2024 will be crossed out on the calendars of the leaders who launched Sumar. The project that Yolanda Díaz launched during the last legislature to rebuild the unity of the left has suffered a series of setbacks in the last 12 months that have put its survival in doubt. From the results of the regional and European elections that caused the resignation of the Minister of Labor as the organization’s organic leader to the resignation of Íñigo Errejón, last October, due to a series of complaints of sexual harassment.
Between the joy that ran across the faces of the majority of the coalition leaders after the 2023 general elections and the video with which Yolanda Díaz announced her resignation as general coordinator of Sumar after the European elections, barely a year had passed. A dizzying journey that shows the difficulties faced by the space on the left of the PSOE despite maintaining five ministries in the Government and thirty deputies in Congress.
That 23J the coalition had laid the pillars to consolidate itself as the new alternative of the transformative left with an electoral result that was backwards compared to that of Unidas Podemos four years earlier, but which held up and allowed the progressive coalition to be revalidated. The unity forged before that appointment was, however, a fleeting mirage and in January 2024 Sumar had already suffered the departure of Podemos and was beginning to accept the first consequences of that break with the vote against Ione Belarra’s party to the decree. of the unemployment benefit that Díaz sought to approve in the first plenary session of the year.
Just a year ago, Sumar was preparing the 2024 electoral cycle: Galician, Basque and European, to which were later added the early elections in Catalonia. And the coalition came to these appointments conditionally.
In Galicia he had had to turn to the then spokesperson in Congress, Marta Lois, to lead the candidacy, which sought to return the non-nationalist left to the Galician parliament. Podemos had voted to attend alone and deepen the rupture with those of Yolanda Díaz. In Euskadi the starting positions were better but negotiations with Ione Belarra’s party were on the horizon. And in the European elections the coalition had to look for a top candidate to compete with Irene Montero, who had just launched her candidacy.
A month later, Lois would not get the votes necessary to enter the Galician Parliament. In Euskadi he barely got one representative, Jon Hernández, from IU, compared to the six that Elkarrekin Podemos had in the last legislature, and in the European elections he was left with three seats, while Montero got two for Podemos.
The European elections and the previous negotiation were a defining moment for Sumar and the left in general. The coalition, in parallel to the electoral race that year, had begun its organic construction with the ambition of creating a platform that integrated the main left-wing parties. But the negotiations for this so-called broad front were going poorly and the formations publicly showed their discomfort at the ambition of their leaders to leave them a minority space in the leadership: 30% of the command positions.
Failure in the European Championships and resignation of Díaz
In the middle of these negotiations, Sumar’s parties sat down to negotiate starting positions for the European elections. The talks were extremely tense for a reason: there were many parties and few seats to be distributed (the most coherent forecasts estimated four MEPs). Sumar intended to head the list with Estrella Galán, an immigrant rights activist who had just presided over CEAR. For the rest of the positions, the Comuns, Compromís, Izquierda Unida and Más Madrid were fighting. The list ended up being settled in that order, with IU so angry that it suspended its participation in the organic construction of the broad front until after the elections. Fourth place was in danger and the party feared being left out of the European Parliament for the first time, as it ended up happening.
Yolanda Díaz then made a decision that surprised inside and outside the team. She left her position as general coordinator of Sumar to focus on Government action, which de facto ended the project as it had initially been conceived.
The departure of Díaz from the organic leadership plunged the entire space into a confusion from which it has not yet emerged and gave wings to other parties to come forward in the middle of the crisis. Among others, to IU, which had just emerged from an internal dispute by choosing Antonio Maíllo as the new coordinator. The Andalusian leader has been very critical of the ways in which Sumar has been built until now and for months he has been calling for building bridges with Podemos again. He has also proposed a name change for the coalition.
Although Díaz has left the coordination of Sumar, his role in the coalition and the party is still uncertain. He continues to attend executive meetings, his voice has a predominant weight in the decisions that are made and he maintains command in the coalition within the Government and in Congress.
One of the effects that his departure has had has been the reorganization of the coalition in which the rest of the parties have asked for more weight. Sumar, in fact, has become the Sumar Movement, a traditional party that no longer aspires to integrate the rest of the alliance’s political forces into its leadership, something that will be definitively finalized in the March assembly.
Díaz had already tried to change the organic direction of the formation and the relationship with the parties with a change in the executive that had functioned until March. He proposed Lara Hernández as Secretary of Organization and relieved Lander Martínez who had performed those functions until now although without an official position. Josep Vendrell, who had led the negotiations with the parties until that moment, both for the electoral appointments and for the organic construction of the broad front, also stepped aside.
The ‘Errejón case’
The Europeans closed an electoral cycle that will not be reopened until the Andalusians in 2026, that is if there is no progress until then. That is why the summer served to put some calm to the internal noise that had dominated the space of the left in recent years. And the coalition took advantage of this impasse and the return of summer to try to regain political initiative. He did so with an event involving all of Sumar’s parties to present their proposals for the negotiation of the General State Budgets and launched a political offensive around housing, in the heat of the demonstrations that were being prepared in the main cities of Spain. in the face of impossible rental prices.
But that offensive led by Íñigo Errejón, Sumar’s parliamentary spokesperson after Lois’ departure in January, was cut short after a few weeks.
Some anonymous complaints of sexual harassment published on the Instagram account of journalist Cristina Fallarás generated a strong internal stir in the coalition at the end of October. Although they did not name anyone specifically – the texts spoke of a well-known political leader – several women in the parliamentary group interpreted that they were referring to Errejón. Both Más Madrid and Yolanda Díaz, according to the story they gave later, asked him if those stories referred to him. The spokesperson accepted this and agreed to resign, although he did so in a letter in which instead of talking about the real reasons for his resignation and asking for forgiveness from the victims, he blamed neoliberalism and the rhythms of politics. After making the resignation public, more serious testimonies arose and actress Elisa Mouliá filed a complaint with Justice for sexual abuse that is progressing in court.
The media impact of the case was overshadowed a few days later by the DANA that devastated the coast of the Valencian Community, but the space continues to pay the consequences, as Sumar’s own leaders recognize. It was a missile to the credibility of the left-wing formations in their fight against machismo and a perfect excuse for the right-wing and extreme right parties to charge against them. Although in the coalition they also defend that the agility with which they acted and the determination in demanding Errejón responsibilities have served to rebound those criticisms and to make society see that not all political forces act the same when a case like this appears among their rows. Without going any further, Carlos Flores, convicted of sexist violence against his wife, is still a Vox deputy in Congress today.
Sumar tried to close the crisis with the appointment of Verónica Martínez as the new parliamentary spokesperson, a person of consensus within the group who was unanimously elected by all the political forces that make up the coalition.
Yolanda Díaz, who is trying to regain the support she achieved during the last term at the head of the Ministry of Labor, has focused on management: she has closed an agreement with the unions to reduce the working day, the star measure of the Sumar’s electoral program, and has activated work for a new increase in the interprofessional minimum wage.
The parliamentary group has been reactivated waiting for the new Budgets to be approved if Junts and Podemos allow it. And Sumar intends to leave behind a terrible year marked by internal noise and the electoral fight to talk about the Government’s progressive measures and its contribution to moving them forward.
As the new electoral contests approach, the coalition will have to define whether it maintains the current model and its name or starts again and tries to reach broader agreements to once again reach out to Podemos. And, if in that scheme, the formation and the cadres of Yolanda Díaz continue to be those who drive the alliance as until now or a more horizontal scheme is proposed with a more distributed weight between the different political forces.
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