The election of Inés Arrimadas as president of Ciudadanos (Cs) this weekend, with almost 77% of the vote, against the opposition sector candidate Francisco Igea, who obtained 22.3%, is, in practice, a change in the leadership team of this Spanish political party, but at the same time, the confirmation of the party's commitment to a strongly right-wing line. Cs proposes, as a strategic line, to make pacts with the other parties of the right, the Popular Party (PP) and Vox, and to forget about any deal with the Socialists (PSOE). It thus abandons any pretension to behave as a swing party in Spanish politics, capable of pacting either right and left, and rather, will probably negotiate with the PP the best possible conditions for its future absorption.
In fact, Ciudadanos have already begun this process of self-dissolution in its candidatures for the elections in the Basque Country and Galicia. In the first case, by causing the displacement of the moderate PP candidate Alfonso Alonso and forming a coalition with the PP, with a new candidate as strongly right-wing as Carlos Iturgaiz, who only seeks to steal votes from Vox, since it's clear that there will be no votes from moderate Basque nationalism or from the PSOE capable of making the jump to the right-wing electoral alliance. In Galicia, president Alberto Núñez Feijóo (PP) literally vetoed any coalition with Cs and forced them to stand alone and, so far, there is not a single survey that awards them even one seat.
However, with her arrival at the party presidency so recent, the election where Arrimadas will really be playing for high stakes will be at Catalonia's upcoming polls - on a date yet to be specified, but they will surely be the following elections to be held in Spain, after the Basque and Galician polls. What is absolutely out of the question is a repeat of the result of December 2017, when Cs were the party that won the election after a once-only confluence in which much of the pro-Spanish-union vote was concentrated under Arrimadas, and now the polls situate the group at the tail end of the finishing order for the next Catalan vote.
With Arrimadas in Madrid, new candidate Lorena Roldán having very little political profile, and the politics of tension as the only Cs rallying flag, the party clearly has too little in its favour - not just to win but even to stay afloat.