Thursday, March 28

Ciudadanos also disappears from the Andalusian Parliament and is mortally wounded

From 21 deputies to zero. From the vice-presidency of the Junta de Andalucía to abandoning all positions in his party. Ciudadanos and Juan Marín assumed another blow last night, after that of the generals who left the formation (then of Albert Rivera) in ten deputies, after Madrid, where he lost all the seats, and Castilla y León, with a single act. Inés Arrimadas did not even come out publicly last night and the party takes another step towards the precipice.

Juan Marín, vice president still in office, is on his way to being another political retiree. Like Ignacio Aguado in Madrid. Like the founder himself, Albert Rivera.

With this bleak panorama, Arrimadas will have to decide the future of the party and his own in the prelude to the triple date with the 2023, municipal and regional polls next May; and general, which if not there are no surprises, will be held at the end of the same year. The orange mark has been bleeding election after election. The surveys have long placed it as a testimonial party, extra-parliamentary in most fiefdoms.

The only important pact that remains alive is the one that Begoña Villacís maintains in the Madrid City Council with the mayor of the PP, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, who is not exactly in very good health, as has been shown these days on his third anniversary . And there the prospects are not good either. Until now, Villacís has ruled out a motion of censure, although we will have to wait to see what he decides now, after this new setback, and the rudeness directed by the Madrid councilman.

Andalusia, the new failure that was already suspected

In Andalusia the cards seemed to be laid out in advance. All the polls indicated that the Vice President of the Board, Juan Marín, had a very difficult time overcoming the minimum barrier of 3% of the votes to obtain representation in the regional Parliament. In the party they claimed to have studies that gave them between three and five seats and air to survive.

It has not been like that, Citizens left 540,000 votes, 21 deputies, a vice presidency and five ministries. The PP once again engulfs Ciudadanos in another coalition. And the only “good news” that the party celebrated yesterday was to prevent Vox from conditions Andalusian policies. That was what Marín highlighted with a circumspect face, before announcing that this Monday he will present to Arrimadas his resignation from all his positions during the National Executive, another mourning meeting in the internal Citizens.

“I always comply with what I say and tomorrow morning I will present my resignation from all party positions to the national executive because I believe that it is my responsibility and that it must be done,” Marín said at a press conference. “I leave these positions at the disposal of my party because I am sure there will be men and women who can do it better than me and that is what I want for my party and for my land,” she added.

Despite the fact that since the closing of the electoral colleges all the polls gave them for missing, in the party they did not want to throw in the towel and thought that they could turn the results around at the last moment. The campaign coordinator himself, Miguel Gutiérrez, appeared after 8:30 p.m. to encourage his supporters: “We have good feelings that our representatives have transmitted to us,” he said. We believe that the coalition government can be reissued for another four years,” added Gutiérrez.

Marín has based his entire campaign on vindicating the “good work” carried out during these three years by him, as vice president, and by his advisers. “We have been the authentic locomotive of change, and the economic locomotive of Spain”, recalled Gutiérrez. But the citizens have blamed this supposed good management on the PP and its president, forgetting the party of Inés Arrimadas.

For the party leader, who has been silent all night, it is a new setback. The previous one was in Castilla y León where they were about to be left without any prosecutor. But in the end they managed to keep a single seat, that of Francisco Igea, who, like Marín, held the vice presidency of the Government with the PP, this time Alfonso Fernández Mañueco. There the Conservatives advanced the elections thinking that they were going to win enough seats to govern the solitary, as just a year before Isabel Díaz Ayuso had achieved in Madrid. But it was not like that and Mañueco was forced to open the door to the extreme right in order to maintain power.

This chain of defeats is going to force Arrimadas to decide whether to continue trying to maintain the party’s acronym in the next elections, or, as some have asked him, to propose a merger with the PP, a party that has achieved throughout all these months his goal of engulfing them after Albert Rivera decided to become his crutch, vetoing any possible agreement with Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE. A decision that time has made them pay dearly.



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