Sumar Movement tries to recompose itself at two speeds. While it postpones its state assembly to transform its structures into those of a traditional party, the deployment of the organization in some territories has begun. The first will be Galicia, where a constituent assembly is scheduled for the weekend of November 23 and 24. And a week later Euskadi will do it. In both territories the formation activated its own cadres and militancy for the electoral campaigns at the beginning of the year.
The party at the state level is in a transition that will take longer than expected. After the departure of Yolanda Díaz from the organic leadership last June, Movimiento Sumar is led temporarily by a collegiate leadership of four people. That interim period had an expiration date in December, when the assembly was initially scheduled to open the new stage.
But on November 10, the Coordinating Group, the highest body between congresses, decided to postpone that appointment until March 29 and 30, 2025. The new assembly will thus take place practically a year after the first, the constituent event of the organization. In those 365 days, there will hardly be anything left of the theses from then, when the documents that laid the foundations for a broad front were approved, with a leadership shared with the parties that never got underway.
The new assembly, therefore, aims to restructure those documents to give the organization a traditional party form. There will no longer be a space in the address reserved for parties. The assembly will not provide major changes in the way it operates because Movimiento Sumar has de facto been operating for many months with that type of organization. It is about adjusting the documents to reality.
The decision to postpone the assembly came in the midst of crisis management after the departure of Íñigo Errejón. The former parliamentary spokesperson was at the head of the team in charge of writing the political presentation of that congress. However, management sources then stated that the idea of delaying the date had already been discussed before due to the open debates surrounding the territorial deployment that the party has planned.
The question of articulation in the different communities is a debate that has crossed Sumar since its beginnings, since it was initially conceived as a project that incorporated its own cadres and also the different parties of the alternative left.
Many of these parties, however, are linked only to their territories, such as Más Madrid, leader of the opposition in the regional assembly, the comuns or Compromís in the Valencian Community, which although never joined the construction of a political project to The state level has always viewed with suspicion the deployment of any structure in its territory.
Once the broad front hypothesis has been rejected, Movimiento Sumar has to decide what that deployment will be like. The issue is more or less resolved in Catalonia, where the comuns have functioned until now with total loyalty to Díaz’s project, but it will be more problematic in Madrid, where Mónica García’s party does not want to know anything about another party in its territory.
While the training defines what it will do in the main communities, it has activated Galicia and Euskadi processes. They are simpler places for several reasons: there are no non-nationalist territorial formations that could strain the coalition at the state level and they have already mobilized militancy and cadres for the elections that were held respectively in February and April of this year.
But there is one more detail that facilitates this development. Both Movimiento Sumar Galicia and Sumar Mugimendua are organizations federated to Movimiento Sumar, with their own CIF and autonomy.
Galicia will be the first territory to celebrate a constituent assembly: next November 23 and 24 at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The main candidacy is headed precisely by the people who have been most involved in the construction of the project in recent months. Paulo Carlos López, current spokesperson, and Verónica Martínez Barbero, who has just been appointed spokesperson for the parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies.
The first aspires to be general secretary, the main position of the party, and Martínez Barbero will assume the presidency. The list with which they are presented to this assembly is closed by Marta Lois, the candidate in the last Galician elections and who was previously Sumar’s first spokesperson in Congress. Today she works at the university far from the front line of politics.
The Euskadi assembly It will be held a weekend later. Although the deadline for the presentation of candidacies has not yet begun – it will be active between November 19 and 22 –, the main face of the party there is Alba García, who led the candidacy in the last elections to the Basque Parliament and who has exercised spokesperson in the territory since then, although the main promoter of the party is Lander Martínez, who is part of the state executive and is a deputy in Congress.
Both federations have proposed similar starting documents, which draw on the same political and ideological principles of Movimiento Sumar, although for Euskadi, the planned organization changes with respect to the Galician or state organization. In this case, the highest representative body will be the co-spokespersons, three people who will hold shared leadership, in a similar way to the scheme that worked until now in the commons.
With these two congresses, Movimiento Sumar will begin to formally have parties in two important territories for the political project, although the work begins at the very bottom. In neither of the two territories did they achieve institutional representation in this year’s elections. In Galicia, Lois did not get the seat and in Euskadi the only deputy who was elected was Jon Hernández, from Ezker Anitza.
The rest of the territorial deployment will begin after the state assembly, if everything goes as planned, although the Organization Secretariat led by Lara Hernández has already made some decisions for the future. One occurred before Errejón left: the integration of the Más Andalucía and Más Asturias cadres into Movimiento Sumar.
Andalusia is the territory that the entire left is beginning to think about, because it is, along with Castilla y León, the first to have an electoral call planned. Movimiento Sumar in fact recently inaugurated its first headquarters in Seville and a few days ago held a meeting with the militancy to begin activating the territory.
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