanos than Ataturk is responsible for the decline of the Turkish state.

As a reactionary conservative trade unionist, I should take immense pleasure in this almost nauseating creation of liberalism being sent into the great abyss. And yet (it truly pains me to say this), there is something to be admired in liberals who instead on leeching into other parties because they know their cancerous liberalism is an electoral virus that can only be supported by latching onto a more popular host (here’s looking at all of you IEA) run, unashamedly, under their own liberal banner.

The institutional grip of PP was but a roll of the dice from being broken just four years ago but alas, C’s had missed their moment. Vox would sweep their anti-independent vote from them in less than a year and, as much as every private school funded think tank (lobby group) would like to otherwise believe, there is really only so much room for economically liberal and socially liberal parties in an electoral space.

But what of their erstwhile left-wing challengers Podemos? Kindred spirits in trying to break the national duopoly of PSOE and PP,  Podemos came within a whisker of bumping PSOE into irrelevancy in 2016 (falling just fifteen seats short of replacing PSOE as the official opposition). Since then, despite a co-alition they have been in decline but unlike C’s have held on. After the regional election in May however (make sure to buy Bournbrook’s May print edition), the gig is also up.

Instead of their elimination, a rebirth of some description to the left of PSOE is led by Yolanda Diaz. Wisely, she is dumping the Podemos brand for her own in Sumar and the great benefit of the Sanchez snap is that her new Sumar and the Podemos rump have been forced to come together and not split the vote on the non-independent Spanish far left. Podemos, like C’s, saw their male leader run for the hills when he knew the game was up (Pablo Iglesias, who sadly shares the name of a man far greater than he is) and also dump it on a woman.

What separates Yolanda Diaz from Ines Arrimadas is that Yolanda has managed to fashion a distinct brand from the space she inherited and, unlike Pablo Iglesias, doesn’t come across as a student politician but an actual human being. There is an article to be written about how the blokes, like a drunk father, abandoned the kids to be held onto by the women Arrimadas and Yolanda Diaz - but that is for another time.

For now, the cacophony of Left-wing parties who had been eating the vote of one another is over and Yolanda is in position to unite them all behind her, concentrating the vote and assisting the centre left PSOE to make this a straight fight for the centre between them and a Vox supported PP.