It will be Rams Sunday. Vice-president Yolanda Díaz will announce on April 2 at 11:30 a.m. at the Magariños sports center in Madrid the decision on her eventual candidacy for the presidency of the Spanish government, which will in all probability be affirmative. The space chosen to do this, a sports hall that is the birthplace of the Estudiantes basketball team and is linked to the Ramiro de Maeztu school, is one of those that the PSOE has used for its campaign events, and it is of particular interest to the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who was a player in the Estu squad. However, also Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, chose the Magariños sports center in November to concentrate his militancy against the reform of the Penal Code that the Government was preparing.
In the event called by Sumar, like all the previous ones of the so-called listening process, representatives of civil society will play a leading role, according to the platform, but all political organizations capable of incorporating- se to Sumar’s candidacy, which have been previously announced by Díaz over the last few weeks. In fact, almost all of them have anticipated their presence at the event, with the exception of Podemos, which, as its executive reported last week, hopes to reach an agreement with Díaz about the conditions for participation in the candidacy and the role of the vice president in the imminent municipal and regional election campaign.
Díaz presented Sumar on Sunday in “an act of listening” in Seville in which he already made clear the meaning of his decision. Addressing the ex-leader of IU Andalusia, an ally of Podemos during his tenure as Andalusian coordinator, Antonio Maíllo, he said: “I will take one of the most important decisions of my life, and I will do it immediately; a decision that serves to contribute to my country, to give hope to the people”. Despite the fact that the management of Podem Andalucía did not attend the event – contrary to what has happened in most events of the listening process, in which the respective territorial leaders of Podem have always participated -, they also tried to file differences with the purples using as an argument of unity for his platform a literal replica of a speech by the then candidate of Unides Podemos for the presidency of the Government, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2019 campaign: “It is difficult to add the which is different If we aspire to change the country, we agree on 90%; you need to be tall and walk together”.
In any case, Díaz’s listening itinerary still has one last trip left, this weekend in the Canary Islands, where Díaz will share space with the ex-organizational secretary of Podemos, who was withdrawn by Congress deputy and who left the purple formation to, months later, announce the launch of his own political platform, Proyecto Drago. Rodríguez has already confederated his organization in the so-called Pacte del Turia, in which there is Compromís, More Country, Verds Equo, Chunta Aragonesista and Coalition for Melilla, and in principle his intention is to incorporate Proyecto Drago in Sumar in the general elections . Before the Canarian event, which will close the tour, Sumar has held twenty sectoral events throughout the country, focused on labor legislation, LGBTI rights, the rural world, climate change, housing and health policies …, to which more than 25,000 people have attended, according to the data managed by the platform.
At the time of communicating the decision to promote his candidacy, it is also expected that Yolanda Díaz will offer the main lines of a document called Proyecto de país that must define the strategic objectives of a transformation that the progressive forces should assume in the next decade, as explained in the hearings, and which has been drawn up by a long thirty working groups throughout the last year.
In any case, it is not planned that Sumar as such will be present in the regional and municipal elections, as Díaz has been repeating in the last year, and his personal presence, apart from the platform, will be linked to the achievement of integration lists of the different progressive forces. This is one of the points of friction with Podemos, who believes that the vice president must commit to the campaign with the acronyms for which she ran in 2019, apart from whether these acronyms are presented against other eventual allies of Sumar, as happens in the cases of the Madrid and Valencia autonomous and municipal governments.
With reference to this, and despite the pressures received during the last year, Sumar’s intention is not to start shaping his general candidacy until after the territorial elections of May 28, whose campaign officially starts on the 12 of the same month
