Something just broke in Spain, following the Municipal and General Elections, and it does not bode well.

Ciudadanos, came into being as the ‘hinge part;’ in other words, a centralist party capable of working with both the PSOE socialists to its left and the PP conservatives to its right.

However, that hinge just shattered owing to the party leader’s failed attempt to veer to the right and replace a staggering PP, beset by corruption and bleeding voters alarmingly.

These last two elections left the PP in very real danger of disappearing so it latched onto the extreme-right party, Vox, as a crutch. Yet Ciudadanos, instead of delivering the death blow, threw all credibility out of the window, and put the PP back on its feet.

You see, to do this Ciudadanos signed tripartite deals with Vox; something they said they would never do.

They had gone through the pantomime of claiming that they had only done a deal with the PP and that the deal struck between that party and Vox had absolutely nothing to do with them. It was an infantile claim because plainly, it was a tripartite arrangement – Ciudadanos needed Vox’s support, but didn’t want to be seen in public with them.

When Vox put its foot down in the Junta de Andalucía, where the three parties share the government, by refusing to back the regional budget unless Ciudadanos gave up this pretence, they finally caved in and publicly shook hands with them, not only in Andalusia, but all over the country in order to snatch administrations away from the socialists where they had been the most voted party but unable to secure a governing majority.

The consequences have been that the EU political group they belong to has said that they are contemplating expelling them from the group, while in Spain they capitulated all across the country, to Vox on the one side and the PP on the other.

Their young leader, Albert Rivera, who said that they had come into being to regenerate Spanish politics, has degenerated, himself.

He backed PP/Vox to take the Junta de Andalucia, justifying his decision with that it was not right that a party that had governed for well over 30 years should remain in power and that it was not ‘Democracy.’ Yet he has just allowed precisely that in Madrid where the PP have governed for over 25 years… and is consumed by ongoing corruption cases. Hypocrisy at its finest.

This ‘centrist’ has allowed the extreme right to reach the seats of power across Spain – something that they had failed to reach with the elections results. In many European countries they have formed alliances to keep the fetid, extreme right from power, but not so, Ciudadanos.

Simply put, they have lost their bearing, their credibility and their reason for being.

The big winners? The very party that they tried to surpass in importance, the PP, and the extreme right in Spain, Vox.

This is not Democracy, it is Partiocracy;  i.e., the good of the party over its ideology and even its own voters and you can see this from Almuñécar to Madrid, right across the country, where parties from opposing ideologies join hands to keep the most voted party out of office.

(News/Opinion: Spain)