The resignation of Íñigo Errejón is a cluster bomb that impacts Sumar in all possible layers. The executive began an investigation when she became aware of anonymous complaints that attributed sexist behavior to her spokesperson in Congress. But the case leaves the leftist alliance in general very shaken and forces a new restructuring of the parliamentary group. Sumar loses its main parliamentary reference and will have to search among its ranks for a new voice, the third in just over a year of the legislature.
Errejón entered Sumar’s orbit in the negotiations for the coalition for the July 23 elections. With a discreet role at the beginning of the legislature, he gained weight in the parliamentary group until Yolanda Díaz elected him spokesperson after the departure of Marta Lois. Her role also grew in the organic part of the coalition and the party, first with her participation in the political presentation of the assembly and then with the cadres she brought from Más País and ended up integrating into the second vice president’s project.
Since then, Errejón had become the coalition’s main reference in Congress. His role as spokesperson accompanied the negotiation with the parliamentary groups and the leadership in many of the decisions that ended up being agreed upon within the group. This same week he had made a strategic turn, negotiating with the PP an exchange of support to carry out his own initiative.
That is why his departure, beyond the obvious political and ethical repercussions it implies, leaves a big hole for Sumar who will now have to analyze how he replaces him. The discussion will take place in the coming days because the priority in these last hours has been the management of the crisis. Since the coalition learned of the allegations that supposedly implicated him, they began an investigation.
The call from Yolanda Díaz
After Errejón admitted that the anonymous messages were about him and told the truth, several parties in the coalition pressured him to resign. The internal noise grew until Yolanda Díaz herself called him, although the decision was now irreversible.
“Following the information that appeared this week, at Sumar we began a process to gather information about the statements that had been made, mainly on social networks, about Íñigo Errejón. “This morning, Íñigo Errejón sent the Sumar executive the statement that he had just made public, presenting his irrevocable resignation as a member of the executive, deputy and spokesperson for the Plurinational Parliamentary Group of Sumar,” the party explained in a statement. .
“The executive of Movimiento Sumar met immediately and, after having listened to the reasons given by Íñigo Errejón, unanimously accepted his resignation,” he added.
But Sumar does not have much time to solve the hole left by Errejón, especially at a key moment so far in the legislature, when negotiations for the General State Budgets begin to move and parliamentary activity picks up. Next week, in fact, an important law for the coalition goes to Congress: the first step to unblock the gag law, after the agreement that the Government reached with EH Bildu a few weeks ago.
Some leaders of the parliamentary group ask to address this issue calmly and quickly scroll through the screen, especially after the speed with which action has been taken, they defend.
One of the first steps within the parliamentary group will be to elect a new voice in Congress, which reopens the pools that began to operate when Marta Lois left office to lead Sumar’s candidacy for the Galician elections. Sumar already has experienced parliamentary spokespersons, although the majority belong to political formations of the coalition that are not from Yolanda Díaz’s own quota of deputies, such as Aina Vidal from the Comuns, Enrique Santiago from Izquierda Unida or Àgueda Micó from Compromís.
On the other hand, Movimiento Sumar must fill the gap left by the leader in the executive, in which he had assumed the task of preparing the political theses, when there are barely two months left for the formation’s new assembly.
The news impacts the coalition after a few very complicated months, with very poor results in the regional elections that closed the political course and also in the European elections on June 9. The polls have not improved since then either and show that Sumar has lost approximately half of the support he gathered a little over a year ago in the July 23 elections. The last CIS reflects 6.3% support compared to the 12.3% it received in the general elections.
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