The party lasted until late in the afternoon. Sports halls are no longer filled just like that to attend rallies and Yolanda Díaz had brought together leaders from many corners of Spain to hear the announcement of her candidacy for her president. The Madrid sports center Antonio Magariños (professor who promoted the Basketball Students) looked splendid, so much so that it almost left the absence of the Podemos leadership in the background. There, leaders of the fragmented political space to the left of the PSOE could be seen applauding each other, although at another time they would not have hesitated to stick (figuratively) the occasional stiletto in the back... The left, especially the more to the left and smaller , tends to get entangled in troubles about their essences that end up being very personal. The conviction of being right and the passion to defend one's own ideas are accentuated to the extreme. Last Sunday, the attendees put aside their quarrels and responded to the call of Sumar, the platform created by Díaz to bring together so many ideological and territorial sensibilities. And then they went to a venue in Madrid to chat and celebrate, without missing Ione Belarra, Irene Montero or, even less, Pablo Iglesias.
But after the intoxicating effluvia of Magariños in Sumar, or once the hangover of the sit-in in Podemos has been overcome, none of them can be fooled. It is enough to do numbers to calculate the catastrophe that would mean for the left if both forces went separately to the general elections. The d'Hondt's law corrective would be great. Díaz needs around 15% of the votes to displace Vox from third position and have options to form a new progressive government. The consequences of the division for all of them would be dire. And that makes both parties play the game of chicken, thinking that it is inevitable that the other will give in. while they offer the image of a collective immersed in a bonfire of narcissism, since the differences are not of program, but of strategy and power quotas, very old politics.
While Podemos sees how some municipal and regional ones are approaching that will not bring him great joy, on the Díaz side they cross their fingers that Ada Colau manages to maintain the mayoralty of Barcelona and the progressive government in the Valencian Community is saved. The polls will mark the real starting point of a negotiation on May 28 that in Sumar it is clear that it cannot last beyond September. It is the deadline that has been set because the general elections will be foreseeably in December and, in that interval, Sumar will convene open primaries, whose procedures are part of that prior dialogue with all the formations that will make up the coalition. The intention is to enable a census in which anyone who wishes can register to choose the lists. Yolanda Díaz has not yet decided if she will present herself in Madrid or in a Galician candidacy. What is clear is that this open election process will serve as an electoral pre-campaign. Hence the self-imposed time limit.
The act last Sunday already gave clues about Díaz's campaign, which will revolve around his person and a slogan about the possibility of a woman presiding over the Government for the first time in Spain. Despite the fact that no survey gives credibility to that option, Díaz will exploit the message that this country is already prepared to elect a woman as head of the Executive. For this reason, the vice president has been quick to dismantle the idea of an electoral ticket with Sánchez, disseminated by the PSOE leadership after Díaz's speech in Vox's motion of no confidence.
The media attraction aroused by Ramón Tamames covered the pulse within the Executive following Belarra's request for "only women to intervene" in the face of Vox's machismo. The Moncloa then proposed that the vice presidents be the ones to speak in the motion of censure, that is, two for the socialist party and Yolanda Díaz, which left out the two ministers of Podemos. But the leader of Sumar rejected that possibility and demanded before Sánchez the same treatment as in Vox's previous motion of censure, when the president and Iglesias intervened. That's how it went. But Díaz does not want to appear in the elections as a ticket or a mere comparsa of the socialists.
Podemos continues to cultivate its good relations with ERC and Bildu, but it is very difficult for this understanding to be translated into an electoral pact for the generals if the purple ones broke with Sumar. So both parties will wait for 28-M and then they will have to negotiate a solution during the summer that does not make them the protagonists of the famous joke that Iglesias himself recalled succinctly in RAC-1 and that goes like this: what is a Trotskyist? A match. Two Trotskyists? A party and a stream. Three Trotskyists? A party, a current and a split.
By the way, he stopped there, but the joke continues: And four Trotskyists? The Fourth International. And five? Such a thing has never been seen.
