Not a hint of that musty smell mixed with hardwoods and leather from ministerial cabinets. Nor to those office air fresheners that make everything worse. Upon entering Yolanda Díaz’s office, he smells of home: coffee, books, cushions embroidered with the name of her daughter, Carmela, and violet candies. In a corner, a record player enlivens the room. “How are you going to put music in the office? I don’t see it well, ”her father, Suso Díaz, a historic Galician union leader, told her years ago. But in 2021, when she was discharged after a kidney disease, she asked the vinyl collector that she took her children to buy in London or Amsterdam: “Daddy, find me a plate.” He stood in her office, measured it, and calculated the distance between the speakers. Today, civil servants have become accustomed to listening to Dimiri Shostakovich and bossa nova. Music is the only thing that relaxes him.
The Sumar leader sleeps just four hours. She gets up at five: “When everyone is sleeping, I read reports, books, data; and, yes, I have a very good memory, just like all my family. I carry the State in my head”. She declares herself a Stakhanovite at work, and admits that, although politics is very tough, she “has a sexy point. She gets you hooked more than anything in the world. And, furthermore, you meet people that in another position you would never meet”.
She was born when they did not expect her; she has been with her older brother for ten years and, to this day, at home she is still “the girl”. She carries her happy childhood stamped on her gaze. She studied Law in Santiago, she specialized in family and women, and worked in various professional firms. “I divorced a lot of people,” she recalls, “and I was surprised that they couldn’t rationalize. I am not romantic, although I am absolutely passionate. You can’t live without love, it’s very sad. I believe in everyday love through the little things, and I give the same. And I believe in egalitarian relationships, in caring for and respecting each other”. I ask him about the open pair. “On a trip I couldn’t believe the story of a young woman who told me about triejas. I am heterosexual, and I like stability. I am very fond of my friends, my books, my vinyls…”.
A photograph of her mother, Carmela Pérez, rests on a table, without a frame: “She was from a military family, Catholic, modern, hilarious and beautiful. I look like my father. Although she had blue eyes. We went down the street together and they looked at her: she wore hats and her short hair; she would say: “what a pity, my daughter is so classically dressed…she looks like a lady!”. She died in 2012, on the seventh day after being admitted, a Twelfth Night. “The oncologist, who was from the Popular Party, told me with great affection: “Yolanda, say goodbye to your mother.” First I didn’t understand it. Then I collapsed. No, I’m not as tough as I seem. I think of her every day, and I wear her rings, her earrings… Sometimes I still have the reflex act of wanting to call her”. On her long trips, she reflects on how she would do her things, the same thing that would tell her about a medal or an Our Father “baby, that doesn’t hurt”.
His meeting with the Pope, in December 2021, was not accidental: Díaz sympathized with grassroots Christianity as a young man –so much so that he is still in contact with priests and members of the HOAC (Worker Brotherhood of Catholic Action)–, and that was a interview sought by both. “I cried and I was moved,” he recalls of the visit to the Vatican.
A few days later, the Spanish episcopal conference called for a vote in favor of the labor reform, something unheard of until then. A message had come from Rome. The story is well known: the law was approved in extremis thanks to the vote by mistake of the people’s deputy Alberto Casero. The Sumar leader recalls: “After the surprising approval, we met in the office and Josep Vendrell [his chief of staff] told me:“ Can I ask you an intimate question? By chance, did you take with you to the vote the rosary that the Pope gave you? And I opened the bag, in silence, and took out the rosary. Words were superfluous.”
The fashionista, as Jiménez Losantos baptized her – “he is the best at putting nicknames”, he concedes – is unfazed by criticism of his image. “Since I was very young I have received them. I like feminine shirts, I wear Galician brands –Verino, D-Due, Mascob– and occasionally I wear heels; I do not feel them as an oppression at all”. And we end up talking about the prejudices associated with beauty, and Pedro Sánchez. “Ah, if he messed up a bit…!”
