Servanda helps those who get up early. On the first day as mayor of Cáceres of the socialist Luis Salaya – on May 29, 2019 he was 30 years old and became the youngest councilor in the city – there was no one to welcome him. Solitary, Salaya wandered very early through the most important office of the City Hall. He sat at the desk. He opened the laptop. His councilors arrived. Minutes later, an official explained to him that on the first day that one is mayor of Cáceres it is always a good idea to locate the secretary that his predecessors had before making any decision:
—Ask Servanda, she knows.
Salaya, a pragmatic, Germanic, thorough guy, carried the council to the letter for the next four years. 1,200 days later—pandemic included—the elections of May 28, 2023 left him without office. He achieved 59 more votes than in 2019, yes, and one more councilor (10), yes, but the right won the race in almost all of Spain and also in Cáceres.
Salaya now carries a Harry Potter keychain with the keys to a small apartment in Madrid. Her light eyes are more rested. She works in the communications and human resources company that she founded with Pablo, a tall, blonde guy, her best friend from her university. From his time as councilor he only keeps a small, framed photo with the former president of Extremadura Guillermo Fernández Vara. It is placed on a wooden shelf that can go unnoticed. Politics, in short, is already gone.
No. He is not considering returning, although his countrymen, he says, repeat it to him every now and then.
That Sunday in 2023, the left suffered an unprecedented setback. Together with Vox, the PP snatched almost all municipal and regional power from the PSOE. The right recovered six of the ten autonomies of the socialists, much more than predicted by the polls. The PP almost completely devoured the Ciudadanos vote of 2019 and with that increase it devastated the big cities – including Seville, which the socialists hoped to retain – and dealt a very hard blow to the PSOE when it won, thanks in large part to agreements with the extreme right, with the Governments of Aragon, the Balearic Islands, Cantabria, La Rioja, Extremadura and the Valencian Community (in addition to the Canary Islands, in coalition with the Canary Coalition).
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At the municipal level, the right tripled its power in the provincial capitals. From the 10 it had achieved in 2019 it went to 30. It now governs 40% of the town councils in Spain. It was held for the first time in all the Andalusian capitals. And he achieved the three capitals of the Valencian Community, the three of Aragon, four of the five capitals of Castilla-La Mancha… A blue curtain covered the Peninsula.
A year later, EL PAÍS has spoken with four of the hundreds of frontline politicians who were swept away by that tsunami: Begoña Villacís —former vice mayor of the capital of Spain and one of the last public figures of Ciudadanos— and the former mayors from Tarragona (Pau Ricomà, from ERC), Valencia (Joan Ribó, from Compromís, who had been in office for eight years) and the socialist Salaya.
Everyone recognizes that March 28 was a fateful election night. “Bitter.” “Sad”. “Unexpected.” Everyone, far from continuing in politics, took a step aside. Three agree that that electoral campaign was impregnated with national overtones. That the regional barons and left-wing mayors got a kick in the butt that, most likely, was for the central government. That they did not vote on the management of their cities but, rather, a kind of plebiscite on Pedro Sánchez. Despite the setback, he also leaves politics. They all left. Salaya, for example, is a guy who goes beyond histrionics:
—Politics has to be boring.
The newspaper Today from Extremadura made a profile the morning he left office. “Farewell to a mayor of Cáceres who did not inaugurate works,” he titled. From those days Salaya remembers that the last weeks of the campaign were not going very well. “You could see it in their faces,” he says. Neighbors approached him and one or another yelled at him: “Let him vote for you.” Txapote!” He told his people that the whiff of defeat was in the air. On election Sunday the count continued at the socialist headquarters in Cáceres. In the schools where the PSOE had to be sweeping, it won, but not by a landslide. He assumed it was only a few hours until he left the office.
After the polls, the still president of Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández Vara, met him at a bar in Cáceres for breakfast the next morning. The two had fallen defeated. The two were having a coffee when they saw Sánchez, on television, appear at La Moncloa to announce the advancement of the general elections. “It was impressive,” Salaya remembers. “I liked the movement. You can agree with Sánchez or not, but he is a brave guy. He causes things to happen before waiting for them to happen.”
—And what did they say?
—Let Guillermo tell him.
-I knew it?
—Guillermo is very intelligent.
840 kilometers from Cáceres, Pau Ricomà lived a very similar day in Tarragona. ERC lost the mayor’s office, although in this case it did not go to the right but to the PSC. “Here there is no anti-sanchism or sanchismo. This is a Madrid thing. Here national politics has a very relative influence,” he maintains. He says that what really influenced that Sunday in May was that many pro-independence voters stayed at his house.
At 66 years old, Ricomà leads a very active life, but from the sidelines. He maintains contact with the leaders of ERC: Pere Aragonès, Marta Rovira, Oriol Junqueras. Neighbors stop him on the street. “When you die in this country, everyone recognizes it, and I am one in life,” he laughs.
![Pau Ricomà, with the baton of mayor of Tarragona, in 2019.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/4CACUDVTS4OPQG5SDQ56UT53ZQ.jpg?auth=f0dc27a0528a4c76fb1a5858d1b20ed7fadc9c93c42af2d390efbef2bddb8650&width=414)
The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. “What happens is that before I had more filters.” She is reading a book of poetry by the Catalan Carles Riba. He is preparing a trip to Greece with his wife. He enjoys his three grandchildren. And with one of his two sons, who is a truck driver, he occasionally travels as co-pilot for long hours on the road. A few months ago they arrived in Toulouse.
He loves flamenco. She counts the days until she sees Nick Cave in Barcelona. He doesn’t miss Espanyol games. He believes, like Salaya from Cáceres, that politics has to be closer and less populist. “The country and the city are the people. We wanted to reach everyone. The works, for example, are always inaugurated by the next person, but they have to be done.”
Ricomà says that one of the things that surprised him most about being mayor were the children: “They knew very well who the mayor of their city was!” Once in class they asked a friend of his grandson who the councilor of Tarragona was. The boy had no doubts. “Roc’s grandfather,” he replied. Who was it going to be?
—Did you expect to repeat as mayor?
—I have an optimism that sometimes leads me astray.
—Do you miss him?
-I was very happy.
This Monday, Ricomá comes from teaching Catalan classes to some North African and Colombian boys in a humble neighborhood in Tarragona. “I don’t know if they will learn much, but the important thing is that they feel part of a society. Now that the extreme right is advancing, the most important thing is that they feel appreciated,” he says. He says he loves talking to people who don’t think like him.
The penultimate blow to Ciudadanos
![Begoña Villacís, at the Glorieta de Quevedo in Madrid, last Wednesday.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/YTFHM6TUP5CDHJ2UJXCGMJG6LI.jpg?auth=01ea5962ff372cd48f5fcb8e16a0ade760f62c955ef90bb50fb2629b51ea7807&width=414)
On May 28, 2023, at the now defunct national headquarters of Ciudadanos, right in front of the Las Ventas bullring, a worker began handing out gifts to journalists: beach shovels, pens and even an orange case with small bags game to pick up dog feces. It was a covert move. The vice mayor of Madrid, Begoña Villacís, appeared crestfallen. “I’m going to state the obvious,” she said. “Life is not always fair.” Ciudadanos disappeared from the map. Its last municipal bastion was also swallowed up by the PP. They lost 280,000 votes. From eleven councilors in 2019, to zero.
Twelve months later, Villacís, 46, is almost the same as he was then. She assures that she does not miss politics, but she is the only one of those participating in this report who has agreed to be a talk show host on television, which is like keeping an active umbilical cord with the past. She says that it is only 20 minutes on TVE and that that takes away the itch.
—How about with your partner? [de tertulia] Pablo Iglesias?
—Better ask him.
—Would you run for Ciudadanos again?
-One and a thousand times.
Of the confusing flirtation he had with the PP just before the elections, he recognizes that he had to give explanations long before. “We failed at that. We were wrong,” he states. He now works in a technology company on the almighty Castellana avenue. He does sports. He keeps smoking. He has more free time. The day he explained to his three daughters that he was leaving politics, there was a shout of joy in the living room: “Weeeeeeeen!”
—Are you thinking about coming back?
—Not today. You never know.
Joan Ribó doesn’t even consider it. “My time has passed,” he says. At 76 years old and with two terms as mayor of Valencia (2015-2023), he maintains that the election Sunday a year ago would have been different if the campaign had not become so polarized. “When there is a very strong light, all the other lights disappear and dazzle you. On May 28, 2023, that light came from Madrid,” he summarizes. Compromís, his party, lost 7,000 votes and one councilor. But the sum with the PSOE was one short of the absolute majority, snatched by Vox and PP. “It was a sad loss, but in some ways predictable.”
He says that the change from the Government to the opposition is complex. He lasted a few months before slamming the door on politics. He wanted to lead the transition in the municipal group.
—How are you dealing with not receiving calls?
—I didn’t have many before either because I paid very little attention to them.
He prefers a meal to talking on the phone. Go reading expansive democracy (Anagrama), the new essay by Nicolás Sartorius. Have breakfast with the press on the table. He goes to City Hall for a couple of days to chat with the councilors. Cooks macaroni for her granddaughters. She likes to cycle around Valencia and also in the mountains. She has realized that she no longer has as much strength as before to climb hills. Some neighbors ask for photos, others make faces; Some, yes, have insulted him. He became good friends with the former mayor of Zaragoza, Pedro Santisteve, and with Óscar Puente, now a minister and former councilor of Valladolid. He follows basketball, athletics. He barely turns on the television. “Now, I simply dedicate myself to living.”
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