The taboo chronicles. Always. Vice President Yolanda DÃaz reduced the pressure within the pot of the left in rebuilding by several pascals, speaking to Jordi Évole about the elephant in the room: Pablo Iglesias. It could have been the other way around. In fact, public figures tend to lose their hair when they put themselves in the hands of the conjurer Évole.
The previews of the program distributed in the previous hours made us fear the worst: that the interview of more than an hour with the presidential candidate would only add more noise to a process that already contains all the inevitable neuroses and a lot of them that could have avoided. The interviewer’s insistence on asking about the personal and political relationship of Pablo Iglesias and Yolanda DÃaz was due, according to Évole’s own expression, to the need to mention “the elephant in the room” in that process that Alberto Garzón calls “restructuring and reunion of political forces and citizensâ€, but it could also have been an elephant trap. It was not, luckily for that space and for the government coalition.
DÃaz spoke a lot and well about Iglesias. From his intelligence and his character, from “the indignity” of the unprecedented harassment operation that Podemos in general and Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero in particular have suffered in recent years. He showed, in short, that “respect” that Podemos began to claim for his political identity at the Autumn University with a loud voice. But he did not pick up the cable regarding the present situation and the attitude of the purples before the restructuring of the space. He revealed his anger at the tacticism of Podemos by boycotting Sumar’s debut at the Magariños sports center in Madrid – after, he recalled, that the territorial directorates of Podemos had fully attended Sumar’s “listening acts” during the last few seven months– and neither did he avoid the other anathema that everyone sees but no one believes without the risk of being reprimanded: the patent bicephaly of Podemos. He was very explicit regarding the claim of “open primaries” by Podemos, a request that he did not hesitate to treat as a tactic, as an alibi for not attending the event on April 2. “Two don’t agree if one doesn’t want to,” he repeated. In this sense, DÃaz was very frank, noting something that Podemos already experienced in the winter of 2016, during the negotiations between the teams of Pablo Iglesias and Ãñigo Errejón to come together in a single list in the Vistalegre II Assembly: all schismatic discussions it revolves around money, rosters, and the number of releases, and the negotiation rarely has any link to program or strategy. She did not have it in that fateful winter in which she coagulated the rupture of Iglesias and Errejón and there is no one around the conditions of Podemos to integrate into Sumar.
But just as decisive as it is to air a taboo to exorcise ghosts and take pressure off the process – avoiding the inclination to ultimatum – is not to say Candyman’s name three times in front of the mirror, because the demon usually incarnates if summoned. The vice president did not mention the possibility of a Sumar in which Podemos is not also present: “I don’t want it.”
