The Ciudadanos (Cs) candidate for the Board, Juan Marín, and the president of the party, Inés Arrimadas, this Monday, at an event in Seville. PACO PUENTES

Ciudadanos has set a goal: to achieve the same result in the 2023 general elections as in the November 2019 elections, when the party experienced one of the biggest electoral debacles, falling from 57 to 10 deputies in just a few months, after election repetition.

Today, the party led by Inés Arrimadas has chained defeats at the polls, abandonment of positions and a host of polls on the ground.

The leadership of Cs, aware of the very complicated situation that the formation is going through, has assumed the following fall in the Andalusian appointment on June 19 and is entrusted to "stay" in the institutions to resist, at least, until the general elections of the year coming.

In the latest CIS, published last Thursday, the party drops to 1,

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Ciudadanos proposes to reform the Constitution to eliminate the reference to “nationalities and regions”

"We have to shake off the label of the dead, put up with the downpour and not get us out of the way," says a leader of Ciudadanos, who also admits that the party's data points to, at most, three or four seats in the Andalusian elections, but that the goal now is not to disappear from the institutions and "maintain the liberal space", as happened in the past elections in Castilla y León, in which they only won the seat of Francisco Igea.

At first, Cs aspired to his own group —which in the Castilian-Leon Parliament is five attorneys—, but privately they acknowledge that they knew long before that this objective was not feasible.

An objective that they are now also pursuing in Andalusia, where a minimum of five deputies is also required, who, for the moment, rule out the polls.

rearmament plan

On April 24, Ciudadanos held an extraordinary meeting of its Executive Committee in which the foundations of an "Action Plan" were laid to start the rearmament before the general elections next year.

And last Friday the work team that will materialize the measures met.

The group is coordinated by the chief of staff of the president of Cs, David Martínez, and the new chief of press of the leader, Jorge Sainz.

Made up of twenty technicians, its goal is to "resist the 2023 electoral cycle in very bad conditions and overcome the

of negative dynamics.

The objective set is to reach 6 or 7% of the vote in future congressional elections, similar to the results of November 2019, when the party remained at 10 deputies and 6.89%, in which it was one of the major debacles of democracy after reaching 15.86% in the elections of April of the same year.

The task force collaborates closely with its European liberal partners to draw up its roadmap.

The plan will begin to be applied after the Andalusian elections internally and, after the summer, externally.

Among the measures, a new communication strategy, a "listening process" with the social actors, the regrouping of the members of the formation or "bringing the project closer to the street".

"We do not intend to reach as much as the Germans [who, after a period of electoral defeats, are now part of Scholz's coalition government], but we do intend to try our own group in Congress," adds a member of the team.

Reform of the Constitution

From the formation they arrogate the qualification of "necessary" when "agreeing to the right and left" to carry out projects such as the labor reform or the recent law of "yes is yes" and to be the "only" party that defends the unity of Spain —before Feijóo's territorial approach—, and the State of the autonomies, —against Vox, which wants to repeal them—.

Despite calling themselves "constitutionalists", Ciudadanos has registered this Monday in Congress a proposal to reform article 2 of the Constitution and eliminate the reference to "nationalities and regions", while "recognizing on an equal footing" the 17 autonomous communities.

An initiative that Arrimadas announced, this Monday, together with the Andalusian candidate, Juan Marín, in Seville, in a pre-campaign act.

In Andalusia, resignation is already a fact.

The deputies for whom the candidacy headed by Marín is fighting are the three from Seville, Cádiz and Málaga, for which they need around 4.5% of the ballots.

Granada and Córdoba are on the horizon, but they seem quite impossible.

The management considers that the fall is not so dramatic because "the comparison must be made" with the data of the general elections of November 2019, whose percentage of the vote of Cs in Andalusia was 8.20%, and not with the numbers of the regional elections of 2019, when Ciudadanos won 21 seats and 18.27%.

"These results were not normal, we cannot compare ourselves with that," adds another senior official.

Several leaders insist that the liberal space is limited and that we must forget the data from April 2019, when Albert Rivera led the formation.

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