Ciudadanos party leader Albert Rivera is in a bad mood and you can tell. His agenda has emptied out, he is giving fewer interviews and he has started to notice that many of the financial and media powers that used to nod in agreement with him now have more important things to do. The same applies, and with twice the intensity, to the party's Catalonia head, Inés Arrimadas. When the boss gets annoyed, it's always the second-in-command who feels it first, and in Catalonia the party of friction has lost an ally and a half. The Catalan Socialists (PSC) - Catalan partners of Spain's now-governing PSOE - do not want to make excessive noise in this new stage and the Popular Party (PP) has more important things to attend to if it doesn't want to disappear. Curiously, the PP now has an opportunity that it did not have in government, because it performs well in opposition.
The establishment is breathing a sigh of relief now that Spain's PP-PSOE bipartisanship has shown that it might recover from the delicate situation of these recent years and the Catalan pro-independence parties are debating between an undisguised acquiescence to the new Spanish situation or following the path mapped out by exiled president Puigdemont. Doing both at the same time is impossible. Above all, because in Madrid they do comedy much better and they are more professional at it.
The opinion surveys will, very soon, start to show signs of the PSOE's recovery. And probably, the PP vote's historical resistance in bad times will also help erect a wall of contention against Ciudadanos, which is likely to start to see some of its recent support returning whence it came. A period of some months will be needed to see if it all happens like this. In the meantime, the Spanish government will try to continue dining out on the fact that it brought down Mariano Rajoy. It has also set in motion a second part of operation dialogue with Catalonia, employing the same communicative strength and capacity as used in the first part instigated by former Spanish deputy PM Sáenz de Santamaría. We will see if this time there is a different result. Because the reasons for hope are few, if we leave aside the deafening sound of all those that want it to happen so much that they are already ringing the bells in celebration.
This weekend, a certain ex-Catalan Socialist voter, who in recent times has done nothing else but sing the praises of Rivera and Arrimadas in the face of what he saw as the incompetence of the PP and PSOE, suddenly saw Sánchez as the new repairman who will unblock Spanish politics. The only thing missing was for him to scream like a madman against Rivera as once upon a time Miquel Iceta did against Rajoy. He was just as happy as when Zapatero arrived as Spanish PM in 2004 (although he got tired of that two years later) and when Rajoy took office in 2011 (and in that case his irritation returned after a year). Blessed naivety.