Podemos is warming up for the European elections, in which the party will face Sumar. Surrounded by the organization’s senior staff and members of her candidacy, the number two of the leftist formation, Irene Montero, left messages this Monday to socialists and greens to claim herself as the only leftist force capable of positioning herself “without fear” once morest The injustices”. “We are not going to settle for hate and rights cuts, nor with the ‘you can’t’ of socialism and the greens,” she proclaimed at an event held at a venue in the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés. He has thus marked the distance with his potential rivals, while making a veiled allusion to the coalition led by the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, which has candidates who belong to both the European left group (IU) and the the green ones (Catalunya en Comú). In her speech, the party leader, Ione Belarra, stated that they “offered” Montero a “political exit” in an embassy so that he would “stop causing problems.”
“It would have been very easy for Irene to have a political solution,” Belarra explained as soon as she began her speech, stating that she had not spoken to Montero regarding what she was going to reveal next, because if she did, she would not have let him. “They offered me something nice, an embassy. A way out that would get her out of Spain and stop her from causing problems. When they proposed it to me, I started crying, because she made me very angry,” she said immediately followingwards without giving any other information. Party sources suggest that it was Yolanda Díaz herself who formulated the proposal following the general elections and that the position was in the Chilean legation, a country with which Montero has a special connection, since she studied there for a while. The former head of Equality was excluded from the 23-J lists, following a very tough negotiation with all the parties that made up the coalition, but particularly agonizing with Podemos, which until the last day did not confirm its integration into the project. Despite her entry, the group denounced the “veto” of her number two and pressured for days for Díaz’s team to rectify it. Less than two weeks before, the party had sunk in the municipal and regional elections, following a campaign in which Montero had a very prominent role. At that time, Sumar did not see the minister as a political asset and argued that they did not want to convert the law of only yes is yeswhich since its entry into force had caused more than a thousand reductions in sentences for sexual offenders and an enormous crisis for the coalition government, in a central element of the campaign.
Asked regarding the information known this Monday, the vice president’s party remains silent for the moment. “What Irene has represented is necessary. It would have been understandable if she didn’t ask for more. It would have been very easy for her to step aside, to look outside of Spain for that political solution,” reasoned Belarra, who appreciated that, instead, she has decided to “put the European candidacy on her back.”
Less than five months before the elections, the former Minister of Equality has presented the team that accompanies her in the party primaries, the results of which will be made public on February 2, the day of the beginning of the campaign for the regional elections in Galicia, a very complicated appointment for Podemos, which is an extra-parliamentary force. On Montero’s list, which must still be voted on by the militancy between January 24 and February 1, are the party’s co-spokespersons Isa Serra, Pablo Fernández and María Teresa Pérez. Also the former Madrid deputy Serigne Mbayé, the former Jemad Julio Rodríguez, now president of the foundation linked to the party (the Republic and Democracy Institute), and the trans rights activist Mar Cambrollé. “I cannot imagine a better team to help Spain in Europe be a reference for feminist policies, for the defense of peace, for anti-racist, environmentalist and anti-fascist policies,” the Podemos leader highlighted before attacking the PSOE and Sumar.
“The European project needs a voice that is not satisfied with what exists. […] In the face of hatred, in the face of the curtailment of rights on the right and also in the face of the conformism of the progressive sectors, also of the green ones, we need powerful forces, without fear, with the will not to remain silent in the face of any injustice that defends this Europe of root, which justified the creation of the European project,” he advocated.
“People who do not conform”
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Montero recalled some words from the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that her best creation had been Tony Blair. “A Labor member who founded the third way at the time, which meant defending right-wing policies from the left. She, with great reason, wanted to say a truth as big as a fist, and which is still fully valid today, which is that if the left makes right-wing policies, in the end the right-wing rules, even if they do not govern,” she said. launched the future head of the list, which has delved into that idea. “This is the candidacy of the people who do not settle, who do not stop dreaming of another possible world, who know that there is always an alternative, that it is possible. Although it implies a high political cost to make possible what both the right and those third ways and those left that apply right-wing policies tell us is not possible,” she stressed, throwing darts at her former government partners.
“We are a few thousand people, let’s see how many, who want this fight to happen,” Belarra stated, de facto recognizing that the Europeans will be a good thermometer to measure themselves once morest the rest of the forces. Podemos faces this electoral event at a time of weakness for the party, which following the May debacle has seen its territorial structure diminished and which in December broke with Sumar in Congress and now maintains its five deputies in the Mixed Group. Although his candidacy will still be made official in the coming days, the Podemos leadership (at the expense of materializing an alliance with some other force) is already clear regarding the members of the list with which he will compete in the European elections. For its part, Sumar has not yet chosen its head of the list and although talks have already taken place, its spokesperson, Ernest Urtasun, stated this morning at a press conference that they will address the negotiations to unite the coalition parties in a same ballot “whenever it’s time.”
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