The disturbing silence of Irene Montero

It is the silence that precedes the storm, the stillness of the din. Why is Irene Montero so quiet? We already know that they removed her from the electoral lists with a slap of the hand, that they made a target of blame and forgiveness with her face, that they severely applied the maximum punishment of politics, taking her out of the offices, removing her from the podiums and palms.. We already know that all this has happened, that Yolanda Díaz, the new leader of the ideological miscellany that exists to the left of the PSOE, which is the extreme left or the extreme left, has sought with her punishment the exemplary nature of a summary trial. Irene Montero, her political image, had to disappear so that Yolanda Díaz could be born. A gesture of authority and reaffirmation in the most convulsive political space in history, the one that brings together communists with socialists, Trotskyists with Stalinists.

That is why the public sacrifice of Irene Montero, which was like that of the witches in the Middle Ages, covered with pitch and chicken feathers, so that everyone knew. At first, he provoked the protest reaction of his Podemos colleagues, from Pablo Iglesias downwards, as if they were biting their fists.. But then, to the surprise of many, they accepted the punishment, they assumed the banishment and, in all that environment, which is always noisy and dirty, there was silence.. This disturbing silence of now that, for those who have doubts, is not the end of anything but the beginning of what will come.

Since the Sumar platform slipped the imperative to exclude the main referents of Podemos from the electoral lists, a struggle began for the definition of what was happening. A betrayal or a necessity? A reckoning between incompatible egos or a step forward to favor the unification of the left? Yolanda Díaz, as has been said, needed that blow of authority to reaffirm her leadership and to show herself free and independent, without mortgages or outside influences. On the other side, Pablo Iglesias, leading Podemos along with the others, understood almost instantly that he was in a dead end, that no one from Sumar, of the 10 or 15 movements that make it up, was going to come out in his defense.. The trap that Yolanda Díaz had hatched had left them alone.

Trapped in the spider web of unity that began to be woven with the resignation of Alberto Garzón, the leader of Izquierda Unida, to repeat in the candidacies. It was no longer a vendetta against Podemos, but a gesture of solidarity and humility that could not be denied. The step back of an individual does not mean anything, it is nothing, because what is essential is that the organization, the collective, advance. In other words, not only was no one going to recognize the betrayal of Podemos, but they ran the risk of being left before the electorate as a group of egoists, clinging to the seats, at the cost of breaking the unity of the left. So, trapped, they accepted and were silent..

Juan Carlos Monedero, preserved as in formaldehyde in his role as a haruspex of Podemos, without being affected by government disputes or the wear and tear of the laws, often repeats from the trapping of Podemos that the obligation of all militants and supporters is to vote for Sumar in the elections next Sunday, knowing that his former colleagues are the ones who have formed the firing squad to annihilate Irene Montero. The “firing squad” thing is up to him, Monedero and the rest of Podemos, as given as they are to recreating the Spain of the Civil War in the political environment. He calls them “desk shooters” and, in each line in which he asks for the vote for Sumar, hatred, contempt.

“It is striking that part of those who have shot at Irene Montero the most from the left are the same ones who are now demanding that she set up a speak corner at every street intersection to proclaim to the four winds the benefits of voting for Sumar (…) It has been an idiotic attitude, fueled by some sectors that badly advised Yolanda Díaz. And that they are responsible for the electoral ballast that the polls in Sumar detect today”, he wrote a few days ago in a press article in which he once again requested the vote for them.. “Despite everything, I am going to vote for them. And if I can, you can”, said Monedero. But was he really asking for the vote or is the interest another, hidden?

Each word of Monedero is equivalent to each silence of Irene Montero and they should only be interpreted as an attempt to draw up the minutes in this electoral campaign so that, as soon as the polls close, we can exculpate Podemos from the electoral fiasco and place all the responsibility on Yolanda Diaz and in Sumar. If the result of the polls is the one indicated by the vast majority of the polls that are being published, the silence of Irene Montero will break into a roar on the night of the elections. There will only be one person responsible for the failure, to which all the purples will point, in the last attempt to strike down the version imposed by Sumar and recover the leadership of that miscellany, which has been taken from them in these elections.

Some of the veterans of the United Left, such as Nicolás Sartorius, often repeat that in this political space there is “an evident inability to normalize and manage discrepancy.”. Yes, he will know, who in the time of Julio Anguita created Nueva Izquierda, a critical current within Izquierda Unida that ended up dynamiting the entire coalition. Those from Anguita said then that Nueva Izquierda was “a PSOE submarine”. After the general elections of 23-J, when the end of this time of silence is decreed, we will hear the same from Sumar, the PSOE submarine that wanted to sink Podemos.