The party lasted well into the evening. Sports halls are no longer filled like that to attend rallies and Yolanda DÃaz had gathered leaders from many corners of Spain to hear the announcement of her candidacy for president. The Madrid sportsman Antonio Magariños (teacher who promoted Estudiantes basketball) looked splendid, so much so that he almost left the absence of the Podemos management in the background. There they could see leaders of the fragmented political space to the left of the PSOE applauding each other, although at some other time they would not have hesitated to (figuratively) stick a stiletto in the back… The left , especially the further to the left and more reduced, it usually gets tangled up in traffic about its essences which end up being very personalistic. The conviction of being right and the passion to defend one’s ideas is accentuated to the extreme. On Sunday, the attendees cornered brawlers and responded to the call of Sumar, the platform created by DÃaz to bring together so many ideological and territorial sensitivities. And then they went to a place in Madrid to talk and celebrate, not missing Ione Belarra, Irene Monteroo, and less so, Pablo Iglesias.
But after the intoxicating effluvia of Magariños in Sumar, or the hangover of the plantation in Podemos, none of them can be fooled. It is enough to do the numbers to calculate the catastrophe that would mean for the left if the two forces went separately to the general elections. The corrective of the D’Hondt law would be of category. DÃaz needs around 15% of the vote to displace Vox from third place and have options to form a new progressive government. The consequences of division for all of them would be calamitous. And this causes both parties to play the game of chicken, thinking that it is inevitable that the other will give in, while offering the image of a group immersed in a bonfire of narcissisms, since the differences are not on the agenda, but of strategy and power quotas, very old politics.
While Podemos sees municipal and regional councils approaching that will not bring them great joy, on DÃaz’s side they are crossing their fingers that Ada Colau manages to keep the mayorship of Barcelona and save the progressive government in the Valencian Community. The polls on May 28 will mark the real starting point of a negotiation that in Sumar is clear that it cannot extend beyond September. It is the deadline that has been set because the general elections will predictably be in December and, in that interval, Sumar will call open primaries, whose procedures are part of that prior dialogue with all the formations that will make up the coalition. The intention is to enable a census in which anyone who wishes can register to choose the lists. Yolanda DÃaz has not yet decided whether she will run for Madrid or in a Galician candidacy. What is clear is that this open election process will serve as a pre-election campaign. Hence the self-imposed time limit.
Sunday’s event already gave clues about DÃaz’s campaign, which will revolve around his person and a slogan about the possibility of a woman presiding over the government for the first time in Spain. Despite the fact that no survey gives credibility to this option, DÃaz will exploit the message that this country is ready to elect a woman as head of the Executive. For this reason, the vice-president has been quick to dismantle the idea of ​​an electoral ticket with Sánchez, disseminated by the PSOE leadership after Vox’s motion of censure.
The media attraction aroused by Ramón Tamames stopped the pulse in the bosom of the Executive following Belarra’s request for “only women to intervene” in the face of Vox’s masculinity. Moncloa then proposed that it be the vice-presidents who take the floor in the motion of censure, that is to say, two from the socialist side and Yolanda DÃaz, which left out the two Podemos ministers. But the leader of Sumar rejected that possibility and claimed before Sánchez the same treatment as in the previous motion of censure of Vox, when the president and Iglesias intervened. That’s how it was. But DÃaz does not want to appear in the elections as a ticket or a mere companion of the socialists.
Podemos continues to cultivate its good relations with ERC and Bildu, but it is very difficult that this understanding could be translated into an electoral pact in the face of the generals if the lilacs broke with Sumar. So the two parties will wait for 28-M and then they will have to negotiate during the summer a solution that does not make them the protagonists of the well-known joke that Iglesias himself briefly recalled to RAC-1 and which goes like this: what is a Trotskyist? a party Two Trotskyists? A party and a current. Three Trotskyists? A party, a current and a split.
By the way, he stopped here, but the joke continues: And four Trotskyists? The Fourth International. And five? Nothing like this has ever been seen.
