Earthquake with unpredictable consequences on the left flank of national politics. After several weeks of mounting tensions that neither party made any effort to conceal, Podemos yesterday confirmed its break with Sumar.
The person in charge of making official the abandonment of the purple formation of the discipline of the parliamentary group, supervised by the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, was Javier Sánchez Serna. The purple leader assured that the transfer of the five deputies to the mixed group is necessary to “guarantee Podemos’s ability to do politics in Congress” and continue carrying out “brave transformations.” And he stated that, despite attempts to work within Sumar’s parliamentary group, in practice it had been “impossible.”
Although by the time the deputy for Murcia spoke in the Desk room of the chamber, the news was no longer such. The founder of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, had once again marked the times of the match by advancing the exclusive through Diario Red, the digital one that he directs in first person.
It was so advanced that Yolanda Díaz, at that time sitting in her seat in Congress, found out from the press. The usual call, in fact, took a few minutes to arrive. And it was not even between members of the respective directorates, but rather it was the purple deputy Lilith Verstrynge, who communicated it by telephone to one of the second vice president’s advisors.
Courtesies aside, Podemos sources assured La Vanguardia that the decision was made just yesterday. That they had been checking for some time the constant “obstacles” that Sumar was putting in place to “prevent them from doing politics,” but that the “lukewarmness” with which Agustín Santos, the person in charge of setting Sumar’s position, classified the position of the President of the Government with Regarding the conflict in the Middle East, it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
However, seeing the speed of the movements of the purple ones –Santos intervened at 3:45 p.m. and the news was known just an hour later–, it seems evident that the scenario, and its consequences, had been studied in advance.
The disagreements come from afar. Podemos was left without the spokespersons for the group, while Catalunya en Comú, Compromís or the Chunta Aragonesista did obtain them, a situation that they saw as a grievance. It was also annoying that Sumar’s refusal to support the two non-legal proposals that the deputy and general secretary of Podemos, Ione Belarra, tried to present on the preservation of the Doñana park and the Government’s position on the debated conflict in the Middle East was recorded. yesterday in full.
In a first hot assessment, the parliamentary spokesperson for Díaz’s coalition, Marta Lois, avoided publicly defining the five deputies as turncoats, but harshly criticized the breakup. And after refusing to share the “victimist vision” of the party, she disfigured the absence of “high-level politics” at a time of “harassment” of the Executive by the right and the extreme right.
“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 last June 23,” the spokesperson was in charge of reproaching.
The date chosen by Podemos to make the break official coincides with new symptoms of exhaustion of the party founded by Pablo Iglesias, who yesterday saw how the internal crisis worsened. First with the departure from the party of Jesús Santos, regional coordinator of Podemos in Madrid. And hours later with the departure of Jéssica Albiach, president of the En Comú Podem group in the Parliament.
The current deputy mayor of Alcorcón argued in a letter addressed to the militancy that “what fit within Podemos in 2016 no longer fits today due to the reinforcement of a political line focused on self-affirmation and raising increasingly thicker borders.” ”. And pointing directly to the leadership, he pointed out as one of the most serious errors committed by his party “the refusal of the purple nucleus to participate in Magariños – the official presentation event of the Sumar platform 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.”
While the leader of the Catalan party, one of the three coordinators of Catalunya En Comú, decided to leave politics after Conchi Abellán, general secretary of Podem, recently defended the prohibition of double militancy, which in practice leaves the possible joint participation in the next Catalan regional elections.
This disagreement on the left gives ammunition to the PP in its campaign to wear down the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. And his deputy secretary of regional and municipal policy, Elías Bendodo, was quick to describe what happened as a true “media circus.”
The Andalusian ironically said that “we have had more Government crises than Government days”, while, from the PSOE, the person in charge of sending a message of serenity was its parliamentary spokesperson, Patxi López, who in the same line as Lois showed himself “ convinced that no one from the left is going to slow down and paralyze the progressive Government.”
