Until recently, Verónica Martínez Barbero (Gijón, 1980) barely had any relationship with party politics. She spent more than 15 years mediating as a labor inspector between unions and employers in Galicia until Yolanda Díaz recruited her for her ministry. Her closeness with the second vice president led to her ending up on the Sumar lists for Congress on July 23. A year and a half later, he assumes a very delicate task as spokesperson for the parliamentary group after the departure of Íñigo Errejón, involved in a scandal following several complaints of sexual harassment.
The appointment of Martínez as spokesperson met the consensus of all the parties in the coalition and, according to several Sumar sources, also of the technicians and advisors who work in the parliamentary group, which approved the decision last Wednesday.
“I am not going to deny that I have thought about it a lot, because I know very well that the position I assume is a great responsibility. But I am taking the step because this appointment is the result of a collective decision that has the consensus of all the political forces that make up Sumar and, above all, because I have the firm commitment to continue contributing to making this a progressive, feminist and ambitious legislature. “He said in a letter to the militancy to explain his step forward.
The election of Martínez Barbero represents a radical change in the profile of the spokesperson. From Errejón, with years of experience on the political front line, to a person who has extensive technical expertise in labor law issues and who until a few days ago was unknown to the general public.
But people who know her assure that her conciliatory spirit and her ability to work will be fundamental tools that she will use for her new position, which has an obvious external dimension, being Sumar’s voice in Congress, but also internally: sew together a diverse and complex parliamentary group, even more so after the departure of Errejón and the latest electoral disappointments in the space.
The new spokesperson has a lot of experience at negotiation tables. He was born in Gijón but has spent a good part of his life in Galicia, where he lives. She passed the examinations for the Higher Corps of Labor and Social Security Inspectors in 2005 and from that position she began to gain a reputation as a good mediator. “He is incapable of getting frustrated until he reaches a solution to a conflict,” explains Ramón Sarmiento, former secretary general of the Galician Workers’ Commissions and candidate for Sumar in the last Galician elections.
Sarmiento met her when she started working as an inspector in the Vigo delegation and he was responsible for the metal area in the union. A turbulent moment, as he describes it, in which Martínez Barbero stood out.
“I had the Pontevedra-type, Vigo-type conflict resolution method. We had 34-hour meetings. We did not leave the table until one of the parties ran out of arguments. She has a bit of that school. And he has that ability to be able to make a proposal or propose alternatives that meet the expectations of both parties,” explains Sarmiento.
These conditions were what led to an agreement in 2017 between the employers and the unions to propose her as president of the Labor Relations Council of the Xunta de Galicia, an institutional dialogue body between unions and business associations and which also functions as a consultative and advisory body. of the Government in matters of labor law. “In this pepera Galicia we have many public organizations but we only have one in which the appointment of its presidency depends on the organizations that make up the council and we are the unions and employers,” says Sarmiento, who acknowledges that it was difficult for them to place Martínez Barbero, that she was chosen because she had a “recognition” in the sector that her participation was a guarantee that paths were found to resolve the conflicts.
“When Verónica left the council, the position was vacant for a year and a half for a reason, because the demand for autonomy had to be reinstated,” explains the former union leader who is also her neighbor. They live 400 meters away in the town of Sabarís, in the municipality of Baiona. And although the representative’s agenda is complicated, they usually find moments, she says, to have some “faladoiros”he says, talks about everything and nothing but in which politics and labor issues end up permeating everything.
Martínez Barbero left the Council in 2020 after receiving the call from Yolanda Díaz to join her ministry as general director of Labor. In that position, she once again demonstrated, according to those who worked with her, her negotiation skills. First with the implementation of ERTE during the pandemic and then in the social dialogue for labor reform. “That reform was written on Verónica’s laptop,” says Manuel Lago, advisor to the ministry at that stage and now Sumar’s deputy in Congress. Lago, who has known Martínez Barbero since the time when he was an economist at CCOO in Galicia, assures that he had a “fundamental” role in the “legal construction and negotiation” of the ministry’s major agreements.
“Verónica has been able to sit in the oval room on the fourth floor of the ministry for nine months, businessmen and unions, together with the secretary of state, to carry out the labor reform. “He has an extraordinary capacity for dialogue, negotiation and agreement,” describes Lago, who believes that his incorporation into party politics was the culmination of his commitment to social justice and the rights of the working class.
Martínez Barbero was at the head of the list for Pontevedra in the Sumar lists on 23J. She won the seat and has served as a deputy ever since. Sitting next to her on the seat since then is Rafael Cofiño, former director of Public Health of Asturias and from Gijon like her. “I didn’t know her directly until we started as deputies. We were close because she is Asturian and because we are sitting together on the bench,” he says. Both are two technical profiles, with management experience in the administration but without political experience until they arrived at Sumar.
Although they did not know each other before, they forged a special relationship over the months, which crystallized in their work drafting the ALS law. Cofiño provided technical health knowledge and gave legal form to the set of texts that the groups had presented and that needed a consensus that they reached with the help of the associations. “When we had the first draft, we locked ourselves in for a weekend to work on the text and we got it out. He has experience in working hard and well,” says Cofiño, who when he defended the law on the Congress platform used three words in Asturian to define it. “Prescious, gayaspera and afayadiza”, brave, who works well and knows how to do useful things, he explains.
“The moment he joined the working group of the ALS law, he turned it around, he put his expertise into it,” corroborates Fernando Martín, president of the National Confederation of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Entities (conELA), who speaks of an “extraordinary” person, who highlights his “intelligence”, his “sincerity”, and his “empathy”. “He does his job perfectly, with knowledge and judgment but also with heart,” he says.
Cofiño recognizes that his teammate assumes the position in a complicated situation but that he takes the step forward because his name generates a very broad consensus both among the parties and among the technical staff. “The spokesperson also has to have other things, work inward, knit. She is going to be a very good spokesperson because she is a weaver,” she summarizes.
“She is very good at dealing with people and has a great capacity for dialogue about the world she comes from. That is going to be very important in a complex parliamentary group,” explains a person who has worked on his team.
“I like that she is from Galego-Asturias, that she is not from Madrid. Some of our characteristics as a population are positive. We are not presumptuous. We are from poorer communities and it leads us to be more humble,” says Lago. Sarmiento believes that he will contribute to the spokesperson in an unconventional way. “She is a woman who says what she thinks, she is not limited to expressing something canned in front of a microphone, she is going to bring freshness,” he says.
Some of the people who know her also point out her love for risky sports, such as mountaineering and climbing. To which, starting on November 14, another dizzying experience will be added: the leadership of the spokesperson for the parliamentary group.
A complicated position
Martínez takes the reins of the spokesperson after a few very turbulent days for the coalition. Errejón’s departure and the repercussions that the scandal is having engulfed the left in general and Sumar in particular in a state of shock from which they are trying to escape. The election of the new spokesperson has been a way to begin to face the new stage.
This is the third time that the coalition in Congress has had to reorient course through the spokesperson, a position that seems hopeless for those of Yolanda Díaz since Marta Lois took office shortly after the general elections. Then there was little debate: Movimiento Sumar had been guaranteed in the coalition agreement to elect the group’s spokesperson and the second vice president was clear about who should fill the position.
Lois was a person she completely trusted, politically and personally. Although the spokesperson was not in office for long, in those months she had to live through very complicated moments. The worst of all, surely, was the departure of Podemos from the parliamentary group, which left them with five fewer deputies and which began to unravel the initial meaning for which the coalition, Sumar, was created.
The breakup occurred at the beginning of December and at the end of that month Lois already had another destination: she would be the head of Sumar’s list for the Galician elections, in which the non-nationalist left was starting out in a complicated situation. The predictions came true, the coalition did not enter Parliament and its candidate left institutional politics to return to teaching at the university. From everything to nothing in just a few months.
Sumar quickly resolved the hole that Lois left in the spokesperson. Errejón had been gaining positions in the party and many parties saw the founder of Más País as a good option for that position, especially due to his dialectical ability. Although that decision seemed definitive, its passage has also been ephemeral and its end has generated a crisis in the political space with consequences yet to be dimensioned.
An anonymous complaint of sexual harassment caused internal noise within the coalition that led its leaders to ask Errejón for explanations, who admitted the facts and agreed to resign. But after the reasons for the resignation became clear, several more women also accused the politician of sexist violence and the actress Elisa Mouliaá filed another complaint with the police for sexual assault. The presenter’s defense also coordinates the complaints of several women against him.
The coalition first tried to give all possible explanations for Errejón’s departure before delving into the spokesperson’s debate. This week he finally chose Martínez Barbero as the person of consensus after a debate in the group that has become more complicated as the days go by, not because of the name of the spokesperson, who had the approval of all the parties, but because of the demands of several of those forces for a complete restructuring of the parliamentary group that is still underway.
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