Yolanda Díaz leaves the leadership of Sumar. Just a few months after receiving the support of the militancy of her political platform to become general coordinator, the second vice president is leaving her organic responsibilities and will focus on her task within the Government as Minister of Labor, according to sources familiar with the decision confirm to elDiario.es. Díaz has made this decision after some harsh results in the European elections that call into question the viability of the project that she has been building since Pablo Iglesias handed over the leadership of the confederal space to her in 2021.
Sumar won just 3 seats in the European elections this Sunday. A poor result that also leaves Izquierda Unida, Díaz’s main partner in the construction of the broad front of leftist parties, out of Brussels. Part of these results are due to a better than expected performance by Podemos, which has won two MEPs and which shows that it has more weight within the left-wing electorate than the hard core of the vice president trusted it with.
In Sumar they understand that there is a part of the leadership that works, their role at the head of Sumar in the Government and in the Ministry of Labor and they defend that this is something that the polls reflect. But they also believe that he must accept electoral results that they have considered negative from the first moment and that is why he has decided to resign to make way for another person and open a reflection on how the political project should be built.
“”I feel like I haven’t done the things I should have done and the things I know how to do best. The citizens have perceived it. Many people have been telling me that. We have to be there to solve people’s problems, not the problems of parties or politicians. The last elections have served as a mirror, citizens are not wrong when they vote nor when they are not going to vote,” Díaz said in a video broadcast by streaming.
After Sunday’s scenario, practically all the organizations involved in the construction of Sumar had asked the leadership of the political project for reflection. The spokesman himself, Ernest Urtasun, acknowledged this Sunday that the results were not as expected, that they transcended the European elections and that therefore they opened a reflection process to reinforce the political project.
Although no one asked for the resignation of Yolanda Díaz, in the tweets of some party leaders there were harsh criticisms of Sumar’s leadership and how the process of building a broad front that has not worked so far has been forged. Sumar, for now, is only the Sumar Movement, a political formation that includes cadres from other political formations and independent people close to the Minister of Labor. In all these months, the movements in that direction have been angering the political parties that want to participate in the construction of the project for different reasons.
These tensions exploded in the negotiations to form the list of European elections in which Sumar decided to relegate Izquierda Unida, the only state party on the list, to fourth place, which has finally left them out of the European Parliament. IU even debated in an assembly whether to accept that position or go alone. Yolanda Díaz put the comuns ahead, who on Sunday were behind Podemos in Catalonia, and Compromís, which is not part of the organic construction of Sumar.
Sumar’s expectations have been diminishing as the European elections approached. After the internal turbulence, with a candidate, Estrella Galán, who has not finished working, and with leaks towards the PSOE and Podemos, the coalition has ended up with three seats and less than 5% of the vote at the state level, despite to be a force with five ministries in the Government. These results also come after a total failure in Galicia, where they did not manage to enter Parliament, a very bad result in Euskadi and a setback also in Catalonia.
Sunday’s results have exhausted the patience of the parties. Yolanda Díaz, who during the election night did not even go to the Sumar headquarters to support her candidate, has decided to directly assume responsibility and abandon all of her organic positions to continue involved in the work within the Government. What is opening up now is a new stage of upheaval and uncertainty for a left that is increasingly diminished and entangled in its internal conflicts.
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