Citizens (Spanish political party)

Citizens–Party of the Citizenry
Ciudadanos–Partido de la Ciudadanía
Catalan nameCiutadans–Partit de la Ciutadania
AbbreviationCs
SpokespersonJordi Cañas
FounderAlbert Rivera
Founded7 June 2005 (CC)
9 July 2006 (Cs)
Youth wingGroup of Young Citizens (J's)
Membership (2022)Decrease 7,642[1]
Ideology
Political positionCentre-right[9][10][11]
European affiliationAlliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe
European Parliament groupALDE Group (2014–2019)
Renew Europe (2019–2024)
Colours  Orange[12]
  Dark teal[12]
Congress of Deputies
0 / 350
Senate
0 / 266
European Parliament
0 / 61
Regional Parliaments
0 / 1,248
Local Government
392 / 67,611
Website
www.ciudadanos-cs.org Edit this at Wikidata

Citizens (Spanish: Ciudadanos [θjuðaˈðanos] listenⓘ; Catalan: Ciutadans [siwtəˈðans]; shortened as Cs—C's until January 2017), officially Citizens–Party of the Citizenry (Ciudadanos–Partido de la Ciudadanía),[13] is a liberal[18] political party in Spain.

Founded in Catalonia in 2006, its political ideology was initially unclear beyond a strong opposition to Catalan independence and Catalan nationalism in general.[19][20][21] Citizens describes itself as postnationalist,[22][23] having used the motto "Catalonia is my homeland, Spain is my country and Europe is our future" in its early days; however, it has been deemed by journalists and academics as professing a populist Spanish nationalist ideology.[24][25][26] The party has also been variously described as conservative-liberal,[27] populist,[28][29] and pro-European.[8]

Citizens initially presented itself as a left-of-centre party that promoted social democratic and progressive liberal positions,[30] but it removed any mention of social democracy from its platform in February 2017,[31] moving closer to the political centre. By 2018, it was judged by commentators to have drifted further away from the left, as its focus shifted to competing against both the People's Party (PP) and Vox as the leading party of the Spanish right.[32][33][34][35] This was concurred by opinion polling and the research institute CIS, who also deemed the party to be right-leaning.[36][37][38]

The party initially enjoyed growing support throughout the 2010s on a regional and national level, owing to its staunch opposition to Catalan independence as well as the PP's decline in popularity under then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Entering the Congress of Deputies in 2015 in fourth place, it became the single largest party in the Parliament of Catalonia in 2017 and entered government in multiple autonomous communities. Citizens reached its electoral zenith at the April 2019 general election, where it became the third-largest party in the country and pulled ahead of the PP in several regions. This popularity did not last long: after refusing to form a coalition with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE),[39] that year's November snap election saw Citizens lose 47 seats and become the country's smallest national party, resulting in leader Albert Rivera's resignation and departure from politics.[40] This proved to be the first of a succession of electoral defeats that would set Citizens on the path to near-complete political collapse, with the party's decline mainly benefitting the PP and Vox.

In 2021, the party failed to pass a no-confidence vote against its own regional government with the PP in Murcia,[41] after which its coalition partner in the Assembly of Madrid triggered a snap election over fears of meeting the same fate — this resulted in Citizens losing all of its Madrilenian seats, having already lost 30 of its 36 seats in Catalonia earlier that year. The following year, the party lost all but one of its seats in the Cortes of Castile and León, as well as all of its seats in the Parliament of Andalusia. The party chose not to contest the 2023 Spanish general election[42] after facing a near-total collapse in that year's regional and local elections;[43] save for a handful of municipalities, 2024 has seen the party lose the last of its electoral representatives in the Catalan and European Parliament elections, receiving less than one percent of the vote in both cases.[44]

  1. ^ "'Yo sigo siendo afiliado de Ciudadanos'". 15 October 2023.
  2. ^ "Parties and Elections in Europe". www.parties-and-elections.eu.
  3. ^ "Spaniens Liberale ziehen in den Kampf gegen die Regierung". Die Welt. 12 March 2015 – via www.welt.de.
  4. ^ "La nueva hoja de ruta de Ciudadanos: "enfatizar" la etiqueta "liberal" y desplazar la de "centro"". 12 May 2021.
  5. ^ "Lessons from Ciudadanos: How liberal parties struggle to deal with the radical-right". 5 July 2019.
  6. ^ "Elections in Spain 2019: the progressive majority wins". 5 October 2019.
  7. ^ [2][3][4][5][6]
  8. ^ a b Niall Walsh (2 January 2018). "Catalonia: The rise of Ciudadanos". Retrieved 2 February 2018.
  9. ^ Georgia Mavrodi; Michalis Moutselos (2017). "Is Spain Becoming a Country of Emigration Again? Data Evidence and Public Responses". In Jean-Michel Lafleur; Mikolaj Stanek (eds.). South-North Migration of EU Citizens in Times of Crisis. Springer. p. 93. ISBN 978-3-319-39763-4.
  10. ^ Bonnie N. Field; Caroline Gray (2019). "The Spanish Parliament in Context". In Jorge M. Fernandes; Cristina Leston-Bandeira (eds.). The Iberian Legislatures in Comparative Perspective. Taylor & Francis. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-351-06520-7.
  11. ^ Marta Fraile; Enrique Henández (2020). "Determinants of Voting Behaviour". In Diego Muro; Ignacio Lago (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 383. ISBN 978-0-19-882693-4. Ciudadanos...competes with the PP in the centre-right of the ideological continuum.
  12. ^ a b "Manual de Estilo" (PDF). 15 January 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  13. ^ a b Nordsieck, Wolfram (2019). "Spain". Parties and Elections in Europe. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  14. ^ Barcelona (12 March 2015). "Spaniens Liberale ziehen in den Kampf gegen die Regierung". DIE WELT. Retrieved 18 April 2021.
  15. ^ "La nueva hoja de ruta de Ciudadanos: "enfatizar" la etiqueta "liberal" y desplazar la de "centro"". ELMUNDO (in Spanish). 12 May 2021. Retrieved 22 May 2021.
  16. ^ "Lessons from Ciudadanos: How liberal parties struggle to deal with the radical-right". EUROPP. 5 July 2019. Retrieved 22 May 2021.
  17. ^ Office, Vera Bartolomé & Amelia Martínez Lobo, RLS Madrid Liaison (5 October 2019). "Elections in Spain 2019: the progressive majority wins – RLS Brüssel". www.rosalux.eu. Retrieved 22 May 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  18. ^ [13][14][15][16][17]
  19. ^ día, Salamanca RTVE al. "Albert Rivera: "El nacionalismo es una ideología obsoleta"".
  20. ^ "Albert Rivera, a los que le llaman facha: "En Cataluña, lo más progresista es facha"". cuatro. 8 November 2015. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  21. ^ "Catalexit?". The Economist. Vol. January 7th-13th. 2017. p. 19.
  22. ^ Ciudadanos – Partido de la Ciudadanía. "Citizens' Ideario" (PDF). ciudadanos-cs.org (in Spanish). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 January 2015. Retrieved 27 September 2016. Tercera, por el vacío de representación que existía en el espacio electoral de ultra-derecha no nacionalista
  23. ^ Diari de Terrassa (9 April 2009). "Javier González: 'Nuestro objetivo es impulsar una tercera vía política en España". ciudadanos-cs.org (in Spanish). Retrieved 27 September 2016. Somos postnacionalistas y no queremos luchar contra un nacionalismo con otro. Vamos sin banderas, casi desnudos, abriendo camino sin fronteras desde la Constitución
  24. ^ Anduiza, Eva; Guinjoan, Marc; Rico, Guillem (2018). "Economic Crisis, Populist Attitudes, and the Birth of Podemos in Spain". In Giugni, Marco; Grasso, Maria T. (eds.). Citizens and the Crisis: Experiences, Perceptions, and Responses to the Great Recession in Europe. Springer. p. 67. ISBN 978-3-319-68960-9.
  25. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ramoneda2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  26. ^ Cite error: The named reference Elordi2018 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  27. ^ Caroline Close (2019). "The liberal party family ideology: Distinct, but diverse". In Close, Caroline; van Haute, Emilie (eds.). Liberal Parties in Europe. Routledge. pp. 338–339. ISBN 9781351245487.
  28. ^ Marco Damiani (2020). Populist Radical Left Parties in Western Europe: Equality and Sovereignty. Taylor & Francis. p. 97. ISBN 978-1-351-02264-4.
  29. ^ Leonardo Morlino; Francesco Raniolo (2017). The Impact of the Economic Crisis on South European Democracies. Springer. p. 50. ISBN 978-3-319-52371-2.
  30. ^ "Albert Rivera, la cara visible de Ciutadans". laSexta. 1 December 2013. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 23 June 2015. Somos un partido de tradición socialdemócrata y liberal-progresista
  31. ^ Mateo, Juan José (4 February 2017). "Ciudadanos elimina la socialdemocracia de su ideario y abraza el liberalismo progresista". El País.
  32. ^ Juliá, Santos (20 April 2019). "Derechas". El País.
  33. ^ Torres, Diego (3 May 2018). "All-out war on the Spanish right". Politico.
  34. ^ "Spain's open election highlights its polarisation problem". Financial Times. 20 April 2019.
  35. ^ Jones, Sam (3 December 2018). "Far-right success in Andalucía reflects Spain's fragmented politics". The Guardian.
  36. ^ "Numerosos comentarios por cómo define a Ciudadanos un periódico francés". El HuffPost. 21 April 2018. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  37. ^ Gasquez, Antoine (20 April 2018). "Catalogne: le parti d'extrême-droite Ciudadanos propose à Manuel Valls d'être candidat à Barcelone". Archived from the original on 10 June 2018. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  38. ^ "Ciudadanos: del centro a la derecha según el CIS". El Español. 5 February 2016. Retrieved 15 February 2021.
  39. ^ "El 28A deriva en una batalla campal entre las tres derechas a menos de un mes de otras elecciones". eldiario.es (in Spanish). 3 May 2019. Retrieved 4 May 2019.
  40. ^ "Lessons from Ciudadanos: How liberal parties struggle to deal with the radical-right". EUROPP. 5 July 2019. Retrieved 22 July 2023.
  41. ^ "Ciudadanos in crisis: How Spain's center couldn't hold". Politico. 26 April 2021.
  42. ^ "Ciudadanos anuncia que no concurrirá a las elecciones generales del 23J". ABC. 30 May 2023.
  43. ^ Marcos López, Minerva (28 May 2023). "Ciudadanos certifica su casi total extinción de las instituciones tras su debacle en las municipales y autonómicas" [Citizens certifies its near total extinction from institutions of power after its debacle in the municipal and autonomous community elections]. Cadena SER. Retrieved 29 May 2023.
  44. ^ "Resultados provisionales - Catalunya". resultats.eleccionsparlament.cat (in Spanish). Government of Catalonia. 12 May 2024. Retrieved 13 May 2024.