The state citizens' council of Podem, the party's highest decision-making body, meets today in Madrid in an atmosphere of internal division that pits the party's territorial executives against the state leadership. The reason: Sunday's Sumar event, where Vice President Yolanda Díaz will predictably announce her readiness to lead a state candidacy in the next general elections, as former Vice President Pablo Iglesias instructed her two years ago, when he left the government .
The fight for the hegemony of the Sumar project launched by Díaz and the will of Podemos to be the central party in the space has accelerated in recent weeks with debates about how to constitute the candidacies of the generals, to the point that Podemos, the driving force behind Díaz's political initiative, could be the only formation of the political space absent from the Magariños sports complex in Madrid on Sunday, a way for the state leadership of Podemos to express their displeasure with the political autonomy assumed by Yolanda Díaz.
However, the discomfort of the party's leadership is not shared by the territorial leadership of the formation, who put the urgent before the important: boycotting the Sumar event on Sunday could affect the electoral expectations of the territories in relation to the imminent date with the ballot boxes, on May 28. None of the territories are in a position of strength so that their absence in Magariños could be innocuous for their electoral expectations. In fact, throughout this week, there has been severe internal stress in Podemos among those who will attend the confirmation ceremony of Yolanda Díaz's candidacy, aside from the criteria of the state leadership, those who would like to do so but they will not do so if the leadership of the party forbids it and those who believe that the decision of the general secretary, Ione Belarra, must be ignored and consider that it is the umpteenth attempt to destroy the party by the economic powers and media, who would have found an ally in Díaz and the rest of the formations of the confluences. Among the weakened territorial leaderships of Podemos, there are a majority of those who believe that Sumar is the engine to stick to in order to survive the next electoral cycle, but at the same time they do not have the political strength to challenge the leadership of the party, where it continues to have a weight fundamental the opinion of the former secretary general, Pablo Iglesias.
While the state leadership acts in the context of general elections to place Podemos in the best conditions to negotiate its role in Sumar's December candidacy, the regional executives face the May elections as an existential challenge, in which they play to remain alive politically in the municipal and territorial institutions the next day. Many understand that the future of political formation is at stake in the citizens' council debate this Saturday.
