Yolanda Díaz moves the board to gain power and prevent rebellions

The rumors about what could come out of the Podemos Citizen Council were intense. However, and as expected, nothing new came out of it.. In reality, the leaders of the parties that make up Sumar are thinking as much or more about the day after the elections than about the elections themselves.. More Madrid is willing to get rid of what they understand as a heavy burden, that of Podemos; IU is thinking about survival after giving up on the charts “in exchange for a hug”; those of Iglesias, making calculations about what position they will occupy after 23-J and what revenue they can get from it; Compromís is only his own, and so on. Meanwhile, Diaz's team knows they need to get a good result to really lead the space behind, so they will try to widen their electoral base as much as possible.. But, above all, it is moving its pieces on the lists to have its own support once the elections are held.

There are actually two positions within Add. The dominant one is that of Yolanda Díaz, and that of some formations that accompany her, which aspire to give a significant change to the national left.. They have a new ideological orientation, because here it has never been a majority on the left. Its master lines, environmentalism, feminism and green labor, have appeared drawn in recent times by all kinds of lefts, but it is not so much about the programmatic lines as the position they want to occupy. They seek in Spain the space of the German green left.

The other great novelty appears in the profile they wish to offer to the electorate. They entrusted the execution of the program to a group of experts, among whom university professors predominated, whose intention was to configure a kind of more advanced version of the Spain 2030 of the Foresight Office, but from which some clear measures could be extracted to these choices. In addition, they intend to show an image of solvency, linked to the image that their leader has shown at the head of the Ministry of Labor, and far from that amateurism that sounded fresh before having government responsibility, but that later has caused them serious problems..

Separate from leftism

The configuration of their lists is also intended to suggest to voters that they are an evolved left, that they have representative people who offer professional credibility.. For this reason, among other reasons, a diplomat has been preferred as number 2 on the Madrid list rather than a trade unionist, who has been relegated to number 6, since they understood that it generated more social trust and distanced them from old leftist remnants.. That is why they have chosen as number 3 (in the Más Madrid posts) Tesh Sidi, a young woman, feminist, anti-colonialist and big data expert; or as number 7 to Alda Recas, nurse and visible head of the White Tide. This intention to separate from leftism has led them not to offer IU starting positions in Madrid; They have had to accept Podemos by force.

This faction of Sumar believes that the time has come to make other policies that give a different continuation to those that emerged from 15-M. It is time to approach the contemporary European left: they aspire to a clear evolution of the political space towards a green, feminist, Atlanticist formation, which makes room for the distribution of work and promotes qualified jobs.

In this new space, there are plenty, ideologically and aesthetically, of some of the forces that compete with Sumar, and only the urgency of the moment and the weakness of its structure have forced it to come together with unwanted partners.. The configuration of the lists has made it clear: there are parties that are not welcome and others that will occupy a very secondary place, largely because they are considered much more part of the past than the future.. Suffice it to point out that Errejón did not want to go with the IU in the 2016 electoral repetition, and now his people have to put up with Podemos and the IU. They are not happy, especially because they think that Iglesias will make the vote for Sumar less.

The two electoral positions

Sumar appeared with a double character, that of an option for the future and that of a rescue ship, and that has generated very different positions within the space. From this gap, from which it cannot be forgotten that it has a marked ideological character, two very different rhythms are born in the face of the elections..

Each party has obvious interests in obtaining the best results where it competes with starting positions, because that is the condition of possibility of what may come, but it cares little for the other constituencies. On the contrary, Yolanda Díaz and her team are doing well on 23-J. Even Más Madrid can take refuge in the capital and the Commons in Catalonia if things do not work out, but a bad general result would be a major blow for the director of the political space.

That is the reason why they want to broaden their electoral base to the maximum, and why they intend not to compete with the PSOE, but to steal all the votes possible in those territories where Sumar is strong.. In Díaz's team, it is believed that their space has a great future, and that it can engage with a broad social sector, and that is why they try to look for friendlier profiles and more socially significant than those of previous leftists.. To a large extent, Sumar is the reunion of the ideological position of the old ICV (Initiative for Green Catalonia), where Urtasun comes from, and of the electoralist vision of regionalism. The confluence of a European green party with the forms, messages and electoral positions that Errejón always defended is what Díaz is trying to build.

However, to achieve this, you need more muscle of your own. The positions that she has located on the lists, of faithful to Díaz and not to other parties, are scarce. That is why there is a dance of last-minute names and Díaz is expanding the number of like-minded people, especially those who are active in other parties, but have shown their commitment to the leadership of Sumar.. The frictions for this reason have even reached his relationship with the Commons.

election night

With this distribution of cards, which marks different political positions and levels of mobilization, it is foreseeable that there will be future tensions in Sumar. If the results are good, the natural thing is that the space that those of Díaz leave to the formations not welcome in the coalition will be reduced. If, on the contrary, they are not enough, the mutual reproaches will multiply from the night of the elections (we must remember what happened on June 26, 2016, the day of the repetition of the general elections that Rajoy won) and life in that parliamentary group will become very complicated. In Sumar they are aware of the double game, the electoral one and the one after 23-J, and they are trying to establish a real structure for the Sumar political party and to consolidate a relevant number of true deputies related to Díaz within the group. Sumar still has many boxes to open in his internal troubles.