Sumar retained the three million votes of the United We Can space -despite the concentration of votes that the PSOE achieved, reaching 7.5 million ballots-, and remained above 30 seats, which will allow him to try to revalidate his coalition government with Pedro Sánchez and an alliance with progressive and multi-national formations. “Today Spain and Europe breathe better”, said the candidate Yolanda Díaz. The ovation that he received, at the edge of eleven at night, upon his arrival at the Sumar headquarters – the Espacio Larra, headquarters of the Diario Madrid Foundation – revealed the extreme pressure with which his candidacy has been unwrapped to compose the troubled alliance of the left and retain the vote of the political space after the patent tensions with Podemos.
Sumar failed to overtake Vox by a narrow margin of votes, which also made its votes more profitable in seats, but its numbers are enough to try again for the investiture together with the PSOE. The evolution of the night at the Sumar headquarters went from initial concern to later hope and then to optimism, given the evidence that the most feared scenario and a thousand times announced by the polls, the absolute majority PP-Vox, was far from coming true. When the count reached 40% and the PSOE remained ahead of the PP, it became clear that, no matter how much the count evolved in favor of the PP, an absolute majority was beyond the reach of the right.
“People are going to sleep easier today because democracy has won today and is coming out stronger. We have won ”, Yolanda Díaz proclaimed when she appeared minutes before midnight in a festive atmosphere that celebrated the possibility of repeating the coalition government as an electoral triumph. The acting vice president took the revalidation of the alliance with the PSOE and the rest of the so-called investiture bloc as a fact, which she assured: “From tomorrow I will start a dialogue with all the progressive and democratic forces of our country to guarantee the government in Spain”.
Surrounded by the first swords of Sumar and the alliance of the left -Ernest Urtasun, Mónica García, Ione Belarra, Alberto Garzón, Rita Maestre and Íñigo Errejón, among others-, Díaz announced that the election results show that “hope defeated fear” and announced that “starting tomorrow we are going to govern better, we are going to give our country peace of mind.”
The result – almost identical in votes to that of Unidas Podemos in November 2019, although lower in seats – incidentally resolves the crisis open to the internal due to the reconfiguration of the left, since the possibility of returning to govern alongside the Socialists unravels any invective of internal dissent and ratifies Díaz’s leadership over a very complex political space made up of fifteen organizations. In this sense, Díaz, aware that the electoral advance shortened the runway for his electoral platform and after the convoluted negotiation to include Podemos in the alliance, stressed that the history of the new platform “is very short” but he insisted on thanking “those who supported the initiative from the beginning”, particularly those who participated “in the working groups and in the listening process” that Díaz deployed for a year, touring the country.
Díaz assured that Sumar’s role has been decisive in the campaign, by avoiding polarization and changing “the script talking about the problems of citizenship.” In this sense, he assured that Sumar is not going “to be distracted, from tomorrow we will continue working to have a better country and with more rights.”
