Yolanda Díaz assumes this Sunday the witness of Podemos as leader of the alternative left to the PSOE with the announcement of her candidacy for the general elections. The vice president takes on the challenge of achieving the unification of the space that has broken into a thousand pieces in recent years, while the main resistance to that unity is being found in the purple party, which struggles with her to preserve its power through despite the fact that it was Pablo Iglesias who pushed her without asking as the next candidate for the elections. That is the root cause for which Podemos will be the great absentee from the presentation today, because it has no "certainty" about what is going to happen with it.
Díaz's coming-out as a candidate, after almost two years of waiting, is marked by that difficult relationship with Podemos. There is an open confrontation about what role she will reserve for him in the reconfiguration of the space. The purples demand a leading role, but their demand is colliding both with Díaz and with the rest of the forces called to concur under the umbrella of Sumar, who advocate opening a new stage in the internal balances between formations and for taking to space, ideologically speaking, of the "corner of the board" to redirect it back to the "centrality" that was lost in 2017.
Díaz will make his long-awaited announcement tomorrow at noon in a great staging at the Magariños sports center in Madrid, the cradle of the Estudiantes basketball team, where Pedro Sánchez played for a few years. There, before some 3,000 people, the vice president will achieve the milestone of bringing together fifteen formations and delegates from the CCOO and UGT unions under the same roof.
The confirmed parties are Izquierda Unida, Partido Comunista, los comúnes, Más País, Más Madrid, Compromís, Chunta Aragonesista, Proyecto Drago, Equo, Alianza Verde, Galicia en Común, Batzarre, Més per Mallorca, Movement for the Dignity and Citizenship of Ceuta and the Andalusian People's Initiative. To all of them we must add the president of the European Green Party, Mélanie Vogel, and the president of the European Left Party, Walter Baier.
But more than the number of parties, that also, what is politically outstanding is that many of these forces come to cover Díaz with their main leaders. Which, on the one hand, is an obvious impulse to the vice president in the consecration of her project and, on the other, which delves into the isolation of Podemos in the reconfiguration of that space.
Belarra uses the lack of agreement with the primaries to stand up
The presence of Alberto Garzón (IU), Ada Colau (Catalunya en Comú) and Enrique Santiago (PCE) leaves Podemos without its three great allies within United We Can. In addition, to this is added that Díaz is bringing his candidacy closer to figures who in their day were under the orbit of Iglesias and who broke traumatically with him. The main one, Íñigo Errejón, who goes with Más País and with the leaders of his Madrid brand (Más Madrid), Mónica García and Rita Maestre, who compete against Podemos in May. These are also the cases of Compromís, now headed by Joan Baldoví and not Mónica Oltra, or Proyecto Drago, by Alberto Rodríguez, which for different reasons separated.
Regarding the presence of Podemos, Díaz and the purples have been negotiating since January, but when they have addressed the truly compromised issues, the talks have run aground. The latest attempts have been useless because Podemos and Sumar have collided on the same point: how to make the electoral lists. Then the rest comes down from this: the quotas between parties within the coalition, the distribution of economic resources, the number of advisors... In short: power.
All in all, Podemos suggested to Sumar that if there was a problem about what the weight of each party should be, the way to solve it was an "open primary." The disagreement over this minimum pact is what Podemos wields to be absent from the act, since it does not want to commit to a candidate who casts more doubts on them than certainties. Díaz only offered them to celebrate "primaries", without last names, and advocated negotiating the conditions with the other actors.
This Saturday, Ione Belarra made one last attempt to pressure the Citizen Council. «He has it in his hand that tomorrow Podemos is in the presentation. It is enough that this afternoon Podemos and Sumar sign a declaration in which we commit ourselves to holding open primaries," he said. Despite the internal closing of ranks, not all share the sit-in. There will be charges in Magariños. Parliamentarians, two regional leaders and a multitude of "ex" from the purple party.
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