Yolanda Díaz defends Sumar as a government project from “centrality” and not from a “corner of the board”

“There are people who make noise but do not have a project for the country. We are going to have a project because we want to govern”, said the second vice president of the Government at the closing of the act in which the main advances of the work being carried out by the different sectoral work groups of Sumar were presented. Díaz has presented her platform as the “key to open a new progressive decade; the guarantee for a progressive decade in Spain”.

The Minister of Labor has thus culminated an act in Madrid in which experts such as the philosopher César Rendueles, the architect and urban planner Zaida Muxí, the former director of Public Health of Asturias Rafa Cofiño, the professor of labor law Antonio Baylos or the current Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats. A dozen experts who have presented the work that the sectoral groups of Sumar have been carrying out for months.

Díaz has collected his conclusions to formulate a political discourse with the main axes that, he understands, should mark a progressive project for the next decade: health, housing, labor rights, feminism. But all this, he has said, through the connection with the “social majorities”. “When you undertake a change of era, it is not done from the corner of the board but from the social majorities, from centrality. It is not going to be in the corner of the board, it is to address people who need a public university, businessmen who have to raise their project every morning, cashiers, warders, teachers, doctors, nurses. We need all of them so that they are protagonists of common life ”, he launched.

Díaz has faced this “social ambition” with the “neoliberal project”, which he has managed from “pain and suffering”, a project that in Spain, he has said, embodies the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and that is already “out of date”: “The neoliberal project, which is cultural above all things, we saw it in the management” of the past financial crisis, it is out of date, it has not served“. “It is time to add up to defeat him politically”, he has warned that if the progressive forces “do not add up”, “barbarism” will arrive.

Housing, health, labor rights

Next, the vice president has outlined the axes of her country project, as she has insisted, for the next decade and not for four more years or a mere electoral cycle. In this compendium of priorities, Díaz has highlighted universal health above all else and has promised to include oral and ophthalmological health in the welfare state. “A person who earns 1,200 euros cannot afford a dentist”, she lamented, to guarantee a future in which everyone can afford to pay for orthodontics, glasses or contact lenses.

Yolanda Díaz has also defended her management at the head of the Ministry of Labor and the labor reform that she is contributing to, she has said to reduce precariousness, but has asked to go further and has promised, if her project manages to govern, to reduce the working day of eight hours and eliminate overtime. “Spain continues to have an eight-hour working day like a century ago. The time has come to reduce the working day, but that is not enough ”, said the minister, who has insisted on another fundamental aspect for her platform in terms of work, unpaid overtime. “I am going to give you one piece of information. In our country today, a whopping six and a half million overtime hours are done per week, half of which are not paid. It’s over. Unpaid overtime in our country will not see the light of day again due to injustice ”, she promised.

Another of the challenges, this time immediate, that he has raised is the reform of the housing market. “Minimum wage, maximum rent”, he has said to call for a new housing policy, after decades of “failed” regulations. “We want to be European. Cities where housing is not the object of speculation but a fundamental right for the people of our country ”, he has advanced, to request, with an eye on the last year of the legislature, on the limit of the rental price.

Today has been the first political act of Sumar, the platform that the second vice president of the Government is preparing in order to bring together the entire space of the left of the PSOE, the first step in a frantic first quarter that will presumably conclude with the Díaz’s announcement that he will aspire to lead that space in the face of the general elections that if nothing changes will be held at the end of the year.

The Minister of Labor has planned an important stop this weekend in Catalonia. On Friday she travels to Tarragona to celebrate a first ‘listening act’ and on Saturday morning she will be in Barcelona with the mayoress of the city, Ada Colau, in an act that will serve to strengthen her alliance with the space of the commons

Díaz has concluded with a call to the “missing” people in Sumar. “Sumar cannot be added without a country project. Too many people are missing in Sumar. The important thing is not here. The important thing is out there and all those people are the ones we need to add a lot and add well. We do not need to think the same ”, he launched.