Read the full letter from Íñigo Errejón in which he announces his resignation

Sumar’s spokesperson, Íñigo Errejónannounced this Thursday that he is abandoning all his political responsibilities, including his seat in the Congress of Deputies and his position in the Parliamentary Group. The decision comes after several complaints from anonymous women who publicly accused the politician. Read the full letter in which he announced his resignation here:

In recent months, and more insistently in recent weeks, I have been thinking that I had to make some important decisions. Today the day has come to do it.

I have been politically engaged and active for almost as long as I can remember. That’s my way of being in the world. But for ten years I have held positions of public representation in institutional politics and very high visibility and media exposure. I have had the privilege of defending the ideas that I consider the most beautiful and just, and of doing so during one of the most intense, but also hardest, decades of the spanish politics. That entails many experiences, learnings and reasons for pride. But it also generates a type of life, a daily life, a subjectivity, a type of links with the public sphere, with fame and with others that take their toll. The rhythm and way of life in the first political linefor a decade, has worn down my physical health, my mental health and my affective and emotional structure. I think this is something that everyone who is in this position for a long time experiences to a greater or lesser extent.

On the political and media front line one survives and is more effective, at least that has been my case, with a way of behaving that is often emancipated from care, empathy and the needs of others. This generates a toxic subjectivity that in the case of men, patriarchy multiplies, with co-workers, with organizational colleagues, with emotional relationships and even with oneself.

I, after an intense and accelerated political cycleI have reached the limit of the contradiction between the character and the person. Between a neoliberal way of life and being a spokesperson for a group that defends a new, more just and humane world. The ideological struggle is also a struggle to build better, more careful, more supportive and, therefore, freer ways of life and relationships. You can’t ask people to vote differently than how they behave in their daily lives.

I have been working on a personal process and psychological support for some time, but the truth is that to advance in it and to take care of myself, I need to abandon institutional politicsits demands and its rhythms.

I announce thus, as I have already communicated to my colleagues in charge, my resignation as spokesperson for the Plurinational Parliamentary Group of SumarI leave my seat in Congress and all my political responsibilities. I will always continue to be active and committed, but for me this institutional political stage is ending and I hope to contribute in this way to the generational renewal and renewal of cadres and ideas that the democratic and popular forces need.

I finish the most important stage of my life. A hard and exciting stage. With successes of which I am proud and errors that I hope to contribute to repairing with this decision. A fraternal hug to all the colleagues of all these years.

Health.

Íñigo Errejón