The peace of the negotiations for the eventual integration of Podemos in Sumar, which had been taking place for days with complete discretion, was blown up on Monday night when the former vice president Pablo Iglesias accused En Comú Podem – which is his organization in Catalonia – and in fact, he is part of the executive and the state citizen council – to veto the entry of Podemos in Sumar. Rarely has En Comú produced a public response to the tactical movements and leaks from the Podemos leadership, but the straw must have overflowed the camel’s back from the usual internal stoicism of the commons, which yesterday assured, on the one hand, that Iglesias does not know what who speaks since he is not in the negotiation and, on the other, they dropped the bomb that the state leadership of Podemos had informed them in recent days that he was playing with two cards at the same time before the general elections on July 23: he was negotiating with Sumar and with ERC at the same time.
It took Esquerra just two minutes to categorically deny it and ask Podemos and the commons not to use them as a bargaining chip in the internal struggle for Sumar’s space. The commons, in the face of ERC’s refusal, confirmed that this was the literal warning from the state leadership of Podemos -in fact, from the leadership itself- and showed their surprise at the double game of those led by Ione Belarra, considering that ERC it is the natural rival of the commons and of Podem.
From the silence of Podemos in the face of the revelation, which did not say this mouth is mine in the face of the successive communiqués of the Comunes and Esquerra, it can be deduced that this warning of having a second suitor for the general elections could have been a pressure mechanism from the purple in a negotiation that seems doomed to another agonizing end. A streetlight.
The fact is that the threat of Podemos sounded plausible, since, since the discreet contacts of the Podemos leadership with Esquerra in January 2022, fueling the distrust of the Republicans towards the labor reform promoted by the vice president of the Government and leader of the space of United We Can in the Executive, Yolanda DÃaz, the closeness has been such that, when ERC voted, together with Bildu, against the partial reform of the gag law promoted by the PSOE and United We Can and it fell, the general secretary of the purples, Social Rights Minister Ione Belarra publicly expressed her proximity to the pro-independence formations and her disdain for the reform text that her own deputies had managed to agree with the socialist group and the PNV.
The rumor of an eventual movement by Podemos for an alliance with ERC and EH Bildu that would compete against the platform of Yolanda DÃaz has been deliberately fed from the leadership of Podemos with insistence during the last year, which has led nationalists and republicans to deny it. categorically on several occasions. The almost total absence of the Podemos leaders in the Ada Colau campaign and the frequency with which Iglesias and Montero were seen on those days in the company of ERC leaders have fueled that same double game. Coincidence or sought coincidence, the private visit, last weekend, of Pablo Iglesias to Catalonia, a trip whose agenda has not been revealed, has served to give more credibility to the threat of a possible change of dance partner by Podemos , leaving the commons in the lurch.
Yolanda DÃaz’s entourage avoided any comment on the matter of the real or feigned double game of Podemos, and in fact they knew about the movement of the commons when it occurred. In any case, the Sumar team maintained maximum discretion yesterday regarding the terms that are discussed in the agreement with Podemos, whose dialogue is still ongoing and, although it is admitted that all this noise unleashed from the intervention of Iglesias in the Ser does not help clear up the negotiation for its possible incorporation into Sumar –which has 48 hours left to resolve–, it does not mean that the parties have decided to get up from the table.
From the outside, and as long as the terms of a possible agreement transcend, the difficult fitting together of the pieces of a dismembered left today seems to have plenty of the tricks of conjurers and lacks the tricks of jugglers.
