The scene was surprisingly unusual. Last Monday of May. Movement at the regional headquarters of Ciudadanos Galicia, located on a quiet avenue in Ensanche Compostela. A bass that was characterized by its absence of activity. Only the orange color and the logo attested to the identity of the owner. Of course, the reopening of the doors, on the 30th of last month, was not due to a press conference or an internal meeting. Inside, neither the coordinator nor any member of the regional committee were seen. They were workers who were struggling to dismantle the headquarters, which is now history.

In a matter of hours it was practically dismantled, without causing more of a stir in the neighborhood than some casual comment from passers-by.

Some white canvases with the name of the party resisted for a few days, but they were removed last Thursday. On the weekend, through the glass front, only office furniture could be seen -table and chairs-. "The headquarters no longer made sense," Olga Louzao, mayor of Lugo and head of Organization on the board of directors of Cs Galicia, tells ABC. She explains that it is a "considered and valued decision", the result of a "change in strategy" rooted in the pandemic. In those months Cs Galicia joined a global current and began to hold its meetings electronically, something that, adds Louzao, "we maintained over time", once the virus was remitting. "Transferring everyone to Santiago, sometimes, was a problem, many people stopped participating because of that," she justifies.

This newspaper unsuccessfully tried to contact the head of Galicia, Beatriz Pino, to obtain an assessment.

Louzao defends the new model in which the acts are transferred to the groups, to "bring the party closer", and the coordination meetings are no longer physical. That she and her colleagues work "all day" and when it's time to meet "sometimes it's 8 in the afternoon." “Are you going to ask a colleague from Vigo or Cee to move to Santiago?” she asks. Another option was to place these meetings on weekends, but «everyone also needs to have their life, which includes myself; my week is crazy. And when Saturday and Sunday arrive, she says, she takes the opportunity to catch up on municipal affairs.

The idea of ​​Cs Galicia, abounds, goes through "doing much more close work and not so much office work". “It is much simpler, it is much more comfortable for all of us and you also make people work,” he expands. “In the end, the headquarters is a space, nothing more. There are many spaces in which we can do many acts. The most important space is day to day and that people know who each Cs representative is in their territory, ”adds the mayor of Lugo.

What Louzao's speech omits is that the absence of activity at the headquarters, especially outside doors, is not attributable to the pandemic. Comes from afar. "When I was a spokesperson, we did have a slightly more present activity," he concedes. After the last regional elections, in July 2020, Cs -in line with what has happened to it at the national level- definitively sank into irrelevance in Galicia. As the movement of Inés Arrimadas to 'go ganchete' with Alberto Núñez Feijóo did not materialize, the oranges, who did not agree to join the PPdeG lists, attended alone. And, alone, they fell off the cliff: a pyrrhic 0.75% of the votes.

Without a presence in the large institutions -Parliament and Provincial Councils-, they barely have a handful of councilors scattered throughout the territory. With Pino in Madrid, Louzao in Lugo and Pepe Araújo in Orense are his most recognizable faces. It was symptomatic that, when in April of last year, it was reported that Araújo entered the regional committee as provincial coordinator, along with four other new members, three of these were simple members. Cs Galicia could never boast of muscle, but his anemia worsened with departures like those of Mónica Martínez, Montse Lama and Laureano Bermejo. The latter slammed the door loudly, between mutual reproaches. Lama's departure was just as tumultuous.

Without a press officer for more than a year, Cs Galicia barely emits communicative signals from time to time, fleeting reminders that it is still there. They are usually initiatives in O Hórreo that do not have any route. A handful of extemporaneous and countercurrent ideas, such as the one that its coordinator registered last month, calling for "a reform of the Constitution that eliminates the reference to 'nationalities and regions' in the Spanish Constitution." The last of those press releases, to which the stamp is put not in Santiago, but in Madrid, reads: «Young Cs requests the Consello da Xuventude de Galicia to oppose the Consell Nacional de la Joventut de Catalunya». A cloned statement of those sent in Castilla y León or Murcia.

Louzao defends that "work continues" at the institutional and communicative level. At the very least, that 'work' has no echo. Cs Galicia goes completely unnoticed on a day-to-day basis. Another formation without a presence in O Hórreo, although in the antipodes of the orange, Podemos, tries to make up for its fall from grace by sticking its head out from time to time through its only asset, Antón Gómez-Reino. The person in charge of the purples in Galicia plays as far as he can the trick of his condition as a deputy in Congress. In the case of Cs, a quick look at Pino's last month's activity on social networks, one of the few showcases he has to give visibility to his messages, reveals more attention to cycling than to Galician politics. Striking, even if there are family ties.

The municipal elections of 2023 will once again take the temperature of the orange delegation of Cs. Louzao clings to polls that indicate that they will keep mayors in Lugo and Orense. Their goal is not to lose any more representation, and from there, they will assess "in which spaces we present ourselves". Without losing sight of the repercussions for the party, as a whole, of the Andalusian elections. As far as Galicia is concerned, the closure of the regional headquarters is the latest milestone in an increasingly flat encephalogram. As much as Louzao sees the movement as "positive" and refuses to value that negative readings can be made: "People can interpret things as they please."