The triple crisis of Citizens in Madrid leaves the future of the party in the hands of Begoña Villacís

Begoña Villacís, on Tuesday, May 18, Ballesteros / EFE

“They shot us. They have left us without a government. And they are going to leave us without representation ”. The complaints that run through the local organization of Cs since March, when Inés Arrimadas organized in Murcia the motion of censure that provokes the electoral advance in Madrid, crystallized this week in two key outputs. First, Ignacio Aguado, former regional vice president, resigns from his position in the Executive and to lead the party in the region. Later, César Zafra, his right-hand man, leaves the organization secretariat. The resignation of the two friends underscores a crisis that threatens the continuity of the project. Without representation in the Assembly, and without an established internal structure, the survival of the party in the 2023 elections will depend on the visibility that Begoña Villacís achieves as deputy mayor of the capital.

The vertigo of Podemos post Iglesias in Madrid

Aguado renounces his power and designates Villacís to replace him

"We have it very difficult," acknowledges a member of the Executive.

"This is not a problem in Madrid, it is a problem of the party, of the brand, and of political space," he diagnoses.

“When we entered the Assembly, in 2015, we were missing due to the corruption of the PP and the PSOE.

And in this campaign, the

qualis

[small polls] told us that people no longer

cared about

this issue, and it even made them uncomfortable, "he adds.

“The needs of the voters have changed.

Since the fateful elections in November 2019, we have clapped one election after another.

We remain lukewarm between the cries of the others ”, he affirms.

"We have the vice mayor's office of Madrid, six mayors and representatives in many towns: now what we have to do is municipalism," Villacís opposes.

"The relationship with the PP in the City Council is bomb-proof," he stresses.

“And as for the organization of the party, we have all been working on it for six years, we all know each other, there is a replacement and neither Ignacio [Aguado] nor César [Zafra] leave the party.

They are going to help ”.

The situation is borderline.

Cs has run out of parliamentary group in Madrid.

Without him, the formation not only loses its political voice in the Assembly.

It also runs out of an important organizational instrument: in 2020, for example, it received 952,885.19 euros of subsidy to finance its operation.

A mana that was going to touch the 4 million during the legislature, and that now disappears, leaving the party without a juicy way to hire key advisers for its political action. It is not the only open waterway: as the 4-M has not had representation, it will not receive the subsidy per seat (almost 20,000 euros) with which to compensate the expenses of the campaign, although it will be able to enter the one related to the votes ( 1.01 euros for each vote) and the sending of propaganda (0.22 euros per voter) after having added more than 3% of the votes.

In this difficult context, the departure of Zafra is doubly worrisome for Cs. In all the formations, the leader in charge of the organization is the one who pulls the internal strings, and who knows the secrets of the groups. More in the case of Zafra, who promoted Cs in Madrid from nothing, and who for the moment will remain in the Executive.

When Zafra and Aguado joined the party in 2013, the orange formation had two groups and 53 members.

At the time of his departure, he had groups in some 115 municipalities in the region, in addition to the 21 districts of the capital, and maintains some 3,000 affiliates of the 6,500 that he had in his best stage.

Their departure marks the end of the pioneer era, because together they built an unknown and unstructured formation, in which they themselves had to scrub the floor of the old headquarters of the Bilbao roundabout.

It is foreseeable that their farewells will not be the last.

To begin with, Miguel Ángel Martín Perdiguero, vice mayor of San Sebastián de los Reyes, has left the position of local coordinator for the North of Madrid.

"There are people who are fed up, and think about leaving it, or going to another party," acknowledges a leader.

Of the two options there are already examples.

In addition to Aguado, former councilor Ángel Garrido has left politics.

That seems to be the case of all the members of the coalition government that formed the PP and Cs, with the exception of Marta Rivera de la Cruz, the head of Culture, whom Isabel Díaz Ayuso tempts for her new Executive.

And it remains to be seen what he will do with his future Juan Trinidad, the president of the Assembly, who in June will cease to enjoy a key institutional position, and will be paid 110,586.79 euros per year gross.

In addition, two former Cs deputies have already joined the PP lists: Sergio Brabezo and Marta Marbán, a particularly painful case for the party, since she was one of its first councilors outside of Catalonia.

There, in the municipalities, it is where Cs hopes to find the lair from which to resist the hecatomb and then try to recover in the 2023 elections. The 4-M elections were brought forward.

That implied that they did not coincide with the municipal ones.

After the autonomic bump - from 26 deputies to none - the councils are now seen as a lifeline.

"Without having representation in the Assembly, all the weight now falls on the municipalities, where we have a lot of muscle," summarized Miguel Ángel Arranz at the beginning of May, who hopes to achieve the mayoralty of Alcobendas in the coming weeks, and as a result of the agreement of government signed between Cs and the PSOE.

"It is time to take the step forward."

And that is why all the lights point to Villacís, who will foreseeably replace Aguado at the head of the game in Madrid.

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