Inés Arrimadas announced this Thursday that she was going home. To abandon her political career, totally or partially. She has done so after the latest electoral failure of Ciudadanos (Cs), which has been left without representation in the majority of Spanish and Catalan town councils, as well as in the autonomous communities that also elected their parliaments last Sunday. If her predecessor, Albert Rivera, led the party to irrelevance in 2019 after the collapse at the polls of the party that he had helped to form in Catalonia, Arrimadas has led it directly onwards to its disappearance, because it is not going to present candidatures for the Spanish snap election that Pedro Sánchez has called for July 23rd.
The Rivera-Arrimadas tandem constituted the biggest political bubble since the post-Franco political transition, and Cs even became a force that competed with the two major Spanish parties, the Socialists (PSOE) and the People's Party (PP). It was an organization without structure, without a political project and without territorial capillarity, based only on the hatred of everything that was Catalan, starting with the language and everything that made it recognizable as a nation. It was always a flag which didn't know where to fly, which pretended to have a liberal ideology when the best fit, the real one, was to the right of the PP. It would not have had any success if it had not served the wishes of a part of the establishment that has always enjoyed ridiculing everything Catalan, both within Catalonia and in Madrid. The Planeta group was its first and major media window, with its television, radio and print media, and after that there were Tele 5, Cope - and not just the right-wing media either, because for a while the Prisa conglomerate also helped to nourish Cs. For all of these, Rivera and Arrimadas were examples of what the People's Party had not done for years in Catalonia. Even journalists from La Vanguardia wrote books about Ribera and his political adventure: Ciudadanos in the conquest of Spain.
But the magic ran out in 2019 when the party made an all or nothing bet, because Rivera, unlike Pablo Iglesias, was not satisfied with just the deputy PM role, but wanted to take charge of the Moncloa palace himself. And he failed miserably. In the role of anti-politics, and flying the flag of tension as the only approach to politics, he had been useful, but he was already a nuisance. And since then it's just been a nosedive, election after election. Those images of December 2017 when Cs was the largest political party in Catalonia after the sacking of the Catalan government by Mariano Rajoy - and the exile and imprisonment of those who made up the Catalan executive - are long gone. Rivera and Arrimadas are no longer in politics, but Carles Puigdemont and Oriol Junqueras are. That seems to say something about how each group has resisted, and the electoral reward they have received.
Today it is worth recalling the last day that Arrimadas spent in the Catalan chamber and the rhetorical moment which the then-president Quim Torra defined with great lucidity in the parliamentary question session. After inviting the Cs leader to listen carefully for a few seconds, Torra paused and then said to her: "Do you hear that silence? That is what remains of your passage through Parliament. Nothing." Arrimadas shifted in her seat, gesticulating as she always does, trying to put on the right face for the photographers and a few seconds of television. But the truth is that Arrimadas has been left with nothing, with a void. Even if the rest of us are left with a much more fractured Catalonia and a language that she has contributed to judicializing and which, if it is achieved at all, will take years to return to where it was before she landed in public life. Bon voyage!