Activists, academics, some with political responsibilities in the past or in the present, linked directly or indirectly to United We Can and the PSOE, this is the team of wise men and experts that will coordinate the 35 working groups of Sumar, the platform of Vice President Yolanda Díaz, and that they will prepare a "country project for the next decade."
From the political scientist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca to the public education activist Agustín Moreno –autonomous deputy for Podemos in Madrid–, through the ecofeminist anthropologist Yayo Herrero, the sociologist and writer César Rendueles, the novelist Bernardo Atxaga, the doctor and former health director Asturias, Rafael Cofiño or the former judge of the Supreme Court Fernando Salinas, the names of the list of experts presented this Friday by Díaz, contains a combination of academia and activism whose mission, the vice president herself explained, will be to think about the country project that update Spanish democracy.
Díaz explained that in the Spain of the last half century there have been four models of a country: Adolfo Suárez's, which consisted of completing the transition to democracy, Felipe González's, which consisted of an institutional and material modernization of the country, that of José María Aznar, consisting of the liberalization of the economy according to neoliberal dictates, and that of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which consisted of expanding the welfare state and expanding social and political rights. The 35 experts summoned, each one leading a large work team, will be responsible for thinking about the country of the next decade, which completes the pending modernizations and updates democracy with the keys of the 21st century.
Although the work of these teams, which will run parallel to the agenda of the so-called listening process, will not be an electoral program, it will prefigure the reforms of the eventual platform with which Díaz would concur in the 2023 general elections, some work that, in any case, they must go beyond the short-term demands of politics.
"Imagination cannot be limited to the size of a ballot box or an electoral list", stressed Díaz, who hopes to present at the beginning of next year the result of the work of the thirty teams summoned that cover fields ranging from justice to democratic quality passing through mental health, care, entrepreneurship, science, the urban agenda or housing, among other areas.
