It will be Palm Sunday. Vice President Yolanda Díaz will announce on April 2 at 11:30 in the morning, at the Magariños sports center in Madrid, her decision on her possible candidacy for the presidency of the government, which will most likely be affirmative. The space chosen, a sports pavilion, home to the Estudiantes basketball team and linked to the Ramiro de Maeztu school, is one of those that the PSOE has used for its campaign events, of particular fondness for the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who he was a player in the youth system for Estu. However, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, also chose the Magariños sports center last November to concentrate his militancy against the reform of the Penal Code that the Government was preparing.
In the act called by Sumar, like all those prior to the so-called listening process, representatives of civil society will have a leading role, according to the platform, but all political organizations likely to join Sumar's candidacy and that have previously notified by Díaz over the last few weeks. In fact, practically all of them have anticipated their presence at the event, with the exception of Podemos, which, as its executive reported last week, hopes to reach an agreement with Díaz beforehand on the conditions for participation in the candidacy and the role of the vice president. in the imminent campaign for the municipal and regional elections.
Díaz presented Sumar last Sunday in "an act of listening" in Seville in which he already hinted at the meaning of his decision and addressing the former leader of IU Andalucía, an ally of Podemos during his tenure as Andalusian coordinator, Antonio Maíllo: "I am going I am going to make one of the most important decisions of my life, I am going to do it immediately, a decision that serves to contribute to my country, to give hope to the people”. Despite the fact that the leadership of Podemos Andalucía did not attend the event –contrary to what happened in most of the acts of the listening process, in which the respective territorial leaders of Podemos always participated–, they also tried to smooth things over with the purple, using as an argument for unity for his platform a literal replica of a speech by the then United Podemos candidate for the presidency of the government, Pablo Iglesias, during the 2019 campaign: “It is difficult to add what is different. If we aspire to change the country, we agree at 90%, you have to be tall and walk together”.
In any case, Díaz's "listening" itinerary still has one last trip left, next weekend to the Canary Islands, where Díaz will share space with the former secretary of organization of Podemos, whose act of deputy was withdrawn by Congress and who He left the purple formation to, months later, announce the launch of his own political platform, Proyecto Drago. Rodríguez has already confederated his organization in the so-called Turia pact, which includes Compromís, Más País, Verdes Equo, Chunta Aragonesista and Coalición por Melilla, and in principle his intention is to incorporate Proyecto Drago to Sumar in the general elections. Before the Canarian act, which will close the tour, Sumar has held twenty sectoral events throughout the country, focused on labor legislation, LGTBI rights, the rural world, climate change, housing or health policies, which have been attended by more than 25,000 people, according to the data handled by the platform.
When communicating the decision to promote her candidacy, Yolanda Díaz is expected to offer the guidelines of the document called Country Project, which must define the strategic objectives of a transformation that progressive forces should assume in the next decade, as she has been explaining in the acts of listening, and which has been prepared by thirty or so working groups over the last year.
In any case, it is not expected that Sumar as such will be present in the regional and municipal elections, as Díaz has been repeating for the last year, and his personal presence, outside the platform, will be linked to the achievement of integration lists of the various progressive forces. This is one of the points of friction with Podemos, which believes that the vice president must commit to the campaign with the initials for which she ran in 2019, regardless of whether they are presented against other possible allies of Sumar, as is the case in the cases of the autonomous and municipal authorities of Madrid and Valencia.
In this regard, and despite the pressures received during the last year, Sumar's intention is not to begin the formation of his candidacy for generals until after the territorial elections of May 28, whose campaign officially begins on the 12th of that same month. .
