Sumar parties activate dialogue for the negotiation of the Budgets

Sumar closed the political year in a sea of ​​uncertainty after the resignation of Yolanda Díaz as general coordinator. While the coalition resolves the organic doubts raised by the announcement of the second vice president, activity returns to Congress and forces the parties to make decisions. One of the issues that will focus on the agenda in the coming months is the negotiation with the PSOE and the rest of the groups for the General Budgets for next year and for this reason the left-wing alliance has opened the channels of communication to prepare a document and focus on the priorities for these conversations.

The Sumar parties held a meeting before the holidays, in which the secretaries of organisation of the Sumar Movement, the comuns, Izquierda Unida, Más Madrid and Verdes Equo participated. The meeting served to initiate a “reflection” on the future Budgets, according to sources from the coalition at that time.

That meeting served to initiate the drafting of a joint document with the main proposals for future negotiations, in which they will request, among other measures, the construction of 500,000 affordable rental homes and remuneration for the first four weeks of parental leave. That text has already been approved by the coalition ministries, received the first approval of the parties at that meeting and was opened to contributions from the formations, according to sources from the coalition.

The idea of ​​the Sumar parties is to meet again in the coming weeks to finalise the document, which will serve as a starting point for the negotiation of budgets with the PSOE within the Government, after Moncloa confirmed this week that it intends to continue with the processing of the public accounts.

Yolanda Díaz’s coalition had already regretted in April the decision of the Ministry of Finance to extend this year’s budget – at that time the PSOE argued that the early elections in Catalonia would make negotiations impossible – and that is why in recent weeks they had put pressure both publicly and privately on their partner to continue with the processing of next year’s budget.

The Government has decided to do so despite the fact that it is far from guaranteed the support of its partners, mainly Junts and ERC, who are caught up in their internal processes and a struggle to see who will retain hegemony in the pro-independence space.

In an interview with the agency EFEthe Minister of Culture and spokesman for Sumar, Ernest Urtasun, stated this Friday that he will try to attract these two formations to support the budgets with greater support in economic terms for the co-official languages. If the PSOE obtained the ‘yes’ of the independentists to make Francina Armengol president of Congress by promoting the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the Lower House, Urtasun now wants to use a similar strategy to tie up the new accounts.

“I am convinced that I will find the sympathy of parties such as ERC and Junts in this matter,” he said in the interview, in which he spoke specifically about increasing the funds allocated to languages ​​within the department he heads in the Government. “Our obligation is to understand each other,” insisted Urtasun, who if he wants to act as a mediator with the separatists has to hurry. The Government has until September 30 to present the project for the public accounts for 2025 to Congress.

A new model of decision-making

The dialogue within Sumar for this first negotiation with the socialists is functioning as a test of the new organisation with which the coalition wants to operate in the post-Yolanda Díaz era, after a few months in which, under the leadership of the minister, the parties lamented an excess of verticality in decision-making.

Following his resignation, the parties that form part of the coalition agreed to open a new period in which the formations would have the leading role, with more horizontal methods, but the model to follow in the future is still not clear. Izquierda Unida proposed in those days the celebration of a round table of parties to order the priorities and tentatively guide the political strategy.

After several twists and turns, a meeting that was initially planned to include the leaders of the organisations became a meeting of the organisation secretaries that was held at the beginning of July. A meeting that will likely be repeated in the coming weeks, although the parties have not yet agreed on a stable model for decision-making in the new stage.

The idea shared by all the formations is that the coalition should build a stable decision-making mechanism to avoid, as happened in Unidas Podemos, the hegemonic formation with its positions being the one that ends up dragging down the rest of the organizations.

At the same time, the Sumar Movement, Yolanda Díaz’s party, has yet to resolve the interim situation left by the minister with her resignation following the European elections at the start of the academic year.

The party is now led by a transitional leadership, made up of Lara Hernández, Elizabeth Duval, Txema Guijarro and Rosa Martínez, at least until the assembly that was planned for autumn. Sources from the party confirm that this congress will be held, and it is expected that the new leadership for the next stage will emerge from there.