Movimiento Sumar will finish defining at the end of this fall what direction the formation should take after the resignation of Yolanda Díaz as organic leader. It will do so with a convention called for December 14 and 15, the second part of the assembly last March, which more than a continuation of that meeting will be a launch of the party for the new stage. In addition to the replacement of Yolanda Díaz, the group will debate its organizational model, its alliance policy and update its political theses with the preparation of a presentation coordinated by Íñigo Errejón.
The new Sumar Movement assembly will be the last in a chain of congresses of forces from across the country. From the one that the PSOE will celebrate to those of ERC and Junts, passing through those that the rest of the left has planned, with the assembly of the commons or the Més-Compromís conclave. Thus, a new ideological and leadership map will shed some keys to the new political cycle after the general elections of July 2023 and the carousel of regional elections this year with the closing of the European elections.
That of Yolanda Díaz’s project will, however, have special relevance after what happened during the last year and, especially, after the European elections. The results of those elections pushed the second vice president to present her resignation as organic leader and forced the coalition of parties that she aspired to lead to enter into a process of reflection on how this articulation should occur from now on.
One of the first conclusions was that Sumar had not functioned as an umbrella for the rest of the organizations and political formations at the same time. This diagnosis therefore forced us to reformulate the organizational document that was approved in the March assembly and which spoke of a hybrid leadership with 70% of the positions for Movimiento Sumar and 30% for the rest of the political formations: IU, Más Madrid , the commons, Andalusian People’s Initiative and Verdes Equo.
That is why Movimiento Sumar will prepare a new organizational presentation, which Lara Hernández will coordinate as Secretary of Organization and which will predictably serve to adapt the structure of the political formation to a model more similar to that of a party and not to a hybrid tool as the assembly had outlined. from Villaverde.
In this new model, the parties will not be present as initially planned, although there is a debate on the table about whether the deployment of the formation has to occur in dialogue with other formations or not, especially with regard to its territorial articulation, which has already been one of the Gordian knots of the discussions prior to the founding assembly.
By moving away from the hypothesis of a formation that is the umbrella of the rest, Movimiento Sumar will also have to debate whether it maintains double militancy or not, an essential condition so that some figures of the project as relevant as Minister Ernest Urtasun can also have a foot in their parties of origin like the common ones.
“We will have to specify what is the best form of organization but for that debate we must wait for the document to be on the table and for that it is still early,” Hernández said this Monday in a press conference in which he gave some details of the operation of the new congress.
The leader of Movimiento Sumar, however, did not give too many clues about the idea that the organization has to replace Yolanda Díaz. The temporary solution that was adopted in the summer was the creation of a temporary collegiate management, to which Hernández joined as Secretary of Organization; Elizabeth Duval, as head of Communication, and Txema Guijarro and Rosa Martínez as links to the parliamentary group and the coalition in the Government, respectively. One of the questions that will be debated in December is whether this model is stabilized with the same people or with other profiles, or if the party chooses a single person for general coordination.
In an interview with this newspaper, Errejón was in favor of that first option, although the debate is not closed and will be resolved in December.
In any case, the leaders of Movimiento Sumar have made an effort to make it clear that Díaz continues to lead the political leadership of the coalition in the Government and in Congress. “Leadership is sometimes not measured so much by labels or positions, but by results, by who puts the spaces to work, to walk. And I think that on Monday a space was clearly seen walking together. And it was also demonstrated what the leadership of that space is,” said Sumar’s parliamentary spokesperson in that same interview.
Along with the organic task, Sumar will also address an update of the political document approved in Villaverde. Errejón will now return to these theses, focused on the dispute with the right over the concept of freedom, to ground them in specific elements of current politics.
“Less than six months ago we approved a document with broad ideological lines and it is about grounding them in a concrete strategic intervention document. We have not started to work on it but my feeling is that it is evident that Sumar has recovered a good part of the political initiative, we are being able to install issues. The recovery of the political initiative is the way,” he said in a press conference in Congress, this Tuesday.
Alliance policy
Another issue that will haunt the conversations between now and the assembly will be the relationship that Movimiento Sumar should have with the rest of the parties beyond the organic issue. There is no defined position or mature debate on this matter, but at its last party, the PCE held a debate on the unity of the left in which representatives of Izquierda Unida, los comuns, EH Bildu, Compromís and also Movimiento Sumar participated. . Podemos initially announced that it would attend but declined at the last minute and Más Madrid also rejected the invitation.
As part of Movimiento Sumar, Lara Hernández attended, presenting her personal theses on what type of alliances the left should forge to avoid a scenario of “Italianization.” Among the conditions he set, he spoke of respect for the “plurality” of the positions of departure and arrival, of not building these alliances on “ideological principles” but rather that they directly challenge the social majorities, and he also spoke of “democracy.”
“The processes of weaving alliances must be open, they must be participatory and we must create the conditions so that any alliance concludes in participation, in voting and in one person one vote,” he said, in a reference to the primary systems that both IU and Podemos They demanded from the beginning for the construction of any broad front of parties.
However, this is a first message and a personal position that Movimiento Sumar will have to debate in the coming months, in a process that will serve to lay the foundations for the coalitions that the party wants to build for the next electoral cycle, which will start within of two years, if there are no advances, with the elections in Andalusia and Castilla y León.
Add Comment