The
meaning of Ciudadanos
An
upstart party has Spain’s future in its hands.
By JEREMY CLIFFE
12/11/15, 2:11 PM CET
MADRID — The queue
only starts to grow at 10 p.m. This is Madrid, after all. An hour
later it winds around the block; a collage of grays, browns and
blacks (the city’s winter wardrobe) with splashes — ties, scarves
and balloons — of Ciudadanos orange. And what a jumble of types:
from old ladies in Barbour jackets to biker chicks, men in tracksuits
and students bundled up against the cold. “Like PP and PSOE,”
comments a man, referring to Spain’s conservative and socialist
parties, respectively. The remark is fitting, as this odd mix of
air-kissers and fist-raisers has gathered for an upstart political
party that blends the politics of right and left.
At the heart of the
great Ciudadanos (“Citizens”) circus shaking up Spain is Albert
Rivera, the most popular of the country’s four main party leaders
and, at 36, the youngest. In the auditorium, cameramen swoop around
the stage. “Rivera Presidente!” cries the crowd as screens flash
the words: “con ilusión” (“with hope”).
Nearer midnight, the
man himself sweeps onto the podium. He is wearing a headset-mic and
looks even more like a fitness instructor than usual. “Pre-si-dente!”
chants the room as Rivera — with his faux-bashful Princess Diana
gaze — declares this moment the most important in 35 years of
Spanish democracy.
He has a point. For
much of the period since Franco’s death, Spain has been dominated
by two monolithic parties: the Socialists (PSOE) on the left and the
PP on the right. Yet ahead of Spain’s general election on December
20, this duopoly is breaking. Podemos, the far-left outfit close to
Greece’s Syriza and inspired by left-wing populists in Latin
America like Evo Morales, has faded since peaking at second place and
a projected 23.9 percent vote-share in January. In polling published
by the Sociological Investigation Center (CIS) on December 3, it was
at 15.7 percent.
Meanwhile
Ciudadanos, a broadly centrist, liberal party, has surged from 3.1
percent in January to 19 percent. The latest CIS research puts it 1.8
points behind the PSOE and in the lead among Spaniards aged 18-24.
Others put it ahead of the Socialists and as such in second place
overall. ABC, the right-wing newspaper, suggested that it is ahead in
six of Spain’s autonomous communities: Madrid, Valencia, Castile
and León, La Rioja, the Balearic Islands and Murcia.
* * *
Rivera’s party,
marginal just months ago, is now the big story. Polls continue to put
the governing PP in first place, where it will probably remain.
Yet if Ciudadanos
overtakes PSOE it might just come to be seen as the main anti-PP
force. PP strategists fret that, if this happens, PSOE voters
determined to ditch Mariano Rajoy — the prime minister unpopular
even in his own party — could flood into the Ciudadanos column,
propelling it into first place and handing Spain’s reins to Rivera.
Even if this does
not happen, the young Catalan may well end up as kingmaker: capable
of supporting a PP government (possibly insisting that Rajoy give way
to his more popular deputy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría) or a
PSOE-led one also backed by Podemos. The party’s record in Spain’s
autonomous communities — demanding big concessions as the price of
its support for governing parties — suggests that it might prop up
a government in exchange for rapid constitutional reforms and an
anti-corruption drive.
So Ciudadanos
obsesses its rivals. The PP is focusing its entire campaign on
combatting the party. Its slogan “España en serio” — “Spain,
seriously” — is an unsubtle jibe at Rivera’s inexperience.
Threatened by his popularity, Rajoy has ducked TV debates with him
(the sight of an empty “Rajoy” podium at the corner of the screen
will be remembered as the image of the election).
PSOE, too, is
panicking. On December 4, Pedro Sánchez, its telegenic but
underwhelming leader, hurried to two former Socialist strongholds on
the edges of Barcelona now firmly in Ciudadanos hands. Meanwhile
Podemos is mocking Ciudadanos’ credentials as a party of change
while its supporters make lurid allegations about its links to big
business.
It is tempting to
attribute the party’s astonishing rise to Rivera’s personal
appeal. From the start he has shown a knack for publicity. Ahead of
the Catalan elections in 2006 he posed naked, hands cupping his
genitals, under the slogans: “Your party has just been born” and
“We only care about people.”
He keeps his clothes
on now, but retains his flair. At rallies and debates, he is relaxed
and conversational. He reasons with his audience rather than
hectoring it. His events are slick and bear the influence of José
Manuel Villegas, Fernando (Fer) Páramo and Daniel Bardavío
Colebrook. Two academics and one journalist, between them this trio
of advisers has engineered one of the most remarkable triumphs of
style in recent Spanish history.
At an event in
Madrid, I had to stifle a laugh as Rivera ushered his team members
off the stage just in time for a huge banner bearing his name and
baby face to drop from the ceiling. The image was plastered across
Spanish news for the next 24 hours. His critics see him as an empty
shell; a slick rebranding of the old establishment.
The reality is more
complicated. Ciudadanos breaks the rules of Spanish politics. It has
outshone not only the two old parties of post-Franco Spain, but even
a rival insurgent, Podemos, that was the toast of Europe’s left.
Even if it folded tomorrow, Ciudadanos’ success to date would have
revealed much about the psychology and self-image of Spain in late
2015; a country not entirely like any other in Europe, one still
grappling with a troubled past.
* * *
The Ciudadanos story
began in Barcelona, where, in the old working-class district of
Raval, its founding manifesto was launched in 2005 by a bunch of
intellectuals skeptical of Catalan nationalism. Yet its electoral
heartland lies in the port city’s middle-class outskirts, in
suburbs like Nou Barris, Hospitalet (where Rivera lives) and Vallès
(where he grew up), housing Spaniards whose parents (like his
Andalusian mother) and grandparents moved there from poor rural areas
during the Franco years.
Rivera grew up in a
petit-bourgeois background to be a motorbike fan, competitive swimmer
and corporate lawyer. This environment — heterodox in an
increasingly self-confident Catalonia, self-reliant and upwardly
mobile — has influenced his politics; a strange mix of liberalism,
Spanish centralism and opportunism.
He started out
firmly on the right, first as a member of the PP’s youth wing and
then from 2006 as a Ciudadanos member of the Catalan Parliament,
standing alongside PP deputies in opposition to a proposed ban on
bullfights (calling critics hypocrites for hunting, fishing and
eating foie gras while opposing the corrida).
Though today he
claims his favorite book is “Playing the Enemy,” an account of
Mandela and the 1995 rugby world cup (the basis of the film
“Invictus”), sources in Ciudadanos claim it used to be “Atlas
Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s libertarian bible. The high point of
Rivera’s flirtation with the right was the electoral pact between
Ciudadanos and Libertas, a Euroskeptic outfit bankrolled by Declan
Ganley, an outspoken Irish tycoon, at the European elections in 2009.
Quite what this move
meant is a topic of intense debate in Spain today. To Rivera’s fans
it was an act of necessity. To his critics (particularly Catalan
secessionists) it was a glimpse into the party’s reactionary soul.
This period was one
of stagnation for Ciudadanos. At the 2010 Catalan election it won
just three of 135 seats, no more than in 2006. Then the eurozone
crisis struck. Unemployment soared, particularly among young
Spaniards. Corruption engulfed the PSOE government and the PP one
that replaced it. The apparent failure of the “post-transition”
democratic order rendered previously tolerable abuses — government
work doled out to cronies, the politicization of courts, regulators
and academia, slices taken off the massive infrastructure investments
partly bankrolled by Brussels — into glaring symbols of an
intolerable system. Voters abandoned the two main parties.
Commentators started to talk of the “second transition.”
Initially the main
beneficiary was Podemos. But then the sheen came off the ponytailed
Pablo Iglesias and his radical-left party as its brittle
presentation, aggressive methods (like its escraches, direct actions
targeting politicians’s homes and workplaces), and links with
Syriza put off moderate voters. Ciudadanos — overlooked by the
media, deft at organizing public assemblies, active online and
critical of the old casta (caste) running Spain — was in the
perfect position to scoop them up. The once-fringe party, having
attained a crucial advance at the European election in 2014 (now part
of ALDE, the main liberal group in the European Parliament), stormed
to second place at the Catalan elections in September.
Together these
factors brought about what Manuel Muñiz, director of the Program on
Transatlantic Relations at Harvard, calls a “psychological shift.”
Centrist, middle-class, urban voters started to see Ciudadanos as a
credible national party. The reluctance of Rajoy and even, in some
cases, PSOE’s Sánchez, to participate in debates has seen Rivera
and Iglesias — the two challengers — debate head-to-head. Rivera
has used these opportunities to sap some of his rival’s insurgent
credentials while branding him a fantasist.
“I respect our
soldiers, our police officers, our judges; in contrast with Podemos,”
he argued at a recent encounter (following the Paris attacks,
Iglesias had declined to sign the government’s “anti-jihadist
pact”). The voters, especially younger ones in and around Madrid,
Barcelona and Valencia, lapped it up.
* * *
Has a mainstream
party in a Western European democracy ever achieved such a rapid
rise? That Ciudadanos has done so illustrates the historical
exceptionalism of Spain in 2015. For at the heart of its rise are
three paradoxes.
The first is the
success of a rhetorically and economically liberal party in a country
with a soggily “Rhineland” establishment. Despite the rich
intellectual history of liberalism in Spain — from the Cádiz
Constitution in 1812 to the writings of José Ortega y Gasset in the
early 20th century — the credo has failed to dominate the country’s
politics.
In the Civil War,
liberals tended to support the Republican government, yet were
overshadowed by the struggle between anarchists and communists. They
were suppressed under Franco but despite a brief flowering after the
dictator’s death under Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratic
prime minister, were then marginalized. Union, Progress and
Democracy, a reformist party launched in 2007 by the philosopher
Fernando Savater and others, never made much of an impact.
Yet today a
professedly liberal party — now championed by European grandees
like Guy Verhofstadt — is being talked of as the next government of
Spain. It advocates the liberalization of drugs and prostitution. It
wants to relax the rigid labor market with a “single contract”
(designed to break the divide between casual labor and permanent
employment). It wants to cut corporation tax from 30 percent to 20
percent and to lower top income taxes to 43.5 percent. Rivera likes
to insist that ordinary Spaniards should not pay “rich people’s
tax rates.” His intolerance of red tape and enthusiasm for
entrepreneurialism is more reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon world than
the Latin one.
Behind this is
opportunism. Studies by CIS suggest that the country increasingly
self-defines as centrist (if not “liberal,” a word by which
Ciudadanos refers to itself privately but is still somewhat toxic).
To occupy this space in Spanish public life is to surf the wave of
history.
Yet there is also
principle. Rivera is advised by the intellectuals of the Nada Es
Gratis blog (echoing a quote — “nothing is free” — by Milton
Friedman) and in particular its founder, Luis Garicano, a
Chicago-educated economist now at the London School of Economics. The
Ciudadanos program for Spanish society is similarly liberal. In the
words of Francisco Andrés Pérez, a key author of its foreign
policy, it wants “institutions that reflect society.” Its
mission, he explains, is to bring a stagnant political class in line
with a dynamic population. He points to Spain’s diplomatic service;
stuffed with political appointees and the scions of grand families,
it needs an injection of meritocracy.
* * *
The second paradox
is that a party from Catalonia is sweeping Spain as its home
territory bids for independence. In September, ahead of parliamentary
elections there, I watched a Podemos rally in Barceloneta, an old
working-class quarter of the Catalan capital, as representatives of
Iglesias’ party (agnostic about secessionism) were bombarded with
hostile questions about the region’s future.
Rivera and his
followers take a different path, harnessing popular dissatisfaction
with the stitch-ups between PSC (the Catalan branch of PSOE) and CIU,
Catalonia’s centrist, pro-independence party. In particular they
have done so among those residents of the Barcelona agglomeration
with ancestral links to other parts of Spain.
This has seen
Ciudadanos tarred in Catalonia as a hard-right bastion of the Madrid
establishment, a caricature it has done too little to fight. As such,
it has been thrust into debates about what Spain’s “territorial
integrity” should mean; the fiscal nature of its federalism; and
the sort of settlement that might calm tensions in a country of
multiple languages and identities dominated by Castile and its
tongue.
The third paradox is
that a party whose politics are distinctly vague can thrive in a
country whose modern history has been binary. Spain has a tradition
of polarization. According to Antonio Machado, of the generation of
writers influenced by the loss of Spain’s last major colonies in
1898, there are “two Spains”: one that dies and another that
yawns. This Manichean credo went on to define the country that went
to war against itself in 1936.
Even when the
dictatorship ended and a post-ideological social liberalism swept
across Madrid in the orgiastic “Movida Madrileña”— epitomized
by Pedro Almodóvar — its politics were firmly rooted on the
republican side of the old rift. In 2008, I was struck by the sheer
ideological self-confidence of the liberal-left crowd that filled the
Círculo de Bellas Artes, a grand old Republican haunt in Madrid, to
cheer the victory of Barack Obama.
But Ciudadanos spans
left and right. It wants drastic constitutional reform, yet commands
the support of swaths of the establishment; it melds a pro-market
approach to work with a commitment to extending paternity leave and
redistribution. If it has a party-political heritage, it is that of
the Third Way.
Rivera’s call for
Spain to create wealth before it divides it, his praise for
“flexicurity” policies, his faith in education and his talk of
the “working middle class” amount to a classically Blairite, or
Clintonesque, attempt to wriggle free of the old class-based
politics.
* * *
The sheer oddness of
Ciudadanos is best understood through its contrast with Podemos. It
is hard to overstate how much Spain’s other insurgent force loathes
its usurper. One Iglesias staffer described Rivera to me as “a wolf
in sheep’s clothing.” At a conference in Oxford I was taken aback
when a distinguished Barcelona-based academic told me that Ciudadanos
was a put-up sponsored by the companies of Spain’s leading stock
index.
Even Iglesias has
appeared nervous of the Catalan upstart and their bid for the
territory of political renewal: At a debate in Madrid he boasted that
his MEPs gave away a portion of their salaries and expenses. Rivera
retorted that it was “populist” to judge “good and bad by how
much you earn.”
The basic difference
between the two is that Podemos wears its ideology on its sleeve. At
its rallies fly the flags of the Second Republic. Its main reference
points are in the old, two-way history of Spain. “The future has an
ancient heart,” as Iglesias likes to say, quoting Carlo Levi.
Ciudadanos, by contrast, gets points merely by rejecting the old
divide.
Many consider this
posture vacuous. Yet Ciudadanos has cut through to the soul of
consumerist, urban Spain. Its program responds to a sense of
insecurity about Spain’s development. In a country that — with
its modern architecture, gender-equal cabinet and legalization of gay
marriage — had been compared to Scandinavia during the pre-crisis
Zapatero years, it was a blow to be lumped with the PIGS (Portugal,
Italy, Greece, Spain), Europe’s basket cases. Rivera taps into
this; never happier than when setting out plans to drag Spain
northward. He hails the English language, the Danish labor market,
the Swedish parental leave regime, the German electoral model and
Finnish education.
The success of
Ciudadanos has arisen because it has hitched incrementalist,
technocratic ideas about the state to the rhetoric of a radical break
with the status quo. To Spaniards used to a corrupt consensus, this
seems worth a gamble.
One way of grasping
Ciudadanos’ strengths and weaknesses is to compare Rivera’s roots
with those of the other leaders. Rajoy’s background is in the
austere, celtic northwest, deep in the conservative heartland.
Sánchez, with an academic career in Brussels and at a private
university in Madrid, epitomizes the strongly pro-European but
ultimately establishment PSOE. Iglesias came to politics from the
Bauhaus-influenced University City, the campus of the Complutense
University of Madrid still pockmarked by bullet holes from Madrid’s
great stand in 1936.
By contrast,
Rivera’s base is in the internal-migrant outskirts of Barcelona, a
place with little fixed abode in Spain’s ideological history.
Neither firmly Castilian nor Catalan, neither rich nor poor, the town
of Vallès is that Spain not encumbered by political baggage. In a
country where history hangs heavily, that attracts as many voters as
it repels.
* * *
If Ciudadanos does
well on December 20, Europe’s politicos will look for broader
lessons. Such attempts could prove futile. The party is the product
of distinctly Spanish circumstances, in particular Spain’s
complicated relationship with — even rejection of — its past.
It is much too soon
to say what long-term effect Rivera will have on Spain’s politics.
Any party that can attract such a spread of Madrid life to one event
inevitably contains deep tensions. Several alternative futures
present themselves. Ciudadanos could become a split-the-difference
party like Britain’s Liberal Democrats. Down that way lies
electoral oblivion.
Or it could usurp
the PP as the main party of Spain’s right, a free-market force
shorn of moralistic finger-wagging, with Rivera as Spain’s answer
to George Osborne. Or it could become the voice of Spain’s
center-left, a Renzi-ite mix pushing PSOE toward Podemos. Or it could
fall as quickly as it rose and end up a historical footnote.
Whatever happens to
Ciudadanos, its success to date contains a moral, at least, for
European centrists of all shades: Such parties, whether notionally
left or right, should be willing to challenge everything that is
wrong about the established order in the countries.
Ciudadanos may
collapse or it may soar. But its stratospheric rise in such a short
period of time should leave politicians in little doubt as to the
appeal of “institutions that reflect society.” Therein, surely,
lies the route to power in the 21st century.
Jeremy Cliffe is the
Bagehot columnist at the Economist.
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