Nobody or almost nobody who is in the political front row today and who has shared a career with Íñigo Errejón wants to speak in public about the scandal that has ended his career. Most prefer not to do it even in private. The departure of one of the leaders of the left in the last decade after complaints of sexist harassment and sexual violence has left the entire political space that he represented as parliamentary spokesperson in ‘shock’. So no one, or almost no one, dares to point out how it can emerge from a blow that many admit will be difficult to come to terms with.
After the coup for Sumar, for which Errejón was spokesperson in Congress, late this Friday the scandal caused another upheaval in Más Madrid, the party that he himself founded and from which he had now distanced himself. The Madrid party dismissed Loreto Arenillas, a deputy in the Madrid Assembly, after a long executive meeting. More Madrid accuses its until now spokesperson on Women’s issues of covering up for her former party colleague in another episode of sexual harassment in the summer of 2023. The leader, who for her part accused her parties of having launched “lies” in that statement, she was resigning from the act, even though her party had accused her of refusing to resign.
To look for explicitly self-critical analyzes of what happened with Errejón or calls to do things radically differently in the future, we must turn to historical figures on the left. Some still hold political responsibilities and others played an important role in the last decade, but they all share the questions raised by such a serious case: how could it have happened without anyone raising the alarm, who looked the other way and what went wrong to stop them. that not even a left-wing and feminist party has been a safe environment against sexist attitudes.
“From a purely political point of view, to me the news seems lethal for Movimiento Sumar, Yolanda Díaz’s party in which Íñigo Errejón landed. And it seems to me to be a considerable burden for the Sumar coalition,” concludes María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop, a former MEP of Unidas Podemos who today is back in university classes after a short-lived stint as the executive of Sumar, which she left shortly after Yolanda Díaz was on the edge of the lists in the last European elections.
For Palop, there was enough evidence on the table in the form of public complaints from not so long ago that should have made Sumar’s management act differently. “There has not been enough attention that this case deserved. And I think that the first thing to do is to recognize it without palliatives, it would be the best, the healthiest and the most hygienic. Íñigo Errejón has been given a leading, substantial and front-line position, right? And that means that the minimum necessary measures have not been adopted to at least stop this type of thing in time,” he explains.
Guillermo Zapata, who is part of Sumar’s management, published a tweet in the last few hours in which he criticized himself for not having taken charge until recently. “There is a part of what happened that also falls on my side. Saying it now changes little, but keeping quiet is worse,” he wrote.
Zapata was a councilor for Ahora Madrid during the Manuela Carmena era, although he has known Errejón for a long time, from the militancy spaces that were born in the heat of 15M such as Juventud Sin Futuro or even earlier such as Patio Maravillas. However, it was from June of this year when both shared a working group for the first time. That summer, Errejón assumed the secretariat of Political Analysis and Speech, and Zapata, who had been working in the second vice presidency in that type of work, joined his team.
In conversation with this newspaper, he explains that this “taking charge” that he talked about in his message on social networks is not so much related to “you knew and did nothing” but rather to not making the effort to know. “There is a kind of noise and instead of going to see what it is, wait or postpone it,” he says. “The difference between us and them is that they can’t wait because it’s their life,” he adds.
That noise you are talking about has to do with the rumors that many people who shared political space with Errejón acknowledge existed. Perhaps they did not have much basis or perhaps what they said did not appear as serious as the information that became known later, but rather described a toxic way of behaving. And, from there, Zapata extracts some reflections on patriarchal dynamics present in society and that also permeate left-wing organizations.
“The first thing that comes out to me is that men have understood the rumors as something less than what is happening. And they understand it as signs or maps of what is happening. The first thing is a reflection on how we do not understand rumor as a kind of beginning of a truth that can be problematic,” he points out. “The next thing is how to see work from the uncles’ side, how to go beyond the rumor, start to be the ones who ask the questions, the ones who confront them and not leave the aunts alone,” he continues.
In general, she says, men have not absorbed the lessons of the feminist movement. “We have not sufficiently taken charge of what feminism puts on the table and of facing what is happening with others,” she believes. “We have left it to them. Not only because of a question of responsibility. Also because it is more comfortable: I do what you tell me. No, what I’m telling you is to take charge,” he understands.
Zapata also analyzes the need to continue building feminist spaces that generate security and trust so that these types of situations can be told. “Understand that the spaces that the feminist movement is building are spaces that have to be generated from a very strong logic of trust, where whoever makes the secret public feels safe,” she says. And bring that logic to social and political organizations, but also to institutions. “The idea that it is not exactly necessary to have a protocol or wait for a complaint, but rather how to build spaces of greater security,” he summarizes.
Teresa Rodríguez, the leader of Adelante Andalucía who shared a political project with Errejón during the first stage of Podemos, does openly confess to being ‘shock’. “For me it has been a surprise. I don’t know if it was something that was known around Madrid and didn’t reach beyond the Court, but I didn’t know. It never seemed to me or at least I didn’t perceive that he had the profile of an abuser or harasser,” he says.
For Rodríguez, who abandoned institutional politics and combines his organic responsibilities in Andalusian training with his work in a public institute in Cádiz, the diagnosis of what happened in this case and how Errejón has been able to find the complicity of many people to create spaces impunity is related to a model of leadership and political project that, in his opinion, is toxic.
“When you get into these dynamics in which, suddenly, there is a project to defend in the middle of a super hostile and super violent environment that is politics, it seems the most important thing in the world that the project survives even above of the principles. And I think that makes these kinds of things covered up and hidden and minimized. Because the most important thing is to preserve the great political project that is going to save the working class or humanity. And I don’t think like that, I defend principles, not a project.”
Miguel Urbán barely coincided in organic spaces with Errejón. He went to the European Parliament in 2015 and returned to Spain a few months ago, already out of Podemos and with his former colleague very far away from the party he helped found. For this reason, in the message on networks that he wrote this Thursday after hearing the news, he launched a reflection that went further and appealed to all the leftist forces.
In conversation with elDiario.es, the founder of Podemos and member of Anticapitalistas, who has already distanced himself from institutional politics after his time in the European Parliament, talks about the logic of power as a tool to generate impunity. “Symbolic power in the end is so powerful as to cover up or generate impunity,” he reflects. And he makes a self-criticism that he launches at all men. “It doesn’t help me that this doesn’t happen in all groups. We fight so that this does not happen, this is the most terrible thing. And it is palpable proof of the need for feminism to continue advancing.”
Urbán points out that it is this feminism that has already introduced some changes. “Without the mutual support networks of feminism, perhaps in the past something like this would have gone unpunished, and not now,” she points out. The problem, he points out, is that these behaviors have gone unpunished and the objective is to prevent it from happening again. “Until the patriarchy is ended, it will happen. The question is how collective mechanisms are articulated that ultimately demonstrate that the personal is political,” he concludes.
During the last few hours, there have been public reactions, on social networks, from people who shared political space with Errejón, the majority denouncing the events and some, to a lesser extent, highlighting his political legacy above the criticism. Most of the leaders of Sumar, a party of which he was a member until his resignation, have condemned what happened. But, in general, the entire political space is unable to abandon the shock in the last few hours due to news that affects one of the main leaders of the new left that broke out ten years ago and that resigns due to a sexist violence scandal whose consequences They are yet to be defined.
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