The door of an elevator in the European Parliament opens, in Brussels, and Pablo Echenique enters the cabin, where Marine Le Pen is. It is 2015 and Le Pen has been an MEP for 11 years and leads the far-right National Front, today National Regroupment. When Echenique leaves the elevator, they make her see who she has met, and there she humorously fantasizes about the idea of having run over her with her wheelchair: “I weigh 200 kilos with the chair, I can break her legs”. And, to get away with it, consider playing the “cripple who has lost control” card.. The anecdote of the then purple MEP was shared by himself to a small group of journalists years ago and contains many keys to understand the last spokesman for United We Can in the Congress of Deputies.
Echenique (Rosario, Argentina, 1978), who was removed from the Sumar lists, said goodbye to the Lower House this week with a last dart at Yolanda Díaz, when she boasted of having made “a lot of noise”, just what the leader of the confluence of the left does not want in its ranks. The theoretical physicist turned politician will ask to return to his post as a CSIC scientist in the coming days, after becoming a controversial political figure. In his four years as a deputy, three and a half – the entire XIV Legislature – as parliamentary spokesman, he has fired at discretion against PP and Vox, but also against his government partner, with whom, in parallel, he had different open negotiations. Some, crucial for the party and for the Executive.
And he has angered his own allies several times in the parliamentary group of Podemos, IU, Comunes, Galicia en Común and Alianza Verde. Some call him today “an arsonist”. A spokesman who has set “senseless” fires, irritating his allies. For the purples, Echenique has been the “lightning rod” for Pablo Iglesias, after Ione Belarra and Irene Montero; for the PSOE and for some of the members of the parliamentary group, it has contributed to trigger tension and tension in a Chamber that has broken its own records this 2023.
Even in his party they have come to joke about wresting control of his own Twitter, from which he has distributed taunts to Díaz this week, after the electoral result of 23-J. From Arturo Pérez Reverte to Willy Bárcenas, son of former PP treasurer Luís Bárcenas and singer of Taburete, going through statements such as that Isabel Díaz Ayuso “would be in jail” if “justice were independent”, her hooks on the social network have been highly commented and controversial. Among the other formations within United We Can, it was never understood that they shot so regularly from the social network, also against some media and journalists. They believe that many of these darts were completely sterile, and maintain that the gall only provides ammunition for their adversaries..
Let them tell you, boss, that you have achieved more feminist advances and LGTBI rights than ever in the history of this country while they fired fire at your own and strangers' discretion.
Well of course you can. It was possible, it can be done and it will be possible again 💜✊🏼 https://t.co/KyCj0BwIw1
— Pablo Echenique (@PabloEchenique) July 26, 2023
They also did not understand some of the messages that Patxi López left in her press conferences in Congress, in which she even disavowed the president of her parliamentary group, Jaume Asens. Díaz claims to silence any mention of internal differences, but also to avoid allusions to businessmen such as Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, target of criticism and attacks by Echenique and Belarra herself. His own words abound, they have made it difficult to reach consensus, and they reduced his ability to build bridges with other political spaces.. “He returns to his job, he has the right to recover his life,” a leader abounds. “A calmer one and with less focus on his person,” he insists.
His own, on the other hand, praise his intelligence, his “courage”, his militant profile, and that he has been able to divert the attacks on his top leaders, putting his body to achieve it.. Also his sense of humor, which he has displayed on and off camera, and his “cool head” to deal with conflicts.. They explain that, when the decibels have increased, on many occasions they have done so following a clear and premeditated strategy.. For days they have been full of praise on social networks, and praise their treatment of their closest team. Purple sources only admit that, being “so militant”, perhaps “he has not collaborated in the necessary self-criticism”. “He is a scientist, scientists cannot be in favor of a law and its opposite, they do not negotiate between truths,” says a purple politician who knows him well from short distances. “He has built that very blunt, very assertive, forceful character, who has expressed his political conclusions, as a scientific conclusion would express”, they emphasize.
It is yet to be decided, they say, if he will leave the Executive, the hard core in which he has played an important role for 7 years. For now, they defend that he has been able “for nobody to talk about his wheelchair”, that he has never made use of his situation to generate “pity” or win a debate. What it has not achieved in its four years is that the Presidency of the Lower House carried out the necessary work so that it could access the seat that corresponds to it, within its bench. A Heritage report, at the start of the legislature, blocked the proposed reform at the time, but raised the option of looking for other formulas. They never arrived, and the deputy has spent his entire legislature in the moat, speaking from a lectern set up for this sole purpose.. “If I had been in the PSOE, the work would have been done”, they abound.
The thousand political lives of Echenique
If Montero has had a prominent political role in the Iglesias environment almost from the beginning, before Belarra gained organic weight, Echenique has lived several lives in politics. After a brief approach to Ciudadanos, dissatisfied with their economic recipes after the crisis that followed the bursting of the real estate bubble, he gave a first lurch and approaches Podemos. With Teresa Rodríguez and Anticapitalistas, he led the only opposition to Iglesias in the first Vistalegre (October and November 2014), in a candidacy that, ironically, was called Sumando Podemos. Who years later would be the whip of the secretary general, and would invent a system of primaries that underrepresented minorities (DesBorda) then defended a much more horizontal and less hierarchical Podemos, to crash against the overwhelming victory of Iglesias.
He was a deputy, spokesman in the Parliament of Aragon and secretary general in the region, despite the fact that the purple leader himself entered into battle to try to prevent it. It happened shortly after the second general elections they attended (June 2016), and when he had been in charge of the body for a few months that his predecessor, Sergio Pascual, used to place affinities with the theses of then number two, Íñigo Errejón, to control the match.
He survived one of the most abrasive charges in a political organization; He was replaced by Alberto Rodríguez, today one of Sumar's allies and at odds with Podemos, and became Secretary of the Program. And Iglesias rescued him to put him in charge of a difficult group to manage, especially since the departure of the historic secretary general. Two weeks after the start of the confinement due to the pandemic, a conciliatory Echenique called on all parties to unite against the pandemic. To the point that Salvador Illa, then Minister of Health and today leader of the PSC, replied to his words and coined them as “the Echenique Rule”.. That same year, he would also survive his sentence by the TSJ of Aragon to pay a fine of 11,040 euros for irregularly hiring an assistant, who performed his services as a freelancer.
In mid-2021, with the abrupt departure of Iglesias to run for the elections in the Community of Madrid, which resulted in his resignation from all his posts, the former second vice president designated Díaz by fingerprint as leader of the space. The Minister of Labor, according to different sources from the parliamentary group, considered taking over from Echenique as spokesperson, but she never came to fight for the reins of Unidas Podemos, which has been on the verge of imploding on more than one occasion in the last year. Díaz gave him a warning, without expressly citing him, in his first speech before the parliamentary group, already in charge of the space. His call to stop the noise fell on deaf ears.
There is no longer a trace of the most conciliatory Echenique, who, however, always kept darts for Íñigo Errejón. Like when he replied “he will have to live on something until May”, when Errejón left Podemos to launch his new party in the Community of Madrid, at the start of 2019, but did not resign his seat. Or when he stated that “they never imagined that Alberto Rodríguez would end Errejón and Baldoví”, when the former number three of Podemos joined Más País and Compromís in the Turia Agreement. Errejón has been his black beast since he abandoned his party to the braves. The mere fact that he was compared to Rodríguez, for which they were willing to sue the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, shows the magnitude of their anger with the Canarian politician.
In February, the CSIC scientist turned into one of the toughest politicians in the legislature, launched his book, Memoirs of a combat pilot. That he had his own imitator in the Leit Motiv program, and that he went to several television stations to laugh at himself. For the unconditional nothing will be the same without him. For many of his allies, he only remains in memory as an “arsonist”.