The departure of Adriana Lastra from the deputy general secretary of the PSOE is on the way to having as many versions as those spread by the former chief of staff of Pedro Sánchez Iván Redondo when the president decided to remove him from Moncloa. The machinery is already running. It was put into operation first thing Monday morning by the former number two of the PSOE with a statement in which he announced his resignation for personal and health reasons that did not prevent him, however, from keeping his seat in Congress.
The resignation that, according to his story, he had communicated to the President of the Government days ago surprised locals and strangers and keeps the entire socialist leadership on the lookout for new adjustments. Sánchez, according to party sources, has suspected for days that Moncloa will take control of the coordination in terms of electoral action and party communication, two legs of the organic structure that are essential to face the municipal elections of 2023. And this idea , which would go through the immediate creation of an Electoral Committee, was already in his head since before Lastra announced his resignation, according to government sources. In Ferraz, nobody knew of his departure, except his usual clique. Nor the Secretary of Organization, Santos Cerdán. Sánchez did speak to her twice over the weekend.
“In recent months there have been important changes in my personal life that require calm and rest and that, in the last two weeks, have forced me to take a leave of absence that is going to last for some time. For all this, and given the difficulty of combining the demands of rest and care, essential in my current situation, with the intensity required by the party’s leadership, I have submitted my resignation, “he says in the statement.
The exit occurs just at the moment in which the president planned to face important changes in the party so that the Moncloa-Ferraz-Congress machinery could work without dissonance or misgivings from September 1 and with an eye on the municipal elections of 2023 , an appointment in which PSOE stakes its survival in Moncloa. The difficult cohabitation between Lastra and the Organization Secretary, Santos Cerdán, was an open secret in Spanish socialism, which had become even more evident during the Andalusian election campaign. Sánchez himself had to call to order at the first meeting of the Federal Executive after 19J. They say that after that conclave he let several leaders know that he would take a few weeks to think not only about the political strategy to follow after that debacle, but also about the necessary adjustments in the party machinery.
The tension, however, crossed the walls of Ferraz, since the former deputy general secretary, who was removed from the spokesperson for the Congress of Deputies in September 2021, was reluctant to lose control of the parliamentary group, which caused her to interfere in the work of the current spokesman, Héctor Gómez, and split the group in half with his attitude. Lastra also never accepted that Sánchez recovered Óscar López and Antonio Hernando for his Monclovita team last summer. Both represented, in his opinion, the living image of the betrayal of the “no is no” with which Sánchez recovered the general secretary of the party after a convulsive and heartbreaking Federal Committee for the party forced his resignation.
The possibility that both could be part of that Electoral Committee, together with the Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, would now have precipitated an exit, which has been covered by a personal resignation and, without expressly mentioning it, to the fact that Lastra is going through a pregnancy risky. At least that is the impression of several of the sources consulted by elDiario.es, who also do not rule out that the rest of the adjustments, which would affect the leadership of the parliamentary groups but also the Executive, were left for the start of the new course political. Parliamentary coordination, a competence that Lastra attributed to himself along with the communication of the party in the drafting of the new statutes that were approved in the 40th Federal Congress, “is not a priority at this time, since the chambers are in a non-working period until September”, add the same interlocutors.
“What is going to happen is only in the head of the president”, they add from La Moncloa, where they do not want to make any comment other than “absolute respect” for the decision of the former deputy secretary general, who “has all the right in the world to want to rearrange her life and dedicate more time to herself”. In the team of the Asturian leader they criticize that the reasons for her departure are questioned.
In other areas, however, they believe that Lastra’s decision to try to link her resignation to pregnancy “is neither credible nor does it leave Sánchez in a good place if that was really the reason.” Leave of absence from work or maternity are not invalidating the professional work of a woman and the leader of a historically feminist party “would never have accepted that this was the motivation,” add those who believe that “she has built a story on her part and has gone five minutes before the president faced a reorganization with which he would lose a large part of the power” that was attributed in his personal struggle with Santos Cerdán, “who has dedicated all this time to suffering the silence of the harassment and demolition and the leaks interested by Lastra’s team against him and against Gómez”.
They are the same sources that corroborate that months ago Sánchez was aware of Lastra’s clashes with the Organization for control of the territories and that even his ears had reached, from some federations, that all of them were hiding a personal cause with their eyes set on in the “postsanchismo”. It was this circumstance that forced the president to order Lastra not to interfere in the replacement of Susana Díaz in Andalusia, after he aired the possible candidacy of Felipe Sicilia. Precisely the role of Sicilia, Lastra’s trusted man, as spokesman for the Executive has been one of the most questioned in this last stage. Lastra – who this same Monday left the management’s whatsapp group – and his small Sanhedrin are also linked in various socialist spheres with the leaks that appeared in different media when he was already removed from any responsibility for the supposed reason that precipitated the departure of José Luis Ábalos from the government and also from the federal leadership. And that, they say, reached the ears of the president, who even questioned her about it, and marked a turning point in the relationship between the two.
Be that as it may, little or nothing remains of that PSOE that accompanied Sánchez on the balcony of Ferraz after his first electoral victory in April 2019. Carmen Calvo, José Luis Ábalos, Adriana Lastra… Will there be more? Namely. The president seeks, in addition to a strong leadership capable of communicating in the PSOE, the harmony that he has already tried with the changes of Government and of the Executive that he made in July and October 2021 respectively.
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