At 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the Citizens’ Guarantees Committee will close the voting to choose a candidate for the next Andalusian elections. Until then, the 2,589 Andalusian affiliates with the right to vote have to decide among the nine candidates for the Cs primaries in the autonomous community – there have been two last-minute casualties. Among them will come the name of the candidate for the 2022 Board elections. From the beginning, the process has drawn criticism from members of the organization for calling it expressly and in the middle of a festive bridge, and because Fran Carrillo, the The main rival of the vice president of the Board, Juan Marín, entered the list of applicants at the last moment. The doubts have led the adversaries of Marín, the candidate backed by the management of Inés Arrimadas, to send proxies to the headquarters in Madrid to oversee the scrutiny at the Citizens’ headquarters.
The Andalusian affiliates vote from 8:00 this Monday in the first primaries of Ciudadanos celebrated after the approval of the new electoral regulations – on October 22 -, in which the telematic vote was shielded. Critical factions such as Renovadores Cs have reproached the organization for not also allowing face-to-face suffrage and warn of a “lack of transparency” in the fact that it is the same party that carries out the counting of votes, rather than an external company. Each affiliate has an identification number to vote on their intranet profile, in order to guarantee “privacy and cleanliness of the process,” party sources explain. Ciudadanos also allows candidates to send proxies to the Madrid headquarters to see for themselves how the process is carried out.
The three most recognizable candidates with the greatest possibilities in front of Marín, the regional deputy Fran Carrillo, the supporter of Renovadores Cs Carmen Almagro and the Huelva-born Elena Bago – who already faced the vice president in 2018 – have confirmed to EL PAÍS that they will have representatives in the headquarters of Cs this Tuesday to follow the count, informs Eva Sáiz. Each applicant may designate a proxy, who are summoned from 19:45 at the headquarters. Marín will not send anyone, according to his cabinet. “The fact that there is only one telematic voting system makes our presence essential in the counting to make sure that the telematic voting system defined by the organization meets the minimum requirements for this type of voting,” explains Tomás Simón, who He will come as a proxy for Almagro. Fran Carrillo has asked that his attorney be at the headquarters since early Wednesday, but he has been denied. “We are thinking of contesting the primaries. We are prevented from transparency of minimum guarantees ”, he declared this Tuesday in Esradio.
The biggest guirigay has been mounted on account of the candidacy of Carrillo, coordinator of Citizens in Córdoba and Andalusian parliamentarian for this province. Finally, he has been able to attend after the party extended the deadline for a few hours to pay the debt of just over 4,000 euros that he maintained with the training. The Guarantee Committee did not accept the deposit before a notary public and allowed him to make a transfer for the exact amount hours later. Some anti-leadership militants believe that the acceptance of his candidacy divides the critical vote against Marín – the official candidate – and benefits the vice president. Carrillo has been facing the national leadership for months and described his provisional expulsion as a candidate as “extortion” and “blackmail”.
The statutes prevent the national leadership from raising any candidate, but the continuous trips of the president of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, and her repeated support for the government in coalition of which Marín is the visible head, suppose a veiled support of the apparatus for the vice president. “Being deputy secretary general of my party, I cannot make evaluations about the development of the primary process, which is foreseen in the statutes,” said Edmundo Bal, spokesman for Cs, this Monday in Congress. “One of the conditions for this process to be carried out with total transparency is that the management has to be absolutely neutral with regard to the competition of these candidates,” he added. Privately, members of the leadership mention only one name as a possible winner: “Juan.”
The vice president of the Board, who starts out as a clear favorite, again stressed on Monday the possibility of participating in joint lists with the PP in the regional elections – scheduled for June or October – despite the fact that this hypothesis has been rejected by Genoa .
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In the last primaries of 2018, Marín was the winner – also by telematic means – with 67% of support among the 1,852 votes cast then, in a race in which he competed with 13 other candidates. On this occasion, the Andalusian vice president wanted a quick primary, without noise and that would go unnoticed. Several members of the national leadership admit that they do not understand why they were convened in such an abrupt way and with such tight times.
Precedents
The Citizens’ candidate election system has been a regular source of complaints due to lack of transparency and complaints of alleged irregularities. One of the most prominent cases was the cancellation of 82 votes that canceled in 2019 the victory of the ruling party candidate in Castilla y León, Silvia Clemente, in favor of the critical candidate, Francisco Igea, today vice president of the Board in that community. In March 2020, the Prosecutor’s Office closed the investigation because it did not find “sufficient evidence of a criminal offense.” That same year, in which Rivera was in charge of the formation, the Murcia primaries were denounced at the police headquarters.
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