The truce between Podemos and IU clears the municipal elections and brings the Sumar pact closer

Autumn's barking has not given way to bites.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
30 January 2023 Monday 06:04
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The truce between Podemos and IU clears the municipal elections and brings the Sumar pact closer

Autumn's barking has not given way to bites. And it looks like they won't. The space to the left of the PSOE, once "the space for change", is experiencing a ceasefire and the first steps of some discreet talks that work to prevent the feared rupture. There are clues and evidence. The indications are the reduction of the general, public and private tone, even in the volume of voice with which one speaks in the meetings of the confederate space. The evidence is the electoral agreements reached between Podemos and IU, which, although desired and promoted by the state leadership since last summer, seemed impossible just a couple of months ago.

There are agreements in Catalonia, Cantabria, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia and Navarra, and it is imminent in Extremadura. Surely there will also be in the Canary Islands and in the Valencian Community, where –as in Madrid, with Más Madrid– they face other actors in the same space: the Drago Project of Alberto Rodríguez, and Compromís, both integrated, in the Turia agreement , together with Más País, Chunta Aragonesista, Més per Mallorca and Verdes Equo.

The reasons for the armistice are obvious and, as soon as one moves away from the always tempting and melodramatic passions of psychohistory, they are found in the polls that, on the one hand, indicate that Podemos and IU would go through more than serious difficulties going separately in the May elections, and on the other, that the general elections would be seriously jeopardized if there is not a single operator uniting the vote to the left of the PSOE. That even more agreements have been reached by May than in 2019 also responds to the certainty that, if the agreement is not given, it would be an agonizing appointment. Maybe a massacre.

The fear of demobilization has permeated and has meant that, even with those forces with which there has been no agreement, the deal is white glove. The example is Madrid, where relations between the team led by Mónica García (Más Madrid) and the candidacy of Alejandra Jacinto (Podemos-IU) are fluid and cordial, nothing to do with the mutual and patent animosity that both candidacies exhibited just four years ago, when Más Madrid took its first steps directed by Íñigo Errejón.

As for the generals, there is much to be done, but the truce declared in December has turned into a ceasefire with very discreet diplomatic contacts. Weeks after Vice President Yolanda Díaz presents the framework document for a progressive decade, her "country project", and confirms her willingness to be a candidate, the offensive declared by the former leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, at the Autumn University of party has ceased. Many are the mediators who have attempted a rapprochement between Díaz and Iglesias – some, with more willingness than entrustment – ​​and many others, such as the majority partner of the coalition, who have pressed in this direction. In Moncloa for half a year there has been express concern about the tension between the former leadership of Podemos and the vice president.

Meanwhile, IU has convened a table of parties in order to begin to define the weight that the organizations would have in a unitary candidacy that, supported by Sumar, would be something more than a mere coalition of parties. The initiative of Minister Alberto Garzón, coordinator of the IU, has been received with caution, but no one has explicitly opposed it. Since 2021, Díaz stressed that Sumar should be more than a constellation of acronyms, that the parties "should be there, but not be the protagonists" and, except for the outbreak of Podemos last fall, no one has publicly objected to that claim, which is part of the very tradition of the first Podemos, which wanted to be a tool of civil society and not a party.

The pax romana has been imposed and is perceived in the meetings and conversations of the confederal space, in the effort to agree on disagreements –more evident in tones than in positions–. The polls weigh. The possibility of rising again above the threshold of four million votes, lost in 2019 after years of civil and criminal harassment, is a powerful glue that, for fans of psychohistory, is evident today even in the tone with whom Díaz, Ione Belarra and Irene Montero are related in the Council of Ministers. More than four million. Third force. yum.