The rejection of the parties and mistrust of the apparatus. This is the main fact that encourages the launch of the Sumar platform, which Yolanda Díaz presented on Friday in Madrid. The operation is as complicated as it is interesting: trying to regroup everything that is to the left of the PSOE under one umbrella and overcoming, at the same time, the constant cainist struggles that – as has happened in the Andalusian elections – spoil many votes. For this reason, the second vice president shies away from talking –for now– of agreements between formations. She is looking for the moment.
From the experience of Podemos, Díaz takes advantage of the dissolution of the “left” concept to underline a transversal aspiration that is nothing more than the yearning for a new centrality from a progressivism that systematically avoids this label, with the aim of reaching a broad electorate ( penetrating even in the socialist parish), little or nothing ideological. On the other hand, and as she herself has recounted in El País, while what Pablo Iglesias launched “was born from the challenge” she starts from “the construction” and proposes “a country in favor, in which we dialogue”. It is easy to see in this position the best legacy of the PCE (which was already for “national reconciliation” in 1956), an organization from which Díaz comes.
The reformism advocated by Diaz has the pragmatic and institutional tone of the old Eurocommunist school without its doctrinal trimmings and with the supplement of a feminism without overacting. The most interesting thing about his speech is that he puts the socioeconomic agenda first and avoids (without denying them) the cultural battles that have reduced electoral expectations for various European lefts, including Podemos. It is an agenda designed to connect with a new majority and, incidentally, dismantle certain “social” messages from Vox.
With the parties that want to come, but without abusively sending the devices. This alchemy will be very difficult for Díaz, who insists on the idea of ??a “citizen movement.” What he offers is a macronismo that is less posh and more leftist than the original, in the hands of a powerful leader who needs the impulse of some bases (“listening process”) in order to not be just a candidate for Moncloa. Her challenge is to be the primus inter pares of this space, surviving in the shadow of Iglesias and a few domes that come to power without having thought enough about it or having forgotten the lessons of the German Greens (divided between fundis or fundamentalists and realos or realistic), whose survival is due to the ability to adapt.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has allowed Díaz to draw his own perimeter, away from a certain Podemite dogmatism, an attitude that adds to his capacity for dialogue with all social agents. In Catalonia, Ada Colau and the commons are for the job, but there are many wickers still loose and many precautions against a possible excess of personalism, between barons and small groups of a left that claims to be very coherent and has a tendency to self-destruction.
