Sumar already has a name to lead his candidacy for the Galician elections on February 18. This Wednesday, the management will propose its spokesperson in the Congress of Deputies, the Galician Marta Lois, as the headliner of its first regional elections, as confirmed by two sources close to the process. Her appointment will be presented to the promoter of Sumar Galicia in a meeting that will be held at five in the afternoon and, an hour and a half later, it will be officially announced at an event in Santiago chaired by Yolanda Díaz.
Lois (Vigo, 1969) is a person of the vice president's utmost confidence, and until the elections of last June 23, a complete unknown to national politics. However, this university professor of political science, who appears as president of Movimiento Sumar, already served as councilor for Equality, Economic Development and Tourism in the Santiago City Council with the Compostela Aberta group, the municipalist tide that led the city between 2015 and 2019 with Martiño Noriega at the helm. In the last five months, as speaker in the Lower House, she has been characterized by her discretion and a profile not very given to getting into puddles.
The head of Labor, who had been looking for a candidate since the summer and had a preference for a woman, has a lot at stake in these elections, where she is launching her project in some regional elections. She also does so in her homeland and in a complex situation for the allied forces, which in 2020 were left out of the Galician Parliament after having become the leading opposition force four years earlier. After Anova closed the door on a candidacy with Sumar, the vice president's options had narrowed. The election of Lois, if she decides to resign from the seat, opens the door to changes in the organization of the parliamentary group, where the position she occupied is of vital importance and she defines, to a large extent, the character of the project.
Primaries in the Belarra organization
Meanwhile, in its lowest hours after the setback in the regional and municipal elections on May 28, Podemos started this Tuesday the processes to renew eight regional executives of the party. In half of them, some candidates, all profiles from the hard core of the leadership or related, have already formally announced or slipped their intention to run to lead the party in their community, a movement that, if successful, would allow the national leadership maintain control in the territories. These are the spokespersons Isa Serra (Madrid), Javier Sánchez Serna (Murcia) and María Teresa Pérez (Valencian Community), as well as the leader of Podem in Catalonia, Conchi Abellán. The party, which this legislature is out of the Government and three weeks ago broke with Sumar when its five deputies moved to the Mixed Group of Congress, faces a complex start to the year, with the challenge of strengthening a territorial structure extremely weakened after the debacle in the polls, the ERE launched and the resignation of some voices critical of the opposition strategy to Yolanda Díaz's platform.
In parallel, the management is launching the primaries for the European elections on June 9, in which it has already announced the candidacy of Irene Montero, and an express consultation to choose the candidate for the presidency of the Xunta in the elections on February 18.
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The Galician elections will serve as the first exam of the year for Sumar and also for Podemos, before the elections in Euskadi and the European elections. With an alliance between Díaz's platform and Ione Belarra's formation practically ruled out, Podemos' options to re-enter Parliament are reduced. According to the calendar published this Tuesday, all those interested in running for the primaries must send their candidacy throughout the day, which will have to be endorsed on Wednesday by the Autonomous Citizen Council before the voting takes place on Thursday and Friday. The results will be known on Saturday.
While in Galicia Borja San Ramón took control of the regional Podemos Executive a year ago, there are currently eight directorates pending renewal, either because it was due to the statutes or because their leaders have resigned in recent months. These are Asturias, Aragon, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, the Region of Murcia, the Valencian Community and Madrid. Three of them outside the regional parliaments since 28-M and five burdened by the resignations of their coordinators.
This is, for example, the case of Asturias, where last September, after months of absence, former deputy Sofía Castañón announced her definitive resignation from all party positions. This same weekend it was known that Podemos has expelled its only regional parliamentarian, Covadonga Tomé, after she was expelled after considering that her actions damaged the image of the party. The deputy had been very critical of the central and regional leadership of the party and even locked herself in the headquarters for days before the May campaign to demand that one of its members, who had been suspended from militancy, not be excluded from the list. . The crisis in the Principality dates back to December 2021, when Castañón's executive (close to Belarra) won the primaries for the first time amid accusations of fraud and the party divided in two. In the last regional elections, Podemos lost three of the four deputies obtained in 2019, while the IU and Más País candidacy rose from two to three and entered the Government.
Still in state of shock Due to the poor results, the coordinators of Aragón (Maru Díaz), the Balearic Islands (Antònia Jover) and the Valencian Community (Pilar Lima) announced their resignations after March 28. In all three cases, Podemos went from being part of the regional Executive to being the opposition or even remaining in an extra-parliamentary situation, as is the case of Valencia. In this community, the party's co-spokesperson, María Teresa Pérez, who served as director of Injuve in the last legislature, has already run.
In the Canary Islands and Madrid the party also lost all its representation in the last regional elections. Especially symbolic is the case of Madrid, the region where the party was born almost 10 years ago. Isa Serra, in 2019 a candidate for the Presidency of the community and in recent years an advisor alongside Montero in the Ministry of Equality, has proposed herself as a candidate after the resignation, this same month, of Jesús Santos. The deputy mayor of Alcorcón, close to Díaz, left with a loud slam of the door. “The clash with Sumar is incomprehensible (…) My political differences with the leading core of Podemos are enormous today,” he said in a letter published the same day that Belarra's party broke with the vice president's coalition in Congress. Added to Santos' departure is that of the latest candidates for the community and the capital's City Council, Alejandra Jacinto and Roberto Sotomayor. With a broken party and no seats, if she is elected, Serra's challenge is, therefore, enormous.
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