“It is the biggest political mistake we have made.” This is how MEP and former Minister of Equality Irene Montero defined Yolanda Díaz in the presentation of the book she has just written, Something We Will Have Done (Navona), edited by her press chief, Lidia Rubio. It is a phrase that is in fact included in the book but that he repeated this Monday in front of a hundred people in Madrid. “We made that decision thinking that it would serve to expand the electoral space and have more power to transform. […] To the extent that space has not been expanded and we have lost power, it is the biggest political mistake we have made,” he said.
The book covers his personal history over more than 300 pages, which is at the same time, logically, part of the political history of the last ten years in Spain. The text begins with his beginnings in activism, in politics and then in Podemos and dedicates practically half of its pages to talking about his time in the Government, in the Ministry of Equality.
But Montero wanted to send a message to the future. “This is a book for hope. There is a point of doing justice and for people to feel reparation for the violence that we have suffered,” Montero described at the beginning of the presentation, in La Casa Encendida in Madrid, together with the writer and journalist Joana Bonet. The event was the first of a carousel with which it will roll through different cities in Spain.
During the presentation, Bonet and Montero reviewed some of the main strengths of the book. Many of the anecdotes that the former minister tells in the book are focused on those four years and try to illustrate, always according to her story, the difficulties and obstacles that the PSOE put in place to advance a large part of the Equality legislative agenda in particular and of Podemos within the Government in general. Perhaps for this reason, the episode chosen to open the book reviews Pedro Sánchez’s interview in the 23J electoral campaign in which he talks about his friends in their 40s and 50s who feel “uncomfortable” with certain feminist discourses.
“With his words, the President of the Government rejected and punished the institutional feminism that we had carried out for almost four years from the Ministry of Equality in the first coalition Government of democracy and with this he also challenged our presence, mine and the of Podemos, in the Government,” Montero summarizes in the first chapter of the book.
A few pages later, he recounts a scene that until now had not come to light. Follow this same line of argument. It occurs during the negotiation of the reform of the ‘only yes means yes’ law, which the PSOE had decided to move forward against the opinion of Podemos after the crisis unleashed by the reductions in sentences that judges were applying to many convicted of crimes of sexual assault. The text proposed by the socialists proposed returning to the penalty scheme prior to the law.
“María Jesús Montero asked me to sign, together with the PSOE, the surrender to the sexist and reactionary judicial offensive, and to wash the face of her pact with the PP to move it forward, and she wanted to end the conversation by telling me: «Sign the reform, minister. Your political career doesn’t have to end here,” says the MEP.
Irene Montero goes on for several pages to defend that law and the management that her ministry made against a strategy of the socialists that, she explains, not only sought to give in to the reactionary sectors of the political and judicial sector. Also, at the same time, attack his party.
And Montero says that he had the complicity of Yolanda Díaz in that strategy. “Yolanda Díaz asked for my resignation in several meetings that she called specifically for this, because the space had no longer met for many months. In one of those meetings, he asked Isa Serra, shouting on several occasions, when Irene Montero was going to resign. A few days later they told me that Yolanda could see that I fired a colleague, and several news items appeared in the press insinuating that I could fire Pam or Vicky as those responsible for the crisis. Both came to my office to make their responsibilities available. I still cry with rage when I remember it,” he says in part of the book.
This Monday, after the publication of the first excerpts and reviews in the media that report this scene, Serra has corroborated what happened while Movimiento Sumar has denied it. “We are not going to value subjective opinions,” said the party’s Communication Secretary, Elizabeth Duval, when asked about this matter. Privately, party sources have denied that Díaz asked for Montero’s resignation at any meeting. They also reject that Yolanda Díaz asked the former Minister of Equality, during the processing of the trans law, to stop pushing for this negotiation.
“Yolanda was acting to force my resignation or that of a relevant person on my team, instead of facing the reactionary judicial offensive together. The decision to promote the reform proposed by Justice and let Equality fall was Sánchez’s, but the one who multiplied the aggressiveness of the blows towards us was Yolanda and who together with her decided that we had to side with the PSOE and take advantage of it to try to hurt death to Podemos,” writes Montero.
He also dedicates a few lines later to criticize the general secretary of the PCE, Enrique Santiago, who was for a time Secretary of State for Agenda 2030 in the Ministry of Social Rights, during the Pablo Iglesias era. “On the night of February 1, I had a tense telephone conversation with Enrique with the aim of explaining our position so that the political space understood the importance of defending consent. In that conversation, Enrique gives me a series of arguments through which I detect that he is negotiating on his behalf or on Yolanda’s behalf with the PSOE, outside of Equality,” he explains. When the conversation ended, Montero says, he received some WhatsApp messages from Enrique Santiago “that he had sent by mistake to the wrong Montero.” In those messages the leader of Izquierda Unida summarized the conversation he had just had with the Podemos minister. “It’s the last time I spoke with Enrique,” he says.
Montero refers in several parts of the book to the “political, media and judicial” persecution against her, Iglesias and the party. “What they have done to us is because we have done things,” he maintained in the presentation, referring to the title of the book. “They are aware that when we have even the slightest power to make things change, we are going to do it and no one has demonstrated that,” he said. “We must have done something is what they have told women so many times to use violence against us,” he summarized.
Alliances without subordinations
Montero glosses over some key political events of the last decade. He only dedicates a few lines to the departure of Pablo Iglesias and does not go into much detail about what happened in the negotiation of Sumar’s lists for the general elections, beyond saying that it was vetoed. But there is self-criticism for the decision to name Yolanda Díaz leader of Unidas Podemos when Iglesias left politics.
“Yolanda had a good image as a minister and we believed that she could be a good candidate to expand the electoral space while taking care of Unidas Podemos, reorganizing the internal power balances —we were not naive, and we were willing to accept it—, but respecting what was built because it constituted the greatest experience of institutional power of the left in Spain since the Second Republic, almost a hundred years before. If things had been the way we thought, I think they would have turned out reasonably well. But it wasn’t like that,” he explains.
In that key, he talks about the alliances that Podemos must build towards the future. And it sets some conditions to avoid repeating mistakes like that. “We believe that our country continues to need urgent transformations and we want to contribute to making them possible. We are committed to growing a political force of government and power, because only with power can things be transformed,” he says.
“In these years we have learned that to transform we need power and, above all, not give up our political autonomy. We know that we will not do things alone, that we must build and take care of alliances between progressive, democratic, feminist and plurinational forces. We have also learned this in these years. But we want to coordinate, work together, not subordinate ourselves,” she says.
“I consider that the PSOE could try with the space of change to establish a relationship of joint work and not subordination, and also take charge of the result of the political operations that it has favored in recent years to replace Podemos, because they essentially share the same type of political project. Taking this path could allow us to carry out an agenda of democratic deepening that is urgent in Spain,” he adds in one of the last paragraphs of the book.
“Now our task is to put the left on its feet,” Montero closed in the presentation. “To grow the forces of peace, feminism and anti-racism and go further. Put hope at the center of our political action, life at the center of politics and change everything that has to be changed,” he said.
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