The political figure of Íñigo Errejón is easier to draw if you follow the dotted line of all the parties that he has helped to create, first, and then to fracture or even dissolve, later. In just a decade he has been founder or co-founder of Podemos, Más Madrid, the extinct Más País and Sumar. He left the first after his fratricidal war with Pablo Iglesias, a confrontation that opened the purple formation. And he did it when he had already set up Más Madrid, the brand that he promoted to form a political tandem with Manuela Carmena for the 2019 regional and municipal elections.
But his interest in regional politics turned out to be quite ephemeral. So just three months after taking his record as a regional deputy for Más Madrid, he gave birth to his third political project in September 2019: Más País. The failure of that political adventure that he undertook practically alone for the general elections took him to the henhouse of Congress as another deputy of the Mixed Group. Until Yolanda Díaz welcomed him into Sumar as one of the most recognizable faces of her coalition and later elevated him to spokesperson for the country’s fourth parliamentary group, a position he held until this Thursday, when Díaz herself asked him by telephone to resign after the scandal of complaints of sexist harassment.
Together with Juan Carlos Monedero, Pablo Iglesias and Miguel Urbán, the political scientist and university professor went in 2014 from the activism of ‘Youth without a Future’ to promoting Podemos, a political project born in the heat of 15M and that turned Spanish politics upside down until achieving five million votes and 71 deputies. Errejón, the party’s number two, is credited with the theory and discourse of that dazzling takeoff of Podemos under the charismatic leadership of Iglesias. Until everything went off the rails.
“Pablo and Íñigo did agree on the strategy of 2014 and 2015. That Pablo of ‘smile because you can’ was a very transversal politician, but he realizes that Spain is changing and there is no longer a place for that strategy to which Errejónism is still hooked,” explained Sergio Pascual, who was Errejón’s right-hand man and Podemos’ organizational secretary in an interview given to this newspaper in December 2022. For Pascual, that is precisely the moment of bankruptcy.
“That’s where the Vietnam. We did not want to eliminate Iglesias, we wanted to twist his arm with the deluded pretension of accumulating organic power that would help us convince him to once again be the spokesperson for Errejonism. It was a stupid thing to do: make him our best spokesman. That’s why we took a cardboard Pablo, to defend that he had to be the general secretary but of our political proposal,” he explains.
That rupture is reflected in ‘Vistalegre 2’, the Podemos citizen assembly to which Íñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias arrive as declared enemies. Errejón loses it by a landslide and Iglesias entrusts him with being a candidate in Madrid, an assignment that he takes advantage of to set up a new political project outside of his party and behind everyone’s back. Under the acronym Más Madrid he presents himself as a poster partner of Manuel Carmena, she is a candidate for Mayor and he is a candidate for the presidency of the Community of Madrid.
Even in those circumstances, with another political project already underway outside of Pablo Iglesias, it had to be the leadership of Podemos who demanded that he leave the party, something that he ended up accepting and solemnizing in a memorable press conference in Congress. “I pay very calmly the price of having adopted the correct decision,” he said the day he resigned his deputy’s record for the first time.
That first adventure outside of Podemos was the first failure, although not the most notorious. His tandem with Carmena destroyed the left in the opposition in the Community of Madrid, as usual, but it also led to the loss of the City Council for the then mayor in favor of José Luis Martínez Almeida. That was in May 2019. In June, Errejón collected his certificate as a deputy in the Assembly and assured that he would fulfill the “commission of the people of Madrid” to exercise the opposition. It took him three months to change his mind.
In September 2019, the blockage of Spanish politics due to the lack of agreement between Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias that caused the repetition of the general elections was received by the already former Sumar spokesperson as his umpteenth launch pad to stardom. Encouraged by some and with the skepticism of most of his colleagues who had been faithful to him since his departure from Podemos, Errejón presented Más País. “We present ourselves in an exercise of responsibility after the failure of the leaders who have not known how to agree and we will put our seats at the service of a progressive Government,” he proclaimed.
But that project constituted his second failure. The initial expectations that outlined the possibility of its own parliamentary group quickly deflated and Errejón barely managed to win three seats. One of their own, another for Equo and one from Compromís por Valencia. It obtained almost 560,000 votes, a similar amount to what Unidas Podemos lost between the April 28 elections and the November 10 repetition, but which translated into four fewer seats for the entire political space due to the electoral division. .
“On December 3 I collected the minutes. Returning alone to Congress is a hard feeling. We are in the chickenest coop. Then our position will be recomposed, but returning like this requires moral strength,” he wrote in his book Con todo (Planeta, 2021), which he published during the last legislature, when the transition period began between the departure of Pablo Iglesias and the arrival of Yolanda Díaz. to the leadership of Unidas Podemos.
In that text, in which he reviews his career from the beginning to his experiment with Más País, he acknowledges that the leap to return to national politics with his own project had gone wrong. And not only that. He had also taken away part of his inner circle.
“[…] My figure is touched. There are things that break. I’ve subjected some people to five inhumane years and there are some guys I lose in the sense that they don’t want to be in any more wars. “You don’t have me anymore.” «Not me anymore, Íñigo.» I understand it later: no one is there forever or can always keep up. We lost away, not in a match fight. “On the street with people.”
That legislature that begins with the pandemic is a wander through the desert of Congress for Errejón. He sets up the plural group with some parties and tries to take advantage of the few minutes he has on the platform with viral speeches. His work to build a national force is also not working. It sets up territorial federations in Catalonia, Murcia or Andalusia, largely with cadres from Podemos, at the same time that it decides to leave the management bodies of Más Madrid. He begins to separate from the party that he had founded months ago to give impetus to a state formation that never fully comes together. And in the middle of that process, Yolanda Díaz appears and the idea of a state force that can reach where Unidas Podemos cannot, that recovers the disenchanted and that ultimately eclipses the Errejón formation.
The return to the political front line cannot be understood without the movements that Díaz began to make at that time to attract the leader of Más País. The first private contacts between the Minister of Labor and Errejón began as a result of the negotiations for labor reform and later crystallized with an initiative of the Ministry of Labor on mental health that both presented in public. In an unpublished photograph, in April 2022, both shared an act just a few months after the opening of the listening process in Matadero that served as the launch track for Sumar.
That photo would be repeated a year later, in March 2023. Yolanda Díaz’s project had already taken some shape and while relations with Podemos quickly soured, the second vice president continued making gestures to other parties. The public meeting with Errejón took place at the gates of the Magariños event in which the leader of Sumar announced her candidacy for the presidency.
At that event, on April 2, 2023, Podemos was not present, but the rest of the alternative left leaders whom Díaz had summoned were: Alberto Garzón, Mónica García, Rita Maestre, Ada Colau. And also Errejón. “Thank you, Íñigo, for the intelligence to contribute to a new country project,” he said from the stage in the greetings he addressed to each of the leaders who had attended the meeting.
The relationship was finalized with the signing of Más País to enter into the coalition agreement for 23J. Errejón was fourth on the list for Madrid, one place above the general secretary of Podemos, Ione Belarra.
“We started talking and from the Government’s management we started talking about Sumar, which one day Yolanda told me about. And we began to see that that sounded good. First we see it with a certain distance from saying ‘let’s see how this ends’, especially because of the tension that begins to exist with Unidas Podemos, but our people were already approaching the events naturally, we were fine-tuning things until we set up the coalition among all,” Errejón explained in statements for a report with this newspaper.
A few weeks before the electoral campaign began, an anonymous woman reported on Twitter that the then deputy had touched her ass at a feminist party in Castellón. Then he deleted the messages. The festival, Tremenda Fem Fest, echoed the complaint and criticized the events at that time. “From the Tremenda organization we have acted as soon as possible and as a collective we have not taken any further action until the moment of publishing these lines. Errejón Mano Culo Mal, this summer sneakers in your hands,” they wrote in a post on social networks. That episode, however, had no major impact.
A month later, Errejón became fully involved in the electoral campaign with great prominence in events and interviews, although his weight was decreasing in the final stretch and he did not even intervene in the closing rally in the Parque Tierno Galván in Madrid. During the first months of the parliamentary group’s life, the then leader of Más País had a secondary role. Until Marta Lois had to go to Galicia to head Sumar’s lists in the regional elections and left the space open for Errejón to become spokesperson in Congress.
His weight both in the parliamentary group and in Yolanda Díaz’s party grew over the months. He was in charge of the political presentation for the Villaverde assembly, entered the executive branch and took steps to integrate the Más País federations into Sumar. In recent months he had become, along with the Minister of Labor herself and Ernest Urtasun, one of the main political references of the party.
His return to the front line of politics has been short-lived and its end abrupt. An anonymous complaint about sexist behavior that began to circulate in Sumar’s internal circles and sparked an investigation. Errejón did not take long to admit the facts. Because at that point the pressure from her colleagues and some coalition parties was already so strong that the only way out could be resignation.
A statement full of euphemisms put an end to a ten-year political era. A career as brilliant at times as it was full of political maneuvers and disagreements that generated many enemies. And in parallel, he accompanied, according to the complaints that are coming to light these days, with behaviors that he and the political groups he led had promised to banish. A damage to the political project that he represented, who knows if it is irreversible and that will forever remain attached to his name.
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