Citizens ( ; ; ; ; shortened as Cs—C's until January 2017), officially Citizens–Party of the Citizenry (Ciudadanos–Partido de la Ciudadanía), is a liberal political party in Spain.
Founded in Catalonia in 2006, the party received 25.4% of votes and 36 deputies in the December 2017 Catalan regional election, making it the largest single party in the Parliament of Catalonia. Nevertheless, it has never taken power, so its actual political stance remains a source of debate between supporters and adversaries, beyond a strong opposition to Catalan nationalism and the Catalan independence movement (although the latter two contributed to a rise in popularity following the 2017–2018 Spanish constitutional crisis). The party used the phrase "Catalonia is my homeland, Spain is my country and Europe is our future" to outline the ideology which the party self-describes as postnationalist. In spite of that, it has been deemed by a variety of sources to profess a populist Spanish nationalist ideology. The party has also been described as conservative-liberal, populist, and pro-European.
Citizens used to present itself as a centre-left party that offered social-democratic and progressive-liberal positions in its platform, but it dropped any mention of social democracy from its principles in February 2017, moving closer to the political centre, and by 2018 was judged by some to have experienced a further swing to the right, as it began to compete with the PP, and later also with Vox, to become the leading right-of-centre party in the country. Starting in 2018, it started being described by media and CIS, a Spanish public research institute, as right-oriented.
The strategy of moving to the right backfired, resulting in fractured opposition to the centre-left PSOE, and after refusing to form a coalition with the PSOE following the April 2019 general election in which they were the only realistic senior partner in a potential government, the party's popularity collapsed after a poor performance in the following snap elections in November, being further weakened after a failed attempt in Murcia to overthrow the regional government coalition with the PP via an unexpected no-confidence vote in 2021. The result was the party losing all its seats in the Assembly of Madrid in 2021 and the Parliament of Andalusia in 2022, 30 of its 36 seats in the Parliament of Catalonia in 2021 and all but one seat in the Cortes of Castile and León in 2022 following regional elections, with the snap elections in Madrid triggered by fears it would try to topple the government there similar to in Murcia. Results of the 2023 regional and local elections confirmed the party's sharp electoral decline — save for a couple of smaller cities and towns, the party won no seats, with most of its voters going to the PP or Vox. Following these results, Cs decided not to contest the 2023 Spanish general election.
History
Citizens was formed in Catalonia in July 2006 in response to the call made in a manifesto by a group of well-known figures in Catalan civic society (among them Albert Boadella, Félix de Azúa, Francesc de Carreras and Arcadi Espada) in which they called for a new political force to "address the real problems faced by the general public". In this manifesto, they also warned that "the rhetoric of hatred promulgated by official Catalan government media against everything Spanish is more alarming than ever" and that "the (Catalan) nation, promoted as an homogenous entity, has taken over the space where an undeniably diverse society lived".
In July 2005, this group of personalities, almost entirely based in Barcelona, formed a political platform called Ciutadans de Catalunya, or Citizens of Catalonia. They organised several round tables and conferences and by 2006 they had announced the formation of a new political party. In their first conference of 2006, Albert Rivera, a young lawyer from Barcelona, was elected president.
In the 2006 elections for the Parliament of Catalonia, Cs won 3% of the votes and returned three MPs. In the 2010 elections, a similar result was achieved (3.4%, 3 MPs). Mainly as a counter to the growing public support for independence in Catalonia, Cs has since further grown substantially in support as one of the most outspoken opponents of this movement. In the 2012 snap elections, the number of votes more than doubled (7.6%, 9 MPs). All but one of these seats were in the Province of Barcelona. In the 2015 elections, Cs more than doubled its votes again (17.9%, 25 MPs), becoming the second largest faction in the Catalan parliament.