Irene Montero: «Electing Yolanda Díaz has been one of the biggest mistakes in the history of Podemos»

The current MEP, who started her speech visibly excited and thanking her chief of staff, Lidia Rubio, assured that “this book is the result of a journey, of very hard years in which we have been able to do things more beautiful, in politics and in our lives,” he said, addressing the former vice president of the Executive, as well as his partner and father of his three children, Pablo Iglesias. In addition to the former leader of the purple formation, they also wanted to support Montero in the auditorium of ‘La Casa Encendida’ in the capital Ione Belarra (“friend and companion in struggle”); the current spokesperson, Pablo Fernández; MEP Isa Serra; the former Secretary of Organization, Pablo Echenique; and the deputy Javier Sánchez Serna among others.

The price of this last decade in the front row of politics, he confessed, “has been very high.” In this sense, Montero remembers with special harshness the so-called ‘Magdalenas Pact’: the day when the resigned Errejón informed Iglesias, on paternity leave, that he was forming a new party with Manuela Carmena to run for municipal elections. May 2019. At that time, he remembers: “We said ‘we can’t take it anymore, we’re quitting!’ and we cry a lot. But we pushed forward and everything fell apart. The plan was ‘we will blow them up in Madrid and then in the general elections.'”

Although there was an even tougher moment, the MEP recalled: the second electoral repetition of 2019, which gave rise to the first democratic coalition government of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos. «The pressure on Pablo was brutal, he received dozens of calls asking him to accept a Government [del PSOE] alone better than going to elections, but we said: ‘no’. Because, he has defended, “power is not given, power is exercised because otherwise things will not be transformed.”

From Podemos, he assures, they always knew that the socialists wanted to use them. Until last year, when they chose to “replace the political leadership of an electoral space that, it is estimated, represents between 10 and 12 percent of the votes without Podemos and that did not want to exercise its political autonomy.” Montero refers, although without mentioning it, to Add. Now, he says, “only the PSOE is in charge and the possibilities for change in Spain have been narrowed.” “We have to break it, it is good for Spain that things happen even if the PSOE and the two-party system do not want to.”

Immediately afterwards, he wanted to send a message to Pedro Sánchez’s team: “We want to coordinate with you, not subordinate ourselves.” For this reason, he asks: “Hopefully the PSOE takes charge of the remains of the political operations that they have promoted to put an end to Podemos and we can cooperate,” he asks those of Pedro Sánchez.

He has left Yolanda Díaz for last, with five minutes left before time runs out. The message he has sent is clear and concise, as already reflected in the book: choosing her “has been one of the biggest mistakes in the history of Podemos.” They made the decision, he explains, thinking about expanding the space and having more power to transform. Instead, they handed over power “to those who have not wanted to change anything” and to those who defend that the only valid way to have the status of victim of sexist violence, he said, is to report: “Your recognition as a victim does not depend on the complaint,” stated Montero, in clear reference to the words spoken by the second vice president the day she came out to report on the Íñigo Errejón scandal within Sumar.

He only mentioned it at the beginning of his speech, when he referred to the offer that the second vice president made to him at the beginning of this year: the Spanish Embassy in Chile. “It was a humiliation to think that we could be bought,” Montero recalls.