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Photographer: Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images Photographer: Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images

Albert Rivera is a man in a hurry.

The leader of Ciudadanos, a new centrist party that’s roiling Spanish politics, has been on the go since dawn. He’s just finished speaking to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Spain at the Westin Palace, an ornate belle epoque–era hotel across from Madrid’s Prado Museum.

On this July morning, Rivera, a 35-year-old lawyer with a made-for-TV smile, plants himself in a stuffed chair for an interview. He orders coffee. It’s too hot to drink quickly. He asks for a Diet Coke. He keeps eyeing the clock to make sure he doesn’t miss a flight back to his native Barcelona.

Rivera finally settles down as he starts describing his campaign. He says it will usher in the most-sweeping changes in Spain since La Transición almost 40 years ago, when the nation became a democracy again following the death of Francisco Franco. For all but a few years since then, Spain has been governed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) or the conservative People’s Party (PP), led now by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

Battered by corruption scandals and the fallout from Europe’s worst real estate crash, the Spanish people are looking for new leaders. In the run-up to a general election that will be held around Dec. 20, 28 percent of likely voters say they plan to cast their ballots for Ciudadanos (12 percent) or another challenger, Podemos (16 percent), according to polling in late August by TNS Demoscopia, a Barcelona-based research firm.

With these relative newcomers poised to change a two-party system into a coalition-based one, Rivera says Europe’s fifth-largest economy is entering a “second transition.” “We’re going to fix what’s been broken,” Rivera says in the calm but intense manner that’s become his hallmark on the hustings. “The middle class has suffered; it’s been broken by crisis. My goal is to lead a government that will reform Spain.”

Albert Rivera, the leader of Ciudadanos, in Madrid. Photographer: Mariano Herrera/Bloomberg Markets

Ciudadanos (which means citizens) is one of a crop of new political movements upending the euro zone as its leaders struggle to hold the 16-year-old bloc together. Unlike the right-wing National Front in France, left-wing Syriza in Greece, or Podemos, the anti-austerity Spanish upstart led by university lecturer Pablo Iglesias, Ciudadanos embraces no single, conventional ideology.

Instead, the party characterizes its platform as cambio sensato, or sensible change. Echoing center-right parties in Europe, it advocates lowering Spain’s corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 30 percent, capping income taxes at 40 percent, slashing government spending by merging small municipalities, and stoking entrepreneurship and innovation. But the party also pushes policies that reflect liberal or libertarian views: It wants to legalize prostitution and marijuana and invest more in education and health care.

With his centrist approach, Rivera is drawing support away from both the right and the left. That puts him in a pretty sweet spot because neither the PP nor the PSOE is likely to win enough seats in the Cortes Generales, Spain’s parliament, to form a government. For either the PP or the PSOE, Ciudadanos would make a more attractive ally than the doctrinaire, leftist Podemos, says José María de Areilza Carvajal, a professor of public law at the Madrid campus of ESADE University. “The main scenario is the PP will need a coalition partner, and that will be Ciudadanos,” he says. “In the second scenario, Pedro Sánchez, the young leader of the Socialists, wins and also turns to Ciudadanos. So Rivera plays kingmaker.”

Rivera is coy about being a junior partner in a coalition. “I don’t want to be an uninvited guest in anyone’s government,” he says. “My goal is to govern.” The very fact that Rivera is even in a position to play a pivotal role is remarkable for a man who unveiled Ciudadanos in 2006 by posing nude (see photo below), his hands modestly forming a fig leaf, on campaign posters that proclaimed “Ha nacido tu partido” (“Your party has been born”).

Ciudadanos was founded by Barcelona intellectuals who opposed Catalan independence. Rivera, an athletic man who won swimming championships in high school, was working as an attorney at La Caixa, now CaixaBank, the Catalonia region’s No. 1 lender by assets. A gifted public speaker, Rivera jumped into the fray and won the party’s presidency. But Ciudadanos had trouble gaining traction. It won three seats in the Catalonian parliament in 2006; four years later, it still had three.

Then the bottom fell out of Spain’s runaway construction market. Beginning in January 2011, the economy contracted for 10 consecutive quarters. Unemployment peaked at 27 percent in March 2013; more than half of all Spaniards under 25 were jobless. Rajoy, a stern Galician who became prime minister in December 2011, scrambled to enact German-style austerity, breaking a raft of election promises. He made it easier for companies to fire employees and harder for unions to negotiate contracts across entire industries.

Rajoy’s measures curbed wage inflation and made Spanish companies more competitive, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even though the employment picture has improved by only a few percentage points, the economy has grown steadily since September 2013—up 1 percent in the second quarter of this year over the previous quarter. Spain is now outperforming Germany, France, and even the U.K.

Javier Maroto, a PP deputy secretary, says Ciudadanos, with zero experience legislating in the Spanish parliament or even managing a municipality, is ill-prepared to steer economic recovery. “We need experienced managers willing to roll up their sleeves and get the job done,” he says.

Ángela Ballester, a member of Podemos’s executive committee, says Rivera’s convenient embrace of policies of the left and right won’t result in fundamental change. “Ciudadanos represents old politics with a new look,” she says. “Instead of being an old guy in a suit, it’s a younger face. But those are superficial tweaks. Their proposals are no different to those of the old parties.”

Even if that’s true, the big parties face a massive challenge. Almost 5 million people remain out of work. A cascade of corruption scandals involving the PP has outraged Spaniards. In a high-profile case, an investigating magistrate said he found evidence that could show that two former PP party treasurers, Luis Bárcenas and Álvaro Lapuerta, were making unlawful payments out of a slush fund; a trial is scheduled for next year. Lapuerta’s lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, says his client did nothing illegal. Bárcenas, who has admitted to running the fund, accused Rajoy of accepting about €250,000 ($273,000) in illegal payments. Rajoy has denied any wrongdoing.

Albert Rivera, launching his new party, holds up campaign posters for which he posed naked, in Barcelona, Sept. 20, 2006. Photographer: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez

A poll published on Aug. 5 by CIS, a government research arm, showed that 54.3 percent of Spaniards say they have “no faith” in Rajoy. In municipal elections in May, the PP suffered its worst drubbing in 20 years. It lost the mayorship of Madrid to Manuela Carmena, a human rights lawyer elected under the banner of Ahora Madrid, a group backed by Podemos. Ciudadanos won 74 of 1,248 seats on regional councils—a numerically small but nonetheless breakout showing.

With the election approaching, Rivera faces a crucial test. The PP, the PSOE, and their allies in business, the media, and the civil service will deploy political machines to attack the insurgent parties, says Kenneth Dubin, a political scientist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. For Ciudadanos to take off, Rivera must demonstrate that it’s a national force and not simply a regional player. “Rivera can be a kingmaker only if his party wins seats,” Dubin says.

For his part, Rajoy compares the PP’s decades of experience in government or opposition with Podemos’s and Ciudadanos’ “15 minutes.” He likes to link Podemos to Syriza’s stewardship of Greece. “Is that the change that the new Spanish parties of extreme left are offering?” Rajoy said on July 11. Ciudadanos, he said, is “weightless … like soap bubbles.”

At the Westin Palace, an undaunted Rivera is arguing that his message of competence and integrity will resonate with voters. “The party system is corrupt and lacks transparency,” he says. “Podemos is promising the impossible. How about we go for the middle ground? How about if we try and fix the system without destroying it?” For him, the election is about more than getting elected. “We need to understand that this isn’t about just forming the next government,” he says. “It’s about creating a new era for Spain.”

This story appears in the October issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine.

(Updates previous version of this story.)