Vice President Yolanda Díaz repeated on Sunday that her Sumar platform will have a state character and therefore will not have its own lists in the regional and municipal elections of 2023. In fact, she had explained it months ago in Julia en la Onda , from Onda Cero, on the occasion of the debate surrounding his role in the Andalusian elections. But that does not mean that Díaz is absent from the electoral campaign that will decide the regional and municipal map in May of next year. Her role will be, in any case, similar to that of the appointments in Castilla León and Andalusia, in whose rallies she participated punctually supporting the candidates, Pablo Hernández and Inma Nieto, respectively.
In any case, the intensity of their participation will have to do with the successful formation of unity lists or that can bring together the vote of the so-called space for change. Thus, it is assumed that the commons campaign in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona and the metropolitan area, will have the presence of the vice-president, with whom the Catalan confluence movement has been involved for months to contribute to the promotion of its Sumar platform. Díaz has notable support in Catalonia, especially in the Barcelona metropolitan area, in part due to the laborist nature of the policies deployed by the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy – and the effect of the labor reform is significant, with the vote against ERC, which makes it difficult for Republicans to enter those working-class fiefdoms in which the socialists have been hegemonic for decades– and has supported Ada Colau for months for its public acts, with the possibility of revalidating the mayoralty .
Much more complicated is the Madrid map. In the regional elections there is a real possibility of unseating Isabel Díaz Ayuso, since it is very likely that the leader of the opposition, Mónica García, from Más Madrid, will continue to eat up land from the PSOE and absorb the old space of United We Can, today very diminished . In the parliamentary group of the purples – whose members joined Pablo Iglesias' list in 2021 but do not come from Podemos – there is a vocation for confluence with Más Madrid, but that interest is not reciprocal. Just as in state terms Íñigo Errejón is interested in converging with Sumar so that Más País does not disappear, Mónica García wants to work on her own brand, which was consolidated as the second force last year and is not in favor of diluting it in a coalition.
And if things are difficult for a unitary candidacy in the community, in the city council of the capital the matter is even more complex. We can give up presenting their own list when Manuela Carmena dispensed with the purple ones and set up her platform with Errejón. After not a few vicissitudes, the municipal group of Más Madrid, from which a group of loyalists to Carmena ended up leaving – who would later support the municipal budgets of the PP – will present their own list with Rita Maestre at the helm. It is very unlikely that Podemos and IU, today outside the city council, will give up presenting their own list, and even less likely that they will agree with Más Madrid. Madrid will therefore be the place where Podemos, IU, Más Madrid and the PCE will measure their forces with more intensity, which turns the capital into an electoral mousetrap for the Sumar platform. Although there are efforts to avoid fragmentation today, it is highly unlikely that they will bear fruit.
Podemos has already announced primary procedures in its diminished territorial organizations, still marked by the internal struggles of the last stage and the pending settling of accounts. That means that it will repeat the Andalusian modus operandi in as many territories as possible: to have its own candidate with whom to sit down to negotiate with the IU and with the rest of the organizations that want to come together.
Although Sumar was never considered as a regional or municipal option, it should inspire a certain confluence of the lists. This convergence was only possible when Podemos was so strong that the rest of the organizations assumed that they would slip by. Today, with Podemos diminished and without the capacity to lead the space, atomization can once again be the norm.
