Ángel Collado
The most positive aspect of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s victory in Madrid for the Partido Popular has been the reunification of the centre-right electoral space around its acronym.
Without the need for coalitions or pacts, the voters of its former competitor Ciudadanos are returning to the PP and accelerating the decomposition in the ranks of the party founded by Albert Rivera. From the national and regional leaderships where elections are on the horizon (Andalusia), they are in turn accelerating the absorption of the Cs leaders they consider to be closest to them or to have the best poster.
The hinge party, born to move left and right, took its last turn last March, when it made itself available to Pedro Sánchez to liquidate the PP opposition via motions of censure in its fiefdoms such as Madrid, Murcia and Castilla-León. That move sparked defections and brought Rivera himself into Pablo Casado’s orbit, along with his main reference in the economic world, Marcos de Quinto.
The elections in Madrid confirmed that Ciudadanos has no place on the political map despite the efforts of its current president, Inés Arrimadas, to keep the party united and play a minimal complementary role in Congress until the end of the legislature. She is left with a parliamentary group of 9 deputies in a Chamber of 350.
Díaz Ayuso is counting on former minister Marta Rivera de la Cruz for her next regional government, but for her merits in the management of her department and personal trust of the regional president, not as a quota of the remnants of Cs. This is what PP sources emphasise in order to define the process that is opening up from now on to incorporate former Rivera leaders. Rivera de la Cruz disassociated himself from the beginning of his party’s attempts to reach a pact with the PSOE, then withdrew from the lists and left Cs after the elections.
The only figure of weight left for Ciudadanos in Madrid is Begoña Villacís, whom José Luis Martínez-Almeida is looking after as deputy mayor of the capital, the most important post currently held by a Cs militant in Spain. In the PP they recognise that, when the time comes, that of the final disbandment, Villacís will be their big signing before the next municipal elections.
The centre-right electorate has expressed itself clearly in Madrid, follows the trend of the last legislative elections, those of November 2019, and confirms the trend indicated in the polls in favour of the PP as the party that brings together this vote throughout Spain.
The next fixed date with the polls is the regional elections in Andalusia, the most populated region and the one that elects the largest number of deputies to Congress. In its eight provinces, the future of Ciudadanos’ leaders will be decided in the coming months. The party founded by Rivera even has a provincial capital mayor (Granada), Luis Salvador, who owes his position to the support of the PP.
Now that unity in the centre has been achieved with the absorption of Ciudadanos, Pablo Casado still has to deal with the complicated relationship with Vox, a far-right party whose programme and populist postulates, such as its obsession with immigrants, clash with the PP. Santiago Abascal’s party has stagnated, and even regressed substantially in Madrid with respect to the results of the last general elections, but the head of the opposition has to avoid a direct clash with Vox in order to maintain its governments in autonomous regions and city councils.
At Genoa headquarters, Abascal’s attempt to compete for the centre-right and replace the PP in that space has failed. This operation of attrition against Casado led Vox to support, with its abstention in Congress, Sánchez’s direct control of the 70 billion in investments from the EU bailout plan. They were and are a guarantee to guarantee the president of the government a long term in office.
The PP believes that, after curbing the growth of Vox, the trend in favour of centre-right unity as the only government alternative to Sánchez’s coalition will spread until it catches on among a sector of the current far-right voter.
