What is Add? Yolanda Diaz ensures that it is a citizen movement, a listening process with which to travel throughout the country and develop a new social contract. At the moment, he insists again and again, it has nothing to do with a game. It is not even -yet- a platform with which to appear at the 2023 general election. But all this will have to materialize. The second vice president of the Government knows it and admits it in public. It will be at that moment when Can clash with Díaz, who, yes or yes, they want to be their candidate, but without marking the entire field of play.
The day that paul churches He chose the Galician politician as his successor and anointed her as the next head of the list for the 2023 elections -without her having barely given his approval- he did not expect that little more than a year later his people (and himself) would have to put middle ground with the vice president. But that’s how it ended up. Sources close to the Podemos leadership assure that they do not want to dilute the party within Sumarthe project that Díaz inaugurated at the beginning of July.
In the purple party they are beginning to be aware that their brand is trading downwards -the regional elections of the last two years give a good account of this-, but they are reluctant to be blurred under the Diaz umbrella. Of course, they want to go with her to the elections. In short, together, but not scrambled. The purples want to maintain their independence, but establish a “electoral alliance” with the second vice president.
power quotas
The first to put that term on the table – that of “electoral ally” – was the secretary of the Organization of Podemos, Lilith Verstrynge during an act together with Díaz herself a few weeks ago. “We need a political project like Sumar, our electoral ally must be Sumar and our candidate is and will always be Yolanda,” she asserted. And a few hours later, Iglesias highlighted this idea: “Add and Podemos are two different things.”
Since then, all the leaders of Podemos have striven to insist on this idea, making it very clear that when the time comes they will want to speak with Díaz as equals, without being subject to the decisions of the second vice president. Above all, when it comes to set up electoral lists, where the quotas of power of each party are fixed. The secretary of Institutional Action of Podemos, Maria Theresa Perezpointed out this week that “Díaz is the candidate who can bring together different political positions,” but that it remains to be negotiated how that fit will occur.
Sumar’s promoter tries to stay out of the controversy. She has already made it clear that the parties should not be the center of Sumar, although they will have their space. Of course, she does not reveal anything about her future organic plans. “Whoever speaks in the summer of 2022 of elections that will take place in December 2023 does not understand what is happening in this country“, he asserted in a veiled criticism of the purples during an interview with EL FARO DE VIGO, the Prensa Ibérica newspaper to which this newspaper belongs.
Facilities in the rest
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For now, the purples are the only ones who have placed limits on Diaz’s leadership. The rest of the formations of United We Can -Izquierda Unida and En Comú Podem, mainly- are shown dedicated to the project of the second vice president. The federal coordinator of IU, Alberto Garzonmaintains a close relationship with Diaz and from their formation they see their integration in Sumar as a natural way. The same happens with the PCE, whose secretary generates, Henry Santiagowas the only leader of the purple space that attended the presentation of Sumar.
The ‘commons’ also seem predisposed to come together within Sumar. In the last year, Díaz has strengthened his ties with the Catalan space – his own chief of staff, Joseph Vendrell, was a leader of En Comú Podem-. In the last congress of Catalunya en Comú in November 2021, they ratified that “winning means making Díaz the next president of the Government of Spain”, “opening up to new alliances that qualitatively represent much more than the sum of the parts” and “turning a potential project leader and political subject”.