The second vice president of the Government and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, urges the leadership of Podemos to attend the Sumar act next Sunday, when she will announce her candidacy for the general elections. Díaz insists on attracting the purple formation, of whom she says that she “has no excuse” for not being present at the event at the Antonio Magariños sports center. From Congress, the vice president has appealed to Podemos and its general secretary, Ione Belarra, to be at the “key moments” in history.
Díaz has promised to carry out primaries, as Podemos demands, “with democratic guarantees”, although the positions are still far away because the purple ones are asking for a bilateral and not a multilateral agreement. In this sense, he has highlighted the diversity within Sumar, which he believes will be “a great revulsion” for the left and that it will have the “key” to form a new government coalition with the PSOE.
“Of course, I think that in the moments that the history of a country can change, it must be there,” said Díaz, who has been convinced that on Sunday there will be many members of the purple party.
The one who has also put pressure on the state leadership of Podemos -and has supported Díaz- has been the third vice president of Congress and a member of the purple formation, Gloria Elizo. The top leaders of the party do not have, in their opinion, the “moral, political and even personal capacity” to ask the party officials not to support Sumar’s launch. Elizo has shown her public support for Díaz, although she has cited agenda issues to be absent from the Madrid event.
Gloria Elizo’s statements from Congress therefore endorse the presence of various territorial leaders of Podemos, who have already confirmed that they will attend the Magariños sports center. For the moment, the directorates of Navarra, Galicia and the Balearic Islands have done so, while the executives of Extremadura, Asturias and the Basque Country have not yet made a firm decision.
For his part, the ERC leader in Madrid, Gabriel Rufián, has joined the calls for a pact between the leftist forces. Thus, he has asked Sumar and Podemos that the political space they represent “is not disunited” and has stressed that Yolanda Díaz and Pablo Iglesias “have very similar things, for better and for worse.”
Likewise, Rufián has demanded that Díaz not lead the negotiations to form Sumar as he did with the labor reform. “If he does it, let’s go aviados”, has warned the republican leader.
