The leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra, guaranteed this Friday, after the executive meeting, that her party will sacrifice the figure of Irene Montero to reach an integration agreement with Sumar as demanded by the territories (state citizen council), while blamed Yolanda Díaz's negotiating team for that sacrifice. For Podemos it is a major resignation, hence Belarra's strange statement, since Montero is one of the strongest and most rocky figures, legatee of the irreducible identity of the purple party. So what are Sumar's reasons for not wanting their participation in their lists?
Díaz's platform has not said a word about the negotiations of the last ten days, but it is not difficult to deduce what are the reasons for Sumar's refusal to include Montero on its lists, in light of the last months of the course political and the role of Montero both in the coalition government and in the dynamics of the confederal group in the Congress of Deputies.
The most obvious thing, which is verified by all the quantitative and qualitative opinion studies, is the damage caused to their reputation by the application of the law of only yes is yes, not so much by the norm itself as by the management during the following months, since the first information about partial sentence reductions appeared. Equality, with its three main faces at the head, the minister, the Secretary of State, Ángeles Rodríguez Pam, and the Government delegate for gender violence, Victoria Rosell, made an effort to deny the majority and attribute to a wrong interpretation or ideological of the norm these improvements in the penal treatment of the condemned.
This meant that for weeks –which turned into months– the feasibility of the norm was limited to evaluating its criminal harshness, which placed the debate in a particularly pleasant place for conservative and reactionary formations, and turned the law into a path of water for the coalition government. Until the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, ordered the amendment.
Equality did not give up its position and qualitative studies began to circulate through the socialist offices that accounted for the improvement in popularity and electoral support of the executive with the eventual dismissal of the Minister of Equality. Pedro Sánchez did not execute him – in any case, to do so he should have had the acquiescence of Vice President Yolanda Díaz, who closed ranks with Montero – but in his perception and that of the Socialists, the certainty that Montero was a drag on the future viability of the coalition government.
The powerful modernization of the equality regulations deployed by the ministry during the last three years was thus punctuated by a hypothetical error in the penal adjustment of the Organic Law of Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom. The ministry –together with Ecological Transition– that embodies one of the transversal policies of the time was converted, in communicative terms more than legislative, into a ministry of political trenches, a condition that reduced support for its policies and that had already emerged for the processing of the Trans law, due to the harsh confrontation with a part of the oldest socialist feminism.
In terms of projections on the general elections on July 23, in the political space of the left, no one doubts that, if the numbers allowed the coalition government to be formed again, Pedro Sánchez would veto Montero to join the cabinet again. In fact, during the last two months, speculation about his possible dismissal has grown.
In the opposite case, in which the government passes into the hands of the right and the Sumar platform must be fought from the parliamentary opposition, the impression that Montero would try to dispute a dominant position over the group, or at least completely autonomous, is based on the checkered course of events in the confederal group of Unidas Podemos, En Comú Poden, Galicia En Común during the last year, in which Podemos has increasingly operated on its own without submitting to the confederal deliberation spaces.
All these impressions and analyzes were established after the audit of support that was on 28-M, in which Podemos lost representation in fundamental territories, such as Madrid and the Valencian Community, and where it ran alone against the IU or against coalitions of other formations. of the left was widely defeated.
The symbolic power of Irene Montero for her party, however, resides, in addition to her legislative production, in that she embodies the mediatic, personal, political and even criminal harassment suffered by the purple formation, after having had her home for a semester , which he shares with former Vice President Pablo Iglesias, surrounded by hordes of the extreme right without the Ministry of the Interior and the FCSE being able to stop this harassment.
Belarra alluded to this by stressing that "again we have been asked to sacrifice our main political asset", alluding to the previous resignation of Iglesias during the coalition negotiations in the summer of 2019. In this sense, Montero is the living expression of the harassment to which Podemos has been subjected and therefore his resignation implies a surrender to his harassers.
To this day, the impression is that the figure of Irene Montero electorally adds votes of irreducible to Podemos as much as subtracts less politicized and militant voters. And that, for what comes after the elections, her presence is more of a headache than a contribution of political capital.
On the contrary, the Podemos executive believes that without Irene Montero the party will lack its own personality within the Sumar platform and that its dissolution, its disappearance in practice, is almost guaranteed. This, that of prioritizing the names in the negotiation over other elements, is one of the points that explain the clash between the state executive (coordinating council) and the territorial directorates (state citizen council) that the leadership decided to resolve with the call to the bases to arm themselves with legitimacy in their decision.
Ione Belarra's intervention denotes that the executive did not want to hand over that pawn in the negotiation, but the explicit mandate of the territories left no room to reject Sumar's offer.
