Renew Europe risks losing Spanish delegation after EU elections

Record low polls and disbandments among centre-liberal party Ciudadanos, which has eight of nine seats in Renew Europe group’s Spanish delegation, may lead the party to disappear from the group after next year’s EU elections.

Ciudadanos, which was Spain’s third political force in 2019 when it obtained 15.86% of the votes in the national elections and 12.17% in the following EU ones, has significantly dropped down in the polls, with polling numbers for the upcoming elections in December currently standing at 2%.

The Spanish delegation at Renew Europe is composed of nine MEPs – seven from Ciudadanos, one independent, formerly part of Ciudadanos, and one from Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV).

With current poll rates, Ciudadanos risks losing all seats in the European Parliament, meaning that if the current trend persists, Renew’s Spanish delegation would be left with virtually one MEP – though this will also depend on the election results of the regional party PNV.

Disbandments galore

With regional and municipal elections set for 28 May, Ciudadanos elected officials and candidates have gradually jumped ship and joined Partido Popular (EPP) in recent months.

So far, 56 elected officials and candidates, including councillors, regional MPs and national MPs, as well as political staff, have quit the party. These include two national MPs, three senators, and the Vice-president of the Murcia region.

This turn of events has reached such critical levels that Ciudadanos’ staff is having issues processing all the resignation applications, internal sources told El Pais, qualifying the situation as an “overbooking”.

Renew Europe expresses confidence

Renew’s President Stéphane Séjourné “acknowledges” the crisis but has “total confidence” in Ciudadanos’ capability to overcome it, a spokesperson from the group told EURACTIV, who also highlighted Renew’s belief in the need for a centrist party in Spain.

The party has been undergoing a major restructuring, including a change of leadership, a programme revamp, and a consultative process, which Renew is confident will help the party get back on track. So far, though, polls suggest the opposite.

“After this process, we believe that Ciudadanos can do it”, a spokesperson from Renew said while acknowledging that “the problem is that we have little time and two electoral processes, now in May and December”.

“We have worked since day one doing the best we know, and that is what we are going to continue doing, (…) with a strong sense of European democracy and what’s best for our country,” Ciudadanos MEP Maite Pagazaurtundúa told EURACTIV while emphasising the importance of the group’s centrism and moderation in preventing the extreme sides of the political spectrum from reaching power.

“I hope there are citizens who, beyond the moment, rather than voting with their guts, think about the added value of Ciudadanos in Spanish and European politics”, Pagazaurtundúa added.

A rollercoaster of emotions – and ideologies

Ciudadanos was founded in 2006 in Catalonia as a new force to battle the increasingly nationalist discourse of the Catalan centre-right and republican parties, Público reports.

The party, headed by Albert Rivera at the time, ran for the first time in the Catalan regional elections. While it had no clear ideology, it led its election campaign under “the values of liberty, equality, justice, and bilingualism” and distanced itself from “the classical left-right bipartition scheme” – a move that won them three seats.

After a failed attempt to enter national politics in 2008, the party tried to get into the European Parliament in a coalition agreement with the extinct pan-European far-right eurosceptic party Libertas in 2009, which caused an internal crisis accompanied by a wave of resignations.

In the following years, Ciudadanos consolidated its centrist position and grew exponentially, scoring five seats in the European Parliament in 2014 and 40 in the following year’s national elections.

With such a good result, Ciudadanos flirted with the socialists (PSOE) to form a government but ultimately took a right-wing turn by scoring a pact with Partido Popular (EPP). It went so far as to delete all notions of socialism from its programme, embracing liberalism instead, Público reports.

And numbers kept rising. By May 2018, Ciudadanos polled at 22.4%, setting the party head-to-head with PP for the country’s leadership.

A series of corruption scandals involving Partido Popular, the closest ally of Ciudadanos back then, and the party’s growing alignment with far-right VOX (ECR) brought part of the leadership to quit. But the party’s shift to the right worked as it got the party 57 seats in parliament in April 2019.

After several failed attempts to form a government with PSOE – something Ciudadanos said they would never do during their campaign – new elections in November saw polls plummeting to 10% of votes, ensuring the party further lost its credibility.

As leadership then changed, the party has since been trying to find its place within the Spanish political landscape. However, it appears its efforts may have been in vain as the party is expected to fall to 2% in the upcoming national elections in December 2023.

(Max Griera | EURACTIV.com)