A civil war to the death. With insufficient troops. No accoutrements. And killing himself at first blood to the astonishment of a historically loyal electorate who knows, in advance, that his vote will not serve much, except to feed one of the fronts in dispute. The Andalusian sinisters, the constellation of minority political brands to the left of the PSOE, are heading towards the municipal elections of May 28, 2023 open in the canal, bleeding from multiple wounds and with subzero chances of political survival.
Quite a tragedy for a militancy that, in the mid-1980s, gave birth to the first serious and lasting experiment in Andalusia in confluence with the vocation of being an alternative to socialist hegemony. Without weighty references and with a rosary of personal frustrations after the irruption of Podemos on the national stage, which in Andalusia reached its peak too soon, the same thing could be said of the bellicose southern left that Pablo Neruda sings in his Canción desesperada : “Everything about you was shipwreck”.
The entrenched fratricidal conflict in which the communists are immersed, what remains of the successive Podemos and the splits that have arisen from these two great biblical ribs, always due to family conflicts (Más País and tiny projects with an Andalusian profile), consolidate the thesis of the exhaustion of the body of faith that gave birth to United We Can.
The reunification of the claims in a block, after the departure of Pablo Iglesias from the Government and the self-determination of his successor, Yolanda Díaz, seems no longer exhausted, but devoured by its very creators. The conflict, it is evident, operates from top to bottom. It is born in the governmental structure – buffeted by internal disagreements, in the first extreme, and by cohabitation with the PSOE, in second place – and extends to local groups and candidacies, which within six months are risking their future – scarce – in town halls and provincial councils. The friendly space – this is how Adelante Andalucía, a brand, was presented
politics currently privatized by Teresa Rodríguez, Podemos MEP in the first Vistalegre– has become a veritable wasteland.
If the regional elections in June were the ordeal of the struggle between IU and Podemos, the electoral results of 19J were received as a crucifixion: six miserable seats and a new fracture of the parliamentary group into three different sectors, with the communists and Mas País failing to comply from minute one the coexistence agreements within the candidacy for Andalusia, one of the battlefields between Iglesias and its people with Yolanda Díaz.
The crisis does not have anyone happy. Neither to their constituents –dwindling–, nor to their leaders, who will lose money and influence, nor to the Socialists, who in the event of reaping an adverse result before a PP with an absolute majority for which these local elections should be a second round of the historic victory in June, they may have serious difficulties in maintaining many mayoralties and city councils because they are left without a potential partner to their left, in the face of a PP that has devoured Cs and, if needed, would once again rely on the Vox mayors.
Nobody wins with this war, but the dispute does not stop. The (broken) confluence between Podemos and IU is like a galaxy in dispersion where the dust of the stars in suspension blurs into tiny fragments. The duel between the (still) nominal partners is also seasoned by a host of circumstances contrary to common sense. Podemos, which has held primaries to designate its candidates, despite the fact that in many constituencies it does not have militants for the lists, has never actually presented itself to municipal ones in Andalusia.
In the event of doing so this May, it would debut with a –less and less hypothetical– failure, given that its objective of obtaining sufficient representativeness on its own to avoid its disappearance has become a chimera. His fear of measuring himself on the local battlefield is not new. In 2015, its leaders preferred to avoid the risks of a cold drop – the organization was going through its best moment, but it still lacked a territorial structure – camouflaging its hosts as decoy-franchises so as not to see its image compromised.
The territorial capillarity of Podemos at that time was more than discreet, although the purple rebellion –Stéphane Hessel had published five years earlier his essay ¡Indignaos!– allowed
dreaming of the assault on the skies. In 2019, the first confluence with UI – Adelante Andalucía, beta version – did not serve to improve things. Even so, Podemos and the minorities that orbited around the communists appeared together in 200 municipalities of Andalusia.
This shared blanket, despite being present in all towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants, which meant competing electorally for the votes of 80% of the population, did not shelter both equally. IU also attended, in parallel and with its own name, in the municipalities where an agreement was not possible, given the weak implementation of Podemos.
At that time, the leadership of both organizations preached harmony, although they did not always practice it. The current situation is radically the opposite: Unidas Podemos has lost many votes, institutional courts and its available economic resources – politics is a materialistic war – have dwindled to the point that they lack the necessary funds to satisfy all potential candidates. Each euro is a Vietnam.
There are more applicants than seats in the consistories. The atmosphere is one of contention, when not of brawl. In many of these 200 localities, it is likely that there will be two different lists, which will reduce councilors and, perhaps, mayoralties. The Podemos primaries rehearse their twilight: so far it has only decided heads of list in 10% of the 785 towns in Andalusia.
It is less than a third of all the candidates who, under the umbrella of Adelante Andalucía, presented four years ago. In this battle of attrition between the communists and the purple party, the former will be slightly less affected in the South, although the 28M front will not be innocuous to anyone. In the previous municipal elections, the IU obtained 455 councilors with their own candidacies and 524 more thanks to the broken electoral cohabitation with Podemos.
It is possible to retain the former within six months, but it is doubtful that the latter will be elected, if there are separate lists. If this event occurred, the left would see its representativeness cut by more than 50%. An absolute debacle, unless the analysis is done in terms of survivors and dead fallen within the same losing army.
What happens with the IU mayors in Andalusia is even more uncertain, given the casuistry of local elections, where the personal ascendancy of the councilors plays a transcendent role. Nothing encourages, in any case, optimism: even in the hypothesis that the organization led by Toni Valero retains its 60 mayors, a good part of them will have to face more uncertain, dependent and even impossible political majorities.
Almost half of these mayoralties may be up in the air in May. The presence of the communists in the coalition governments will also change. The IU candidates will prevail in their battle with Podemos in Andalusia, although in exchange for paying a more than notable institutional cost. Podemos, which starts with 83 of its own councilors (another 53 were on the lists of Adelante Andalucía), may not be present in many councils.
Your space is narrowing. In Seville (106 towns) Podemos does not have more than 20 list heads. In the capital of Andalusia they have not yet been able to cover the electoral list (31 councilors). It is not possible to compensate this setback in symbolic terms: the only mayor’s office of the purple party –Cádiz– is now the bastion of the anti-capitalists of Teresa Rodríguez, who refounded Adelante Andalucía after her break with Pablo Iglesias and his expulsion from the Andalusian Parliament, instigated by the leadership of Podemos and IU in one of their very few agreements.
The situation is so critical that it remains to be seen if there will be a final battle between these two contenders in the capital of Cádiz. The same scenario can be seen in the provincial councils, which are essential institutions to articulate any political project in the territorial sphere. Of the 22 deputies elected in 2019 in the eight provincial corporations, six are from Podemos. The rest militate in IU. Fratricide within the sinisters has left almost half a million votes on the way in the last five years, in addition to multiplying toxic enmities and fertilizing the (African) hatred that accompanies all family wars.
