Podemos begins to prepare the organization for a possible electoral scenario, aware that the legislature could be long and end in 2027 but also collapse abruptly, as happened during the first Government of Pedro Sánchez. With these calculations in mind, the party expresses a kind of bicephaly with its general secretary, Ione Belarra, leading the negotiations in Congress, and in parallel with Irene Montero, who has regained focus since she obtained the MEP certificate last year. summer: she has just published a book and has made her debut as a talk show host on a national television channel.
Although Montero has been involved in parliamentary activity in Brussels for months, she maintains a political foothold in Spain. Just a few weeks ago, at the Association of Parliamentary Journalists party, the party’s general secretary, Ione Belarra, made her return to the national stage with an enigmatic message.
“Irene is the brightest blown fuse in this country. Many people wanted her exiled where we have her now, in the European Parliament, but she asked me to tell you on her behalf that she will return very soon,” she said when collecting one of the awards that parliamentary journalists give out each year.
The former Minister of Equality was the bet that the party made a year ago to compete in the European elections. Podemos had just left Sumar’s parliamentary group and had changed its political roadmap to distance itself from Yolanda Díaz’s project. And the first step after that movement was to launch the former minister as a candidate for the European elections, thinking about a solo candidacy that would compete with the left-wing coalition.
A few months later, after a campaign marked by Sumar due to internal problems in defining the candidacy, Podemos obtained two seats, that of Montero and that of Isa Serra, which gained greater value for the party when verifying that the result of the coalition led for Estrella Galán had obtained only three and that in some territories such as Catalonia they had even managed to surpass them in votes.
Since Montero took office as an MEP, she has multiplied her activity both in Brussels and in Spain. There, she has become the vice president of the left-wing parliamentary group and together with La Francia Insumisa and other formations she has promoted the creation of a new party, The Left Alliance for the People and the Planet, to mark distances with the Party. of the European Left (PIE).
The leader combines her institutional agenda in Europe with presence in state media. He recently released his first book, we will have done something (Navona), which he presented in Madrid on November 11, in an event in which he took the opportunity to make a retrospective of Spanish politics in recent years around his career and send some important messages, among them to Yolanda Díaz.
Since then, Montero continues to present the book in different parts of Spain and has incorporated his participation in the discussion of the Cuatro program ‘En Boca de Todos’ into his agenda. In addition, he has recently been involved in some negotiations with the Government. He did so in one of the last sessions of Congress before the December break, when Moncloa sought to pass a law to improve the efficiency of the Justice system. Podemos gave its votes in exchange for a commitment by the PSOE to extend aid to public transport for six more months and the suspension for one year of evictions in cases of squatting in empty homes and first homes.
The party does not want to give more details about the meaning of Belarra’s words at the Association of Parliamentary Journalists dinner, although there are not many more places to which Montero can “return” as the general secretary expressed than to a candidacy for the general ones.
In one interview in elDiario.espublished after the launch of her book, asked if she saw herself in primaries with Antonio Maíllo, the leader of IU, or Yolanda Díaz, she recalled that everything she had done in her political life had gone through primaries. “Anything I have done, always, has been for primaries. So, yes, I imagine running in a primary. So that? For whatever is necessary, but together with other colleagues: you never achieve anything important alone,” she said.
The European elections were an ideal setting to launch a candidacy because the single constituency system does not penalize the division into several lists, unlike what happens in general elections. With Podemos and Sumar in full disagreement, today it is difficult to think of a joint candidacy for those that emulate what happened for the 2023 general elections, although everything can change until then.
In any case, in Ione Belarra’s party they assure that they are already doing their homework. That is, preparing for the new electoral cycle, whether it is this year with an early call for elections or if Sánchez exhausts the legislative cycle until 2027. It is therefore possible that the party will at some point put its cards on the table and choose to their leadership in the face of this new scenario, just as he did for the Europeans, when he launched Montero long before the rest of the leftist formations had even defined the shape of their coalition.
Podemos avoids for the moment any debate on the unity of the left, at a time when Izquierda Unida has firmly committed to rejoining the political space with those of Ione Belarra in a future candidacy. Maíllo has sent that message after confirming Sumar’s failure to establish itself as a unifying platform for the rest of the parties.
And in his proposal for a new moment on the left he speaks of open primaries, of a consensual model in which there are no vetoes like the one that precisely left Montero out of the general candidacy in 2023.
The former Minister of Equality ends her book with a “And now what?” in which he dedicates a few lines to talking about future alliances in space. “In these years we have learned that to transform we need power and, above all, not give up our political autonomy. We know that we will not do things alone, that we must build and take care of alliances between progressive, democratic, feminist and plurinational forces. We have also learned this in these years. But we want to coordinate, work together, not subordinate ourselves,” he says.
While preparing internally, Podemos has increased pressure on the Government from Congress, trying to extract commitments in parliamentary negotiations that on several occasions have been extended to the voting limit. The party, in fact, has already put on the table its conditions to support the Next General State Budgets, a lowering of rents by law and the breaking of relations with Israel. Support, that of Podemos, is essential to move forward with these accounts and provide continuity to an increasingly complicated legislature.
Podemos will finish fine-tuning its machinery this year, when it plans, according to the statutes, to hold a new Citizen Assembly, the fifth in the history of the party and the first for Ione Belarra at the head of the organization. The last congress, held in 2021, was convened in an extraordinary manner after the resignation of Pablo Iglesias. Those registered then approved a roadmap in which the party recognized the leadership of Yolanda Díaz at the head of the Unidas Podemos coalition, a political thesis that the next congress will have to update in line with the documents approved just a year ago at a conference. policy that laid the foundations for the break with Sumar.
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