Alberto Garzón’s (Logroño, 1985) political career is actually full of coincidences. His trajectory in the last decade is well known. But it could well have been otherwise. In fact, much of what has happened to him was not only unwritten, but has been the result of the political moment of each moment.
In November 2011, the candidate that many in the IU thought of to be deputy for Málaga was Juan Torres. But, due to things in life, he ended up being one of his disciples in ATTAC, Alberto Garzón Espinosa. The young economist, an activist in 15M, had connected with a good part of the new generations of the organization after a speech on the 59 seconds program in August 2011.
In that program, Garzón denounced the cuts by the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, spoke of the troika, the euro pact, the real estate bubble, evictions, the loss of purchasing power, the problems of young people to emancipate themselves and the democratic deficits of the system. Then came more participation in the program, which gave it popularity and a connection with new generations that was essential for what would come later.
“I really like an anarchist maxim that says that if I voted it would do any good, they wouldn’t let us vote,” was how Garzón ended his speech that night, at the age of 25 and still unaware that he would become a deputy four months later.
The phrase represents a young man who, indeed, drank from anarchist influences, although he was a member of the UJCE in addition to participating in ATTAC with one of his teachers at the time, Juan Torres.
Garzón was elected in November 2011 as the youngest deputy of those Parliaments, in the legislature in which Mariano Rajoy obtained an absolute majority and the United Left of Cayo Lara went from 2 to 11 deputies, in an electoral campaign in which Pablo Iglesias , later founder of Podemos and vice president of the Government, had acted as a political adviser.
That result is widely celebrated at the old headquarters on Calle Olimpo in Madrid, which is very far from Rincón de la Victoria (Málaga), where Garzón lived at the time, facing the sea. That young man who enjoyed programming computer games, playing table football with his friends in Rincón de la Victoria (Málaga) and eating skewers in front of the beach at the beach bar Here I wait for you recovered the seat of Malaga for IU at a time when Spain was heading towards the biggest cuts in history, carried out by Mariano Rajoy in 2012.
The legislature started marked, in addition to the absolute majority of the PP, for being the first after 15M, for the reform of article 135 of the Constitution and for the rescue of the banks in Spain, the sacrifices decreed by the troika and the abdication of Juan Carlos I. Of course, the legislature ended in a very different way for the country, but also for Alberto Garzón and the Spanish left.
The young deputy for Málaga –although he was born in Logroño in 1985, Garzón grew up in Málaga due to his parents’ labor issues–, very active on social networks, in the media and with a new way of behaving in the institution, was gaining notoriety for things like recording Mario Draghi during his appearance behind closed doors in Congress –February 2013–; or by the surrounding Congress –September 2012–.
Garzón, thus, quickly gained leadership outside of his organization that connected him with a new political moment inherited from the 15M that agitated bipartisanship and demanded new ways of doing politics and managing the economy, and that rebelled against the collusion of IUCM with the goings-on of Caja Madrid.
But IU did not read the moment, it did not renew itself on the inside and they pushed it to renew itself on the outside: the same Pablo Iglesias who had advised them in 2011 stripped the organization of Cayo Lara bare with the irruption of Podemos in 2014, culminating in five MEPs on May 25 of that year against the six of IU-La Izquierda Plural. Cayo Lara ended up ceding the electoral leadership to Garzón, who intervened in the State of the Nation debate in 2015, but they never gave the co-spokesperson of the parliamentary group to who would be the candidate on December 20, 2015.
With a Podemos at its maximum that ruled out the electoral confluence with the IU on 20D, Alberto Garzón, with just turned 30 and a handful of new young leaders of the IU –still organically commanded by Lara until June 2016–, assumed an all-out campaign nothing in which the electoral survival of the organization that represented that red thread of history was at stake; from the political space of the historic PCE, from what was called the “organized Marxist left”.
The campaign was epic, agonizing, but also with a self-assurance and impudence typical of someone who, once again, as when he was called to be a deputy in November 2011, finds himself involved in an unexpected responsibility. In fact, the replacement was by way of facts, forced by the political moment, recruiting as a candidate who embodied that new generation of leaders, also represented in what was then called La Cueva, the irreverent (at that time) IU network team during the electoral campaign.
Garzón and his people kept the flame alive with two seats and almost a million votes. Podemos and its confluences –in which IU participated in Catalonia and Galicia– achieved 70 seats: Podemos proved to be the hegemon of space; Garzón, that IU was still alive. Conclusion? He pact of the bottles May 2016 with a view to the 26J elections and the birth of Unidos Podemos.
Garzón, vindicating the historical figure of Pepe Díaz (as opposed to that of José Bullejos), made the electoral confluence and popular unity his political strategy to overcome Izquierda Unida, run in the elections with Podemos and form a historical bloc of change.
With that compass and surrounded by a renewed direction, Garzón took over the IU coordination after 26J 2016. With more or less tensions, with ups and downs in relations with Podemos, Garzón has achieved the survival of the IU political project and the presence of representatives of the organization in spaces that it had not occupied for a long time.
Until entering the Government.
Izquierda Unida, due to its stormy historical relations with the PSOE, in which the electorate never rewarded hardness or collaboration with the Socialists, did not quite show enthusiasm for forcing Pedro Sánchez into the coalition government, to the point that after Due to the failure of the negotiations in July 2019, many IU leaders were more inclined to give Sánchez the investiture than to go to the electoral repetition of 10N.
But there was an electoral repetition that brought the extreme right to 52 deputies, and Sánchez called on Iglesias to close an agreement that had been impossible six months earlier for a coalition government. In the negotiations, Iglesias ends up agreeing with Sánchez a vice presidency and four ministries, one of them, that of Consumption with powers over gambling, for Alberto Garzón. And with that, the red thread of history entered the Council of Ministers: for the first time in eight decades there were people from the PCE in that room (himself and Yolanda Díaz, second vice president and Minister of Labor).
Once again, Garzón sees himself in a place that was not foreseen either, and that he occupies as leader of the IU, a responsibility that he had not thought of when he ran for the first time in the elections.
Since his ministry, the IU leader has promoted measures to limit betting advertising on television, social networks and video games -physical betting houses are a regional competence-, in addition to fighting in favor of extensive livestock farming against macro-farms and the Mediterranean diet against the excessive consumption of meat – with the business lobby and the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, against it.
But if the 2011 legislature began at a political moment and ended in a very different one, that of 2019-2023 is also being the same. The legislature in which for the first time in eight decades the political space to the left of the PSOE enters the Government, is faced with a pandemic and a war on European soil, along with the health, economic and social crises that this entails. And also with a transformation in the political space to which Alberto Garzón belongs.
If the legislature and the Government were reached with the leadership of Pablo Iglesias, after the resignation of the former Vice President of the Government in March 2021, the leadership of the space passes to Yolanda Díaz, who throughout this time has been building its own platform, Sumar, with which to compete in the elections on July 23, encompassing the different formations to the left of the PSOE, including Izquierda Unida.
Garzón, from the beginning, aligned himself with Sumar, and headed the IU delegation in Magariños. And from that position he lives the negotiations between Díaz and his team with Podemos for the fit of the party now led by Ione Belarra in the Sumar ecosystem. There are barely a handful of days left for the completion of some negotiations –whether with an agreement or without an agreement–, on which the repetition, or not, of the coalition government may depend.
“I don’t know how many people will remember the work, time and energy that I have dedicated during these twelve years. I hope that people will remember it as a positive contribution. But what I am sure of is that the person who will remember the time and energy dedicated to it is my family. The first line of politics is very demanding. From now on I want to take better and better care of the people I love,” Garzón said in a statement, recalling his three children and his wife, who have lived through the absences of someone who has not stopped chaining campaigns all these years. elections in these 12 years.
Alberto Garzón’s political career is full of coincidences. If his appointment as a deputy, candidate in the generals, leader of the IU and even minister have a lot of chance, so does his course of institutional politics: it occurs precipitously due to the electoral advance that nobody foresaw and that is not in his hand. And, in fact, his departure from the ministry will depend on when the Government is formed, something that is not in the hands of anyone either. And that if there is no electoral repetition.
