MADRID — Ciudadanos portrays its deal to help Mariano Rajoy secure a second term as prime minister as an act of selfless patriotism. The risk for the party is that it undermines its leader Albert Rivera’s promise to clean up Spanish politics.
While the leftist opposition refuses to back the ruling Popular Party (PP) in this week’s investiture vote in Congress, Rivera struck a deal Sunday to support Rajoy‘s bid to end eight months of political paralysis after two inconclusive elections.
“Others continue to block Spain,” tweeted Inés Arrimadas, leader of Ciudadanos in Catalonia. Socialist former Prime Minister Felipe González, urging his own party to facilitate a deal, hailed Rivera’s gesture as “the first act of political responsibility” since June’s election, which was essentially a re-run of December’s contest when the PP came first but without a majority.
Critics see Rivera’s deal with Rajoy, however, as an admission that he has failed to create a viable alternative to the PP and its traditional Socialist (PSOE) rivals, following Ciudadanos’ disappointing results in June when its share of seats in Congress shrank to 32 from 40, placing it fourth behind the far-left coalition Unidos Podemos.
“Ciudadanos hasn’t managed to open up an electoral space in the center ground, which is traditionally a very tricky, dangerous area in Spanish politics,” said Josep Lobera, a sociologist at Madrid’s Autónoma University. “It lost ground in December and in June. It’s in a critical situation but it’s playing its cards as well as can be expected.”
Rajoy and Rivera shake hands after signing their agreement on Sunday | Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images
Instead of giving the PP a run for its money, the self-styled “liberal reformist” looks destined to play a supporting role, agreeing a 150-point program designed to guarantee four more years in power for a conservative politician whom Rivera portrayed until recently as the embodiment of the traditional, tainted politics that Ciudadanos wanted to bury.
Pragmatic Ciudadanos
During the campaigns for the December and June elections, Rivera vowed he would not offer his support to Rajoy as prime minister. “Not Rajoy, not his team, not his government,” the Ciudadanos leader said in April, specifying that he might accept an alternative figure from the Popular Party.
But the June elections weakened Rivera’s hand, and he has performed a spectacular U-turn by negotiating with the PP at the national level and dropping his demand that Rajoy step aside. The deal signed at the weekend does not require any personnel changes within the administration.
In reality, Ciudadanos had already demonstrated a high degree of pragmatisim when it comes to alliances. In the spring, it reached out to the Left, offering its help to PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez to form a government, which ultimately failed to secure enough support in Congress. The party has also lent its support to minority PP governments in four regional administrations and to 15 PP-governed towns and cities, and it has enabled the PSOE to govern in Andalusia.
“Rivera set firm conditions regarding corruption, but now we see that his party is giving ground to the PP” — Óscar López (PSOE)
Ciudadanos’ latest pact with the PP includes reforms to simplify the labor contract system, increase social spending and cancel the debts of homeowners evicted due to arrears. It would also freeze the Rajoy government’s controversial education reform.
But Rivera has faced a barrage of criticism — mostly for diluting Ciudadanos’ strident stance on corruption, which has become one of the main concerns of Spanish voters, behind the country’s persistently high unemployment rate.
“Ciudadanos is lowering the bar a lot,” said Óscar López of the PSOE. “Rivera set firm conditions regarding corruption, but now we see that his party is giving ground to the PP.”
Columnist Manuel Jabois was equally scathing. “Rivera’s whole campaign has been an exercise in ambiguity, under the umbrella of one word: regeneration, which doesn’t even seem to mean what it used to,” he wrote.
Rivera can argue that Sunday’s agreement with the PP does seek to tackle corruption with some vigor. Most notably, it resolves to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the PP’s opaque financing, although the party’s former Treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, who has been linked to the scandal, is not specifically named in the accord as Ciudadanos originally wanted.
In their talks, the two parties spent a considerable amount of time defining corruption. Should any kind of abuse of power be considered corruption, or only the lining of one’s own pockets? When does a politician become ineligible for public office: When they are named as a suspect in a case (“imputado” in Spanish), or when they appear in court?
Even with Ciudadanos’ support, Rajoy is unlikely to secure his investiture this week. With the PP’s 137 seats in the 350-seat chamber, Ciudadanos’ 32 seats and one more from the Canaries Coalition (CC), he is still well short of the 176 needed for a majority. If, as expected, Rajoy fails to secure an absolute majority in Wednesday’s vote, the abstention of the PSOE in a second vote two days later, in which only a simple majority is required, would be enough to return him as prime minister.
Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the Spanish People’s Party | Emilio Naranjo/EPA
But Rajoy’s bid is all but doomed, as the PSOE insists it will vote against him on both occasions. In this case, Ciudadanos’ support is still significant, if only because it means that if Rajoy does fail, it will have been by a narrow margin.
If that is the case, the agreement will most likely be suspended and Congress gets until the end of October to form a government before elections are called for the third time in 12 months.
With 85 seats, the PSOE’s chances of forming a leftist coalition based on the support of Unidos Podemos (71 seats) are slim, given their poor relationship and the fact they would also need the backing of smaller nationalist parties.
Election cycle
There is a growing feeling that Rajoy will try again. Following a Basque election on September 25, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) may be more willing to support the PP in another confidence vote with its five members of Congress. Rajoy hopes the PNV will need his party’s support to govern in the regional parliament and that in exchange, the nationalists will back him in Congress.
That situation would test Ciudadanos’ pragmatism. Initially formed a decade ago to counter Catalan nationalism before becoming a national party, it is prepared to negotiate with socialists and conservatives, but is vocal in its hostility to the PNV’s sovereignty claims for Basques, meaning it may refuse to repeat its pact with Rajoy if the nationalists are involved.
Ciudadanos’ own survival is dependent on the stalemate coming out in its favor.
Such subplots help explain why Spain’s new era of politics — despite the fact that it is its most representative since the return to democracy — has failed to produce a government.
Ciudadanos’ own survival is dependent on the stalemate coming out in its favor. A third election could deal a near-fatal blow to the party.
‘Power to change things’
This is all a long way from December last year, when at a pre-election rally Rivera compared himself to Barack Obama. The 36-year-old politician’s meteoric rise from a Catalan regional player to the national stage had caused a sensation and Ciudadanos appeared poised to sweep away a generation of discredited politicians and shake up Spain’s sluggish politics. It even came close to overtaking its fellow upstart, the leftist party Podemos.
Now, according to political scientist Pablo Simón of Politikon, Ciudadanos is “the most vulnerable party” in the PP’s play for support and risks losing more ground to Rajoy’s party as Spain’s wish for stability trumps any desire for political renewal.
“We don’t want to seize power, but we do want to have the power to change things,” Rivera said before June’s election.
With each passing month, as his party attempts to be the bridge builder of Spanish politics, its ability to deliver on that objective risks fading.