“As a Republican, I have always believed in the renewal of representatives: it is healthy for political projects and also for democracy.” This is how the Minister of Consumption and federal coordinator of the IU, Alberto Garzón, explains his decision not to repeat as a candidate in the general elections on July 23, as he announced in a statement early this Friday. He also points out that he will continue to lead the party and will participate in the campaign helping the Sumar Movement led by the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda DÃaz.
Garzón abandons institutional politics and will not present himself to the Congress of Deputies, a decision that he communicated to the party leadership and DÃaz last Tuesday, after learning of the electoral advance for 23-J. The head of Consumption considers that the new stage promoted by Sumar needs new profiles and will continue to support the project from the federal coordination of IU.
“It is a very thoughtful decision that aspires to promote the renewal of the public faces that represent this necessary project. As a Republican, I have always believed in the renewal of representatives: it is healthy for political projects and also for democracy,” Garzón explained through a statement shared on social networks.
Garzón has been on the front line for 12 years, he participated in 15-M and was the youngest deputy in the 2011 elections. “Now that we are entering a new phase, I think it is a great time to allow other colleagues to contribute their energy and knowledge.
Committed from the beginning to the journey of Sumar, Garzón maintained from the beginning an interpretation of DÃaz’s initiative opposed to the reading that Podemos did. The minister believes that the harassment suffered by civil and criminal justice to the United Podemos space and especially to the Podemos leaders does not exhaust the explanation for the loss of electoral support and considers that Sumar must be the reunion space for all the political families that have been moving away from the purple party and IU.
Rumors about his decision to leave institutional politics at the end of this legislature have been circulating for weeks through the political space, although the anticipated dissolution of the Cortes announced by President Pedro Sánchez last Monday, after the bad result of the formations that make up the coalition government in the municipal and regional elections last Sunday.
Garzón began his political activity during 15M, a camp of which he was one of the protagonists – paradoxically, Podemos was able to capture the desire for renewal of 15M, despite the fact that very few of the members of its founding nucleus participated in the camp of the Puerta del Sol in 2011 – succeeding Cayo Lara in the position of federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida.
15M had a strong impact on the organization and the role of critical economist that Garzón had developed in the digital sphere and his leading role in Sol’s camp earned him, at the age of 26, leading the IU list for Malaga, becoming the youngest member of the legislature. Just over a year later, in January 2013, he was elected a member of the IU Federal Executive Commission.
In 2016, he was elected coordinator of the IU and almost simultaneously reached an agreement with Pablo Iglesias so that Podemos and IU would run together in the electoral repetition of June 2016. Podemos had rejected integration the previous fall for the December 2015 elections in which Finally, Podemos and IU added more votes than the PSOE. In any case, the previous tensions between the two organizations and the internal resistance that both Iglesias and Garzón suffered for the signing of that agreement caused the sum to lose almost one million votes between December and June, and by barely 350,000 votes, the PSOE he maintained his hegemony on the left side of the parliamentary arc.
After the birth of the Unidas Podemos coalition, Garzón and Iglesias agreed on a roadmap for the creation of a single political subject that would integrate the pull of Podemos and the strong organic and territorial implantation of the IU, a plan that was postponed due to the convulsive second assembly of Podemos, held in February 2017 in the Vistalegre bullring, and the subsequent rebellion of the PSOE bases against its leadership, returning Pedro Sánchez to the general secretariat in May of that year. That project never came to fruition.
When the crisis broke out in Podemos in January 2019, due to the march of Ãñigo Errejón to found, first Más Madrid and then Más PaÃs, and the attempted rebellion of various territorial coordinators of the purples, meeting in Toledo, Alberto Garzón, Enrique Santiago, general secretary of the PCE, Jaume Asens, for the commons, and Yolanda DÃaz, then an IU and PCE militant, were the key figures from outside Podemos who remained loyal to the Unidas Podemos agreement and went to the side of the de Iglesias in the general elections in April and in the electoral repetition in November.
In the coalition government negotiation, in November of that year, Iglesias tore up five ministerial portfolios for the confederal space of United We Can, which made Garzón Minister of Consumption.
