While Pedro Sánchez puts on an air of not understanding anything of what has happened in Andalusia, Pablo Iglesias, from his intellectual refuge, says that politics is an ideological battleground and not a demand-based market, and ERC continues to knock on the door of the PSOE to ask them to roll up their sleeves and get down to some dialogue, the president of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, must be watching her party's cataclysm from some bomb shelter. The decline of the party of hatred is so spectacular that we should begin to forget the disappearance of the UCD when it comes to explaining how a political party can evaporate and use Cs as the textbook case. The feat of going from 21 seats to 0 lacks precedents; as going from 26 to 0 in Madrid also did. Seen in this way, in Catalonia, the party still managed to save the furniture with that poor result of six seats won after obtaining, in the previous elections of December 2017, 36 MPs, having finished first in the elections both in number of votes and deputies, and having held the post of opposition leader in Parliament.
The Ciudadanos party has evaporated and, of that group of intellectuals who supported Albert Rivera in 2005, nothing remains. Well, their effects remain - all of them negative - and it is worth remembering how they gained the complicity of the establishment, which provided them with enough resources for their campaigns; how they got hours and hours on Spanish television networks, who did nothing to put them off-balance in exchange for their opposition to the Catalan language and to independence, and they walked around Madrid explaining that they would govern Spain and win the battle of Spanish language in the classrooms. If the patriotic police took on the task of making blacklists of pro-independence figures and generating fake news to alter election results, the patriotic press did the same with the Catalan language, generating an invented ambience, an unreal social climate, of what was happening with the Spanish language in Catalonia's classrooms. The patriotic police were fed by the People's Party (PP), who at that time formed the Spanish government, and the patriotic press took nourishment from Cs, who acted as the armed division for anti-Catalan politics.
At the time of writing this article there was no record that Arrimadas had resigned. Nor that anyone of importance in Cs had asked her to explain the fact that the party had fallen from 661,371 votes (18.26%) to 120,870 (3.29%) in Andalusia and become an extra-parliamentary party. It will be because all of them, or almost all of them, are in political unemployment and for those who are not yet in this situation it is simply a matter of time, until election cycles are completed. This is what political irrelevance means: you sink to the depths electorally after having had an opportunity to touch the sky, you disappear from public life and no one pays attention to what you do, and finally the only news of yours which is heard are your 'noes' until the final extinction.
If Arrimadas is literally toast after the election result, Pedro Sánchez will also, for a while, retain this burnt smell, which is nothing more than the prior step to losing the prime ministerial position in the Spanish government. We'll see how long it takes him to make a first move, a profound reshuffle of the cabinet that will be of little use as all the pieces of the puzzle are poorly placed. His path is very similar to that of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero in 2010, when he received the final blow that would expel him from the government palace in November 2011. In the Madrid that is always boiling with conspiracies, Sánchez's political capital has become non-existent and his political future smells more like a European post, with a different face looking out of the PSOE poster in the next Spanish elections. That's to say, another Feijóo.