A complete challenge stated with a big smile. The victory of the candidacy of Antonio Maíllo (Lucena, Córdoba, 1966) in the internal struggle to lead the federal leadership of Izquierda Unida – integrated within the Sumar coalition – represents an amendment to the entirety of the behavioral habits of the party created around of the figure of Yolanda Díaz, who in the last two electoral events – Euskadi and Catalonia – has shown an organic weakness that contrasts – however astonishing – with the notable amount of institutional power that the vice president still holds within the Government. We don’t know for how long.
The election of the Andalusian politician as the new coordinator of the left-wing organization, whose sentimental heart and factual driving force continues to be the property of the heirs of the PCE, comes to consolidate another new circle of misfortunes for Díaz – not so much for the left to the left of the PSOE – whose precedent, as soon as the legislature began, was the stormy divorce with Podemos, and whose final duel will be the European elections in June.
The devoted praetorian guard of Pablo Iglesias and the Díaz-Errejón alliance will measure their strength in the 9J elections. But whatever happens, Sumar’s founding formula is in question both from inside and outside the organization itself. This is an existential crisis. The most evident movement of erosion comes from a PSOE that, after the sudden advance of the Catalan elections – caused by Díaz’s inability to control the Commons –, promotes, largely thanks to the theatrical retirement (interruptus) of Pedro Sánchez, a political takeover bid to become the only reference for left-wing voters.
From the old social democrats – now on the verge of extinction – to the new territorial populisms. The entire progressive arc under the sole command of Moncloa. This is the dream. The victory of the PSC –Sumar has lost two seats in the Parliament and does not have even 6% of the votes– contributes, by appealing to the useful vote against the right, to accelerate the absorption operation of part of Sumar’s electorate, whose decline is not It’s a theory. It is a statistical fact.
The second storm front is the internal one. To the cordial harassment of the PSOE, which intends to expand towards its left to the detriment of Díaz, we must add the discomfort of IU, in whose primary elections four lists have competed. The obvious conclusion is that Sumar, which held its first official assembly in March of this year, only has two options in the medium term: either become something else –even if it is with the same name– or, as Dante wrote in his Comedy, “abandon all hope” not just of a surprise, but of survival.
Maíllo’s candidacy, pragmatic and possibilist, embodies the first option. She remains to see how she will be received by the courtiers who surround Yolanda Díaz, very inclined towards the interests of Más Madrid, los Comunes (Catalunya) and Compromís (Valencia). Internal balances, as we know, are a source of enduring and African hatred. Of grudges and litigation.
Maíllo, who jumped into national politics after overcoming stomach cancer that forced him to retire in Andalusia five years ago, postulates an organizational model different from the one embodied by the vice president. Instead of charismatic leadership, he defends the prominence of the militants. Instead of the Madrid-Barcelona axis he believes in looking at the peripheries. Against pyramidal structures, the Andalusian politician is in favor of giving full voice to the bases.
IU is not comfortable within Sumar. The proof is that Díaz’s candidate to control the left-wing federation – Minister Sira Rego, a nutritionist – has not even reached 25% of the votes in dispute, thirty points behind Maíllo. From the outset, her triumph opens the door to an inevitable bicephaly at the top of Sumar. The enormous prominence of Díaz, supported by the Errejonistas and the Catalan and Valencian sinisters, will diminish. Nothing will be the same.
Maíllo represents half of the IU militants, who come from Andalusia, where the federation has fifty mayors and more than a thousand councilors. His representativeness is out of question both in territorial and organic terms. It makes sense to him that instead of institutional or personal leadership – which is what Yolanda Díaz has nurtured, sometimes bordering on caricature – the new IU leader seeks greater visibility within Sumar. Maíllo talks about “expanding the organization” to incorporate social groups and, with the militants, articulating a Broad Front. Wasn’t that going to be Sumar?
The nominative question, in reality, denotes the crux of the discussion. It also indicates where the shots are going to go (which can be literal). Adding, for certain sectors of IU, is not a destiny. It is a simple way station – until now with little electoral return – to another place. The European elections will focus attention on the Iglesias-Díaz duel, but while this (vain) contest is being settled, IU, relegated to a discreet fourth place in the electoral candidacy, has returned to its origins. And its leaders want it to be noticed.
Maíllo, who is a cultured politician (classical philologist, works as a Latin teacher at an institute in Seville), knows peripheral Spain very well – he has been a teacher in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and in Aracena (Huelva) -, he is active in IU since he was 19 years old and has government experience during the short-lived PSOE-IU coalition in Andalusia.
It represents a synthetic left. Faithful to tradition, but open to updating. In the South, it resisted the emergence of Podemos – then led by Teresa Rodríguez from Cádiz, who surpassed but did not replace IU – and was in the kitchen of the germinal test of red and purple confluence: the first Adelante Andalucía. Later he lived (not without chagrin) the guerrilla war, including the sectarian episodes, between successive left-wing candidates.
His victory in the IU primaries removes the specter of an imminent internal implosion – the minority candidacies of Madrid and Valencia directly advocated leaving Sumar – but it would be quite naive to think that it will not have consequences both from an organic point of view (a decision-making power minor for the Sumar nomenclature) as institutional.
Sumar’s Andalusian deputies in Congress – appointed by Yolanda Díaz’s team – have maintained, in the first stages of this legislature, a submissive attitude in debates such as the amnesty, the demand of the Catalan nationalists for singular financing or bilaterality . This silence also explains another key to Maíllo’s victory.
The new IU coordinator defends social federalism – which is different from the mantra of plurinational Spain that Díaz’s circle has turned into its rhetoric – and knows that the territorial asymmetry sought by Pedro Sánchez’s parliamentary partners (PNV, Bildu, Junts and ERC) is detrimental to both Andalusia and the rest of the Spanish peripheries. The Catalan and Valencian influence in Sumar, which only has Más Madrid as a counterweight, will tend to decrease or be neutralized. Maíllo cannot allow himself – if he wants to save IU from a tacit disappearance – to sacrifice the social issue to the interests of the rich autonomies.
Sumar was born like a Russian doll: a candidate-minister – appointed by Pablo Iglesias without any vote – within whose body multiple political miniatures followed one another. Maíllo arrives in Madrid to reform this organizational system and prevent, from within, the traditional political space of the left of non-socialist obedience from ending up disappearing under the mantle of sanchismo or settling into irrelevance. There will be no shortage of adversaries in the Palace. Nor enemies. At its foot lies the moor where King Lear – Shakespeare’s great creature – discovered ingratitude. Cave canem.
