Earthquake of unpredictable consequences on the left flank of national politics. After several weeks of tensions building up that none of the parties tried to hide, Podemos yesterday confirmed its break with Sumar.
Javier Sánchez Serna was responsible for officializing the abandonment of the purple formation of the discipline of the parliamentary group, supervised by the second vice-president, Yolanda Díaz. The leader assured that the passage of the five deputies to the mixed group is necessary to “guarantee the ability of Podemos to do politics in Congress” and to continue carrying out “courageous transformations”. And he ruled that, despite the attempts to work within the parliamentary group of Sumar, in practice it had been “impossible”.
Although when the deputy for Murcia took the floor in the Escritorio room of the hemicicle, the news was no longer such. The founder of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, had once again marked the times of the party by advancing the exclusive through Diario Red, the digital that he directs in the first person.
It was so advanced that Yolanda Díaz, who was sitting in her seat at the time, found out about it through the press. The rigor call actually took a few minutes to arrive. And it wasn’t even between members of the respective departments, but it was the lilac deputy Lilith Verstrynge who communicated it by phone to one of the advisors of the second vice president.
Courtesies aside, Podemos sources assured La Vanguardia that the decision had been taken just yesterday. That for a long time they had checked the constant “obstacles” that Sumar put in order to “prevent them from doing politics”, but that the “tepidity” with which Agustín Santos, in charge of fixing Sumar’s position, cataloged the president’s position of the Government regarding the conflict in the Middle East was “the last straw”.
However, seeing the rapidity of the Lilas’ movements – Santos intervened at 3.45pm and the news became known just an hour later – it seems clear that the scenario, and its consequences, had been studied in time.
Disagreements come from afar. Podemos was left without the group’s representatives, while Catalunya en Comú, Compromís or the Aragonese Party did get them, a situation they saw as a grievance. He was also upset that Sumar’s refusal to support the two non-law proposals that the Deputy and Secretary General of Podemos, Ione Belarra, had tried to present on the preservation of Doñana Park and the Government’s position on the conflict was recorded in the Middle East debated in plenary yesterday.
In a first heated assessment, the parliamentary spokeswoman for Díaz’s coalition, Marta Lois, avoided publicly defining the five deputies as defectors, but harshly criticized the breakup. And after refusing to share the “victimist vision” of the party, he criticized the absence of “politics of height” at a time of “flogging” from the right and the extreme right in the Executive.
“The break is not only with the pact sealed with Sumar for the entire legislature, but with the more than three million citizens who gave us their vote in the elections of 23-J”, he took it upon himself to criticize the spokeswoman .
The date chosen by Podemos to make the break-up official coincides with new symptoms of exhaustion in the party founded by Pablo Iglesias, which yesterday saw how the internal crisis grew.
First, with the departure from the party of Jesús Santos, regional coordinator of Podemos in Madrid. And hours later, with the resignation as member of Jéssica Albiach, president of the En Comú Podemos group in Parliament.
The current deputy mayor of Alcorcón argued in a letter addressed to the militancy that “what in 2016 fit within Podemos today no longer exists due to the reinforcement of a political line focused on its self-affirmation and on raising borders increasingly thick”. And pointing directly at the leadership, he pointed out as one of the most serious mistakes made by his party “the refusal of the purple nucleus to participate in Magariños – the official presentation of the Sumar platform, which was attended by all the confluences -, based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that has ended with a total and incomprehensible shock for the vast majority of the population”.
At the same time, the leader of the Catalan formation, one of the three coordinators of Catalonia in Comú, decided to leave politics after Conchi Abellán, general secretary of Podem Catalunya, recently defended the prohibition of dual militancy, which, in practice , leaves the possible joint competition in the next Catalan regional elections up in the air.
This disagreement from the left fills the PP with ammunition in its attrition campaign against the president of the central government, Pedro Sánchez. And its deputy secretary of regional and municipal policy, Elías Bendodo, did not take long to describe what has happened as a real “media circus”.
The Andalusian quipped that “we accumulate more crisis of Government than days of Government”, while, from the PSOE, the one in charge of sending a message of serenity was its parliamentary spokesman, Patxi López, who in the same line de Lois was “convinced that no one from the left will slow down and paralyze the progressive Government”.
