The executive of Podem yesterday offered her first political assessment of the situation, eight days after the municipal and regional elections, and her assessment is that the party is still alive and that it is essential to repeat a coalition government. “We continue standing”, proclaimed the co-spokesman of the coordination council, Pablo Fernández. Both he and his colleague Isa Serra expressed the urgency of the purple party to sign an agreement with Sumar as soon as possible, without waiting for Friday, although sources familiar with the negotiation believe that it could be ready tomorrow or Thursday.
Podemos spokespeople asked for discretion for the negotiation, although, given the possibility that some member of the organization’s current leadership would step aside as IU leader Alberto Garzón has done, they affirmed that “vetoing names is torpedoing unity”. Party sources point out that Podemos has tried to speed up the agreement and in fact, they pressed to have it ready by Monday, so that they could announce it after the executive meeting.
Regarding the first assessment of the electoral defeat of May 28, the executive considers that these results are a product of the size of its opponents and the unredeemed condition of the formation. “No one ever said that this was easy, we had to face enormous adversities”, said Serra, and indicated: “We knew that our way of doing politics, brave and always telling the truth, could have a harsh response by the country’s authorities”. The executive, however, does not give up and is sure that the purple formation “continues to represent the hope of changing this unjust system” and its presence in Sumar is an indispensable – “condition of possibility” – to revalidate electorally the coalition government. In this sense, he also had words for the first vice-president, Nadia Calviño, who considered the purple formation to be gone, after its patacada on 28- M. “Perhaps the PSOE wants to stay in the opposition to eliminate the our political space”, said Fernández.
Despite the fact that the organization has not convened its highest body between congresses, the state citizen council, which met urgently on April 1 to avoid the attendance of Podemos positions or candidates at the act of Summar a Magariños, which was held the following day, its spokesmen assure that “the whole organization” supports the state leadership “in the analysis that unity is indispensable”. In this sense, the purples feel irreplaceable in the progressive space. “When the reactionary wave advances, it is more important than ever that there is an organization like Podemos that keeps hope alive,” the spokespeople point out.
That is why Podemos has adopted a new tactic in this process, antithetical to that of its previous agreements with the rest of the forces in the political space, consisting of not exhausting the term of the negotiation until the final moment, with an unfortunate result in the Andalusian confluence from a year ago. Podemos affirms that “every minute that we do not manage to reach an agreement is very valuable time lost to convince the public that there is a party, that it is possible to win”.
Meanwhile, Yolanda DÃaz’s platform announced yesterday the addition to the campaign team of Pablo Bustinduy, who had been Podemos’ international policy secretary, retired from politics since the schism of Podemos and Més PaÃs in 2019. Bustinduy was to be the candidate for the European elections for the United We Can list, but a few weeks after Ãñigo Errejón founded his own political organization – first as More Madrid and then its state affiliate, More Country–, he abandoned active politics and he continued his research career as a political scientist in the United States. Yesterday, both DÃaz and Alberto Garzón praised the addition of Bustinduy to the Sumar team on social networks.
