Roberto Sotomayor, the Podemos athlete who wants to "fix Madrid by running"

If there is a candidate for mayor of Madrid who can say that he is sweating his shirt for the left to recover the City Council after four years of the PP government, that is the ex-athlete Roberto Sotomayor (Madrid, 1977).. The head of the United We Can list hopes that the purples will once again have representation in the Consistory of the capital after four years of emptiness, but, above all, he is emerging as one of the key pieces so that the left is in a position to snatch to José Luis Martínez-Almeida the staff of command.

In the hands -and in the legs- of Sotomayor is that Unidas Podemos overcomes the barrier of 5% of the votes, which would give the coalition access to the Palacio de Cibeles and which would allow no progressive vote to end up in the trash. The task, of course, is not easy: the candidate starts from scratch, since Podemos gave up running in 2019 after his abrupt break with the former mayor Manuela Carmena and will have to compete both with the PSOE and, above all, with Más Madrid, that it has serious options to remain as the main force of the left in the capital and that it has absorbed a good part of the vote that, in the already distant 2015, allowed Carmena to evict the PP from the Mayor's Office after 24 years of popular governments.

Against Sotomayor, however, it is not only the fact that Unidas Podemos was extra-parliamentary in the last legislature in the Madrid City Council.. It also has the disadvantage of being one of the lesser-known candidates presented by the big parties, especially since it will have to compete on the same political spectrum with the one who was spokesperson for Carmena between 2015 and 2019 and has led the opposition for the last four years. , Rita Maestre (Más Madrid), and with whom until just a few weeks ago she was the Minister of Industry, Reyes Maroto (PSOE).

Hence, for a few months now, Podemos has launched a frantic pre-campaign agenda to publicize Sotomayor, who has accompanied the two main assets of the purple party at numerous events both inside and outside Madrid: the ministers Irene Montero and Ione Belarra, with whom sportswear has even been equipped to participate in a popular race. His particular profile plays in favor of the candidate: he was a professional athlete until just a few years ago -an occupation that he combined with his work at El Corte Inglés, a men's high-end clothing section-, he has never held positions of political representation and, worth the cliché, he is famous among those who work with him for not being able to sit still for a long time.

An 'outsider' candidate

In fact, Sotomayor is so alien to the world of institutional politics that, until 2021, he was not even part of the state leadership of Podemos, although for years he has been very active on social networks defending the postulates of the purple party. However, his political commitment comes from his cradle: his father, a bank employee, was a member of the PCE – a party that is part of the IU and for which, therefore, Sotomayor will also be a candidate – and a trade unionist in the CCOO, while his mother was a member of the PSOE.

His foray into politics came from the No War movement against the invasion of Iraq, and he also participated in the 15M movement assemblies. His most recent militancy, however, was in the neighborhood movement against the proliferation of betting houses: Sotomayor is co-author of the dossier Don't Play With You, with which he has traveled part of the national territory to denounce the abuses and problems of health generated by the gaming industry in Spain.

But it will be on May 28 when this triple European indoor athletics champion -in the veterans category- will face his most difficult race. The goal will be to turn around the polls that place him outside the Madrid City Council. For now, he has begun by selling himself as the candidate of the working-class neighborhoods of the capital. And with a promise: “We are going to fix Madrid running”.

Other candidates for Madrid City Council