The crisis that the breakup of the coalition with Sumar has opened in Podemos seems to have no end. Its electoral candidate for the City Council of the capital, Roberto Sotomayor, and the one who was purple export spokesperson in the Madrid Assembly, Carolina Alonso, communicated yesterday their decision to leave the party due to the lack of internal democracy. A hard blow on an internal scale that, moreover, coincides with Sumar’s decision to raise the tone in his dispute over the acts of the five purple deputies for an act that the confederal spokesman, Ernest Urtasun, describes as “transfugism”.
The departures of Sotomayor and Alonso – which are added to those of Jaume Asens and Jèssica Albiach in Catalonia – are not just two losses. In addition to being the most visible faces of a formation that currently has no representatives either in the Consistory or the Assembly on which to start a phase of reconstruction in the territory where it was founded, the two leaders were considered as two convinced Pabloites. Or, in other words, two related members of the current purple dome. Something that shows that the strategic decision to break the pact with Sumar does not have the consensus argued in recent days by its general secretary, Ione Belarra.
“Podem had the opportunity to influence this new tool, but instead, it has opted for direct confrontation as if it were a championship to find out who will keep the space”, argued Sotomayor in a letter addressed to the militancy, in which he warns his former party that “winning primaries by further dividing the militancy is not winning”.
The ex-athlete also regrets that “the dynamics that existed in other regions” were being replicated in Madrid, where “no one picks up the phone anymore, or answers messages. Actions are taken and decisions are made in small decision-making groups, some of which seem to be overpowered” and “the distances with the state management are getting bigger”, he adds as a poisoned dart to the nucleus formed by the former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, the founder of the party, Pablo Iglesias, and Belarra himself.
To the internal crisis of Podemos we must add the external one. Sumar has decided to go one step further in apportioning blame for the dissolution of the coalition and yesterday made it official, in the words of Urtasun, that the five lilac deputies who have joined the mixed group have committed an act of “defection “. The confederal space does not rule out, in fact, raising the case to the commission of the same name, in which the suitability of all of them returning their acts could be assessed.