Edmundo Bal planned to present all the names on his list this Friday, but he did not. He did not do it because a few hours before the pro-government candidacy (headed by MEP Adrian Vazquez and with Inés Arrimadas inside it) with the announcement that it was going to be presented on Friday morning in front of the Congress of Deputies. Checkmate. “We didn’t want to compete in headlines,” says Bal’s team, who had done the same staging only two days before. The coincidence was not a fluke.
Faced with the four charges that accompanied Bal in his debut, a squad of more than twenty Ciudadanos leaders, calculatedly prepared for the photo, accompanied this Friday to Adrian Vazquez Y Patricia Guasp in an exhibition of what the MEP called the “rebirth” of Ciudadanos. Ines Arrimadas Y begona villacis they gave him the leading role and listened in the second row.
Balancing so as not to outshine the ticket Vázquez-Guasp, to whom the survival of Ciudadanos has been entrusted, the current president of the party could not, nor did she want to, hide her smile. Convinced, both she and her surroundings, that the list that Bal will face is “unbeatable”.
Adrián Vázquez was Bal’s favorite
The truth is that the names that lead the candidacy leave the State lawyer with little room for maneuver. Adrián Vázquez was placed as a favorite by Edmundo Bal himself, who until recently tried to drag him into a “unity candidacy” that would leave out Arrimadas. But Vázquez told him no.
“When he spent two weeks offering me to be secretary general, I did not listen to that criticism, because he wanted me to be in his candidacy and I always told him that I would be in the candidacy in which we were all,” explained the MEP this Friday.
“Surprise and Disappointment”
The versions differ on this point. “He spoke to us about his work in Brussels and told us that from there there were things that he could not do,” say sources close to the team that greases Bal’s candidacy. “He always told us that it was better to be on the sidelines,” they say, visibly disappointed. They also say that in the summer months, when they began to work on the refounding of Ciudadanos, Vázquez openly conveyed that “the objective had to be to change the direction of the party.” “I didn’t want Arrimadas either.”
Despite the fact that they recognize the worth of Vázquez, for whom everything is flattery within the party, his decision has generated “surprise and disappointment” for all of the above.
From the environment of Arrimadas and from the team for the refoundation, almost common circles, they defend that they had been working with Vázquez for months on a list in which he held the position of general secretary. The MEP was the bet of the party apparatus from the beginning.
Arrimadas wins and will continue to be spokesperson in Congress
His proposal, the result of the conclusions of the listening work carried out by the team for the re-foundation of which he was a part, is the following: a bicephaly with him as general secretary and Patricia Guasp (spokesperson and coordinator of the party in the Balearic Islands) as political spokesperson. He will also be a general coordinator, Carlos Perez-Nievasand two vice spokespersons, Guillermo Diaz and Nacho Martin Blanco.
Although the name of Arrimadas will not occupy any position of organic relevance, the president of Ciudadanos ensures that with this candidacy she will continue to be the party’s spokesperson in Congress. De facto, will be, as up to now, the most visible face of Cs. His main personal desire, after assuming that he should step back in control of the party, was to protect his political capital and he has achieved it.
For critics of this pro-government candidacy, this is the demonstration that it is “his list”: “It is Inés’s list.” “She is going to direct it and she is going to continue making the decisions”, they point out from the environment of Edmundo Bal in conversation with Public. They also believe that the fact that both Vázquez and Guasp are not in Madrid, he is an MEP in Brussels and she is a deputy in the Balearic Islands, will mean that the weight of decisions will continue to fall on the Arrimadas team.
“What she wants is to be on the list so as not to become detached, but it’s her list, that’s how it is. The people who go on that candidacy are the ones that her team has organized. We want more transparency and they don’t want that. The projects they are radically different”, they clinch from the environment of Bal.
A free space for Edmundo
However, the MEP called to be the new benchmark for a party in free fall, still aspires to stop the clash in a primary and has not completed all the positions of his candidacy in case Bal rethinks his position. Vázquez assured that “someone is missing” on the list at the top, that someone is Edmundo Bal and that they have left empty spaces thinking about him.
In the same way that both Bal and his entourage recognize Arrimadas as a fundamental political asset of the party that they would not want to do without, sources of absolute confidence in the orange leader assume that Ciudadanos it would be “worse” without Edmundo. Cross flattery in a battle for control of a party that the polls leave without parliamentary representation.
