Citizens

Citizens (Spanish: Ciudadanos [θjuðaˈðanos] ; Catalan: Ciutadans [siwtəˈðans]; Basque: Hiritarrak; Galician: Cidadáns; shortened as Cs—C’s until January 2017), officially Citizens–Party of the Citizenry (Ciudadanos–Partido de la Ciudadanía), is a liberal 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. Citizens describes itself as postnationalist, 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. The party has also been variously described as conservative-liberal, populist, and pro-European.Citizens initially presented itself as a left-of-centre party that promoted social democratic and progressive liberal positions, but it removed any mention of social democracy from its platform in February 2017, 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. This was concurred by opinion polling and the research institute CIS, who also deemed the party to be right-leaning.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. First entering the Congress of Deputies in 2015, it became the largest single party in the Parliament of Catalonia in 2017 and entered government in multiple autonomous communities. Citizens reached its zenith of popularity 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 government with PSOE, that year’s November snap election saw Citizens lose 47 seats and become the country’s smallest non-regional party, resulting in party leader Albert Rivera’s resignation and departure from politics. This proved to be the first of a succession of electoral defeats that Citizens would endure over the following years, with the party’s declining fortunes mainly coming to the benefit of 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, 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. Its electoral collapse was cemented in the 2023 regional and local elections: save for a handful of smaller towns and cities, the party lost nearly all of its seats. Shortly after, Citizens announced that it would not contest the 2023 Spanish general election.

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