Ione Belarra, acting minister and general secretary of Podemos, yesterday denounced an “operation to replace Podemos with a servile left.” This alleged conspiracy against the party that “had to be stopped” would explain why the current leadership of the purple party avoids at all costs the convening of a State Citizen Assembly, a party congress to rethink the strategy and elect a new leadership.
As an alternative, after “stopping the hypothetical operation in its tracks,” yesterday he held a political presentation in which a document was approved that blocks the possibility of a party congress and gives a rudder to the strategy of confluence with Sumar. , whose leader, Yolanda Díaz, is treated as a “traitor” in the contributions to the document accepted by the management. In the least participated vote since Podemos existed, 26,000 registered were enough to reverse what was voted by 52,000 three months ago: from the convergence with the rest of the political space approved in July to its opposite, a route of greater autonomy that prefigures the final purpose of the operation, that is, to participate in the European elections with one's own candidacy headed by Irene Montero.
Yesterday, at the council that consecrated the new journey of bunkerization, held within the Círculo de Bellas Artes and outside the Podemos statutes – which only enable the State Citizen Assembly to prepare political strategy documents –, the interventions were loaded with reproaches towards the rest of the formations integrated into Sumar and were applauded by a forum where relatives in the first degree of kinship of the current leadership occupied the first row, while they bowed and withheld greetings from all the members of the party who are already considered suspects of treason by the Madrid dome.
The regional cadres of Madrid, Extremadura, Navarra and Andalusia, among others, were looking for each other in cafes, calculating how to put a stop to the drift, which has been accelerating in recent weeks and which has turned the YouTube channel Canal Red, directed by the previous general secretary, Pablo Iglesias, as principal of the general staff and provider of strategy and doctrine outside the party organs.
In the interventions, the speeches were identity-based, underlining the importance of the purple party for the country's destinies and praising the new strategy of divergence, although they still avoided making explicit a break with the parliamentary group. Behind this modesty is the economic allocation. Podemos gave up contesting the inclusion of Minister Irene Montero on the lists in exchange for receiving almost a quarter of the parliamentary group's resource allocation, an agreement to clean up the party's difficult economic situation after losing almost all of its institutional representation. in the regional and municipal elections of May 28. That is why the heterodox political presentation was accompanied by a new survey where the bases were invited to renounce the return of the May microcredits and new contributions were requested. The possibility of the five Podemos deputies leaving the Sumar group and taking control of the mixed group – where today there are only three deputies – requires obtaining sufficient resources to give up the allocation negotiated in July. Of course, of a possible vote against the investiture pact negotiated by Podemos' Secretary of Economy, Nacho Álvarez, Belarra's number two in the ministry, not a word.
