The wait is over. Vice President Yolanda Díaz presents her listening process this afternoon at the Matadero in Madrid, through the Sumar platform, in a public act in which there will not be a lineup of politicians but rather representation and voice of civil society, expressed in the public workers, of the new models of the digital economy as well as of research and cultural creativity, among others.
Once the epidermal controversy over the absence of the first swords of the political formations of the left has been overcome –the ministers of United We Can and the leaders of the different spaces will not attend, although militants and representatives of all these formations will attend–, the act coincides with a a singularly convulsive week in the coalition government, in which the PSOE has stepped on the accelerator of internal dissidence, rebuffing its partner with a semi-clandestine approval of an extraordinary item of one billion euros for military spending.
On Tuesday, the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, was seen very angry in the Council of Ministers, a very unusual image, even in the most tense moments of the negotiation of the labor reform, due to the inopportune trick of the socialists, sneaking that expense in the Council without prior discussion with the government partner. That, after the disciplined low profile that the United We Can ministers maintained during the NATO summit, sources from the formation underline. But also because of Monday’s offensive by the Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, who with an unheard-of malevolent allusion to the Navantia de Ferrol shipyard executed what in conventional football could be described as a heels-first tackle on the politically educated Vice President Diaz in labor disputes at the Ferrol shipyard. Two saetas of the PSOE against Yolanda Díaz in the week in which she launched her platform and her listening process does not fit, they complained in her environment, in the mantra that Díaz repeats every time there is a conflict within the Council of Ministers: the urgency, in this accelerated time, of “taking care of the coalition” in the face of the horror of the alternative. And the week has not progressed any better, if we consider that the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, has confirmed her resignation from the tax reform that was one of the pillars of the coalition pact reached by Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias in January 2020.
In any case, Díaz, who has already launched the Sumar website, which will reflect the progress of this listening process over the next few months -and in which mechanisms have been opened for the participation of citizenship–, which will run until December, does not want to turn today’s public event into a political and partisan current affairs rally, as confirmed by sources from the vice presidency, but rather a public call for a participatory process to which it intends to incorporate sensitivities progressive members of civil society to form a “country project” that will be the basis of an eventual political program. If he finally decides to lead an eventual list in the generals, something that nobody doubts today.
The vice-president’s speech will close tomorrow’s event, but the organization’s aim is that once the speeches are over, Yolanda Díaz will remain in Matadero to be able to talk with those attending the baptismal act of the new platform. A mass bath to change the tone of a gloomy political moment because sad passions do not move the vote.
