• Former leader Albert Rivera will not attend the Citizens' convention that seeks to re-float the party

  • Ciutadans Tribune, three decades of liberalism in Catalonia

The famous photo of June 7, 2005 in the restaurant

El Taxidermista

in Barcelona acquires an increasingly sepia tone.

The notable absences of the promoters of Ciudadanos on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the party widen the distance that already existed between those intellectual fathers and the current leadership of the liberal force.

Cs will commemorate this Saturday in Barcelona the anniversary of its constitution, in July 2006, but will not be attended by most of the protagonists of the meeting immortalized a year earlier, when a group of intellectuals opposed to Catalan nationalism formed the

Ciutadans

platform

de Catalunya

and produced the manifesto entitled

For the creation of a new political party in Catalonia

.

Félix Ovejero

,

Arcadi Espada

or

Xavier Pericay

were part of that iconic portrait of the embryo of Cs, but they will not, instead, of this weekend's act.

They claim not to have been invited to participate in the celebration that will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba).

Francesc de Carreras

will be one of the few signatories of the founding manifesto that will be present at an event that will feature a round table made up of the deputy secretary general and spokesperson, Edmundo Bal;

the general secretary,

Marina Bravo

;

the leader in Catalonia, Carlos Carrizosa, and

Jordi Cañas

MEP

, which will be closed with a speech by the president, Inés Arrimadas.

Another of the old faces of the party, MEP

Javier Nart

, who left the militancy two years ago, has shown his surprise at the absence of the main promoters.

Sources of the

orange

formation

explain that the act aims to be a memory of the origins, but that it will not stop in nostalgia and look towards the future.

Without Albert Rivera

No less significant will be the absence of Albert Rivera, indisputable leader of the party, first in Catalonia and then in the subsequent national expansion, until his abandonment of politics after the debacle in the general elections of November 2019, when Ciudadanos lost more than two million and a half votes and went from being the third force in

Congress

to the sixth, behind Vox, Unidas Podemos and Esquerra Republicana.

The former liberal president will also not attend the convention that the training will hold in Madrid on July 17 and 18 to give a rudder to his course.

It could be the case, instead, that Rivera does attend the national convention of the PP next October, an extreme that the

popular

leadership

He has not denied and that he gains strength as a result of the close professional collaboration of the former

orange

leader

with the PP from his law office.

The party's fifteenth anniversary comes at the most delicate moment in its history.

The bad results in the Catalan elections of February 14, when it fell 30 seats and went from being the first force in the

Parliament

to the penultimate, with only six deputies, and the debacle in the regional

elections

of the Community of Madrid held on the 4th May, in which he lost his 26 minutes and was left without representation in the

regional Assembly

, have joined the loss of muscle in Congress to be able to serve as a hinge party. The current 10 parliamentarians - in the April 2019 elections he had obtained 57 seats - have proven insufficient as an alternative to the successive pacts that the PSOE Government and United We Can have reached during the current legislature with the groups that led to the investiture of Pedro Sánchez in January 2020.

The leadership of Ciudadanos is aware that, from now on, the battle to be waged should not be focused on achieving being a governing party, but on being able to exercise a balancing force.

Some of its leaders believe that Sánchez's pacts with Esquerra and the possible assignments that may derive from them could take their toll on him in the second half of the term.

They also consider that Pablo Casado's new turn to compete with Vox opens a niche of votes on the side of the center-right.

Cs wants to again aspire to be a

catch all party

, although, this time, with the modesty required by the last stumbling blocks at the polls.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Citizens

  • Catalonia

  • PP

  • Vox

  • United we can

  • PSOE

  • Pedro Sanchez

  • Albert rivera

  • Pablo Casado

  • Edmundo bal

  • Ines Arrimadas

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