As the saying goes, it never rains but it pours. It's a sentiment easily applicable to the cloudy future hanging over Ciudadanos (Cs), the party founded by Albert Rivera, which went as far as to win the 2017 Catalonia election called under article 155 by Mariano Rajoy, and is now divided into several currents, with Inés Arrimadas's leadership under question and with an electoral calendar ahead - polls this year in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, without it being clear in what order - which threatens to carry the party away as it sweeps through.
That haughty, disdainful, and insulting attitude used when talking about the independence movement is still there, but the results it brings are far removed from the times when the political group appeared as the great standard bearer for Spanish unionism. Now, Cs are knocking on the door of the Popular Party (PP) to try and forge an election bid that will give both of them some respite in the next Catalan election. Even former PP minister Jorge Fernández Díaz has suggested Manuel Valls as the best possible candidate for this hypothetical alliance labelled as Catalonia Suma or Unidos por Catalunya. Ciudadanos has already tripped up once with Valls, in last year's municipal election in Barcelona, but in politics everything is possible, so who knows.
In the end, neither Ciudadanos nor Valls are ideologically coherent - as they have shown - and their sole objective is to prevent the independence movement from governing the political institutions. They did so in Barcelona by sacrificing the Catalan capital and handing over the mayor's office to Ada Colau instead of respecting the electoral victory of Ernest Maragall. It is going to be entertaining to witness the appearance of artificial candidatures (more than one) formed by so-called civil society to prevent a new victory for pro-independence forces in the Catalan election.
One of the leaders who has been working on one of these lists for a long time recently told me that it is harder for them to find faces than money, as there are many doors to knock on for the latter. Back-room politics has always conceived a Catalonia different from the real one.