Yolanda Diaz: "If you ask for clean cake unity, you depress your electorate"

In the interview, recorded on April 12 in a Japanese restaurant, Díaz talked about her relationship with Pablo Iglesias or Pedro Sánchez, how she would see herself as president of the Government, the monarchy, the Sahara or the war in Ukraine.

The absence of Podemos in Magariños

“Sumar is addressed to the entire society. Raising the minimum wage is not a matter of the left. It addresses everyone. There are people who share the country’s project ”, he said about the project that he presented on April 2 at the Magariños sports center with the notable absence of the Podemos leadership. “I can’t understand why I invited you to an event on the 2nd in which nothing was over and you couldn’t come. I am not able to understand it ”, he pointed out, after highlighting that there were people belonging to Ione Belarra’s party who were there and others who wanted to go and did not go. “There is a fundamental principle: when you want an agreement to come out, you negotiate it with discretion”, he added. “I don’t castle in any position. I even negotiate with the devil and if one doesn’t want to, two don’t agree”.

When asked about the statements that she has made on several occasions about being “free of guardianships”, in reference to the gesture that Pablo Iglesias made when appointing her without consulting her when he left his post as vice president and general secretary of Podemos, Díaz has indicated: “Pablo did not think of tutoring me”. “The problem is that I always have to belong to someone, to men, curiously not to women,” she added. She has also shared the anger that this situation produced in her: “He has qualified my anger a lot in his book. I didn’t just call him a bastard [como el exsecretario general de Podemos relató en su día], I did something much worse that I am not going to tell. It was respectless. I found out from a video.

What he has assured is that he did not imagine that Iglesias would have, outside of the party now led by Belarra, a “so sharpened” role. “I believe it and all of Spain believes it. In politics you have to let people fly. You have to let it go ”, he asserted. When Évole asked him if he was referring to Belarra, Díaz stressed: “To everyone.”

Despite the obvious distance that there is now between them, the vice president also wanted to highlight that Iglesias is a person whom she “respects” and who “made the possibility, after 80 years, of being part of a government a real one.” “I have enormous respect for Pablo and I love him very much. But we think differently. We are at a time when we do not think the same things. We are very different. We always have been. I don’t have a fight with anyone.” In that section of the interview, the Minister of Labor has recognized and criticized that “what has been done to Podemos has not been done to anyone. Also to its leaders, Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero. Not only for harassment or for invading his private life, it is that hate is intolerable in a democracy”. And immediately afterwards, she has recounted that some people around her who were imprisoned in the Franco regime have not lost their smile or their illusion. She is her explanation of why she called Iglesias a “curmudgeon” on one of the few occasions when they have greeted each other again, during an act in La Vanguardia on the occasion of the celebration of Sant Jordi, almost a year ago .

“There is no disagreement” on open primaries

One of the central points of the friction between Podemos and Sumar at the time of agreeing, has been the open primaries, although Díaz has given it to be understood that this is not the reason why Podemos was not in the Madrid pavilion of Magariños. “There will be open primaries, but there is debate about how we want to do them. In Sumar, whoever wants to run in the primaries can. It is not the same to do them in an office than to have anyone show up. There is no disagreement on this. You reach agreements when you want to reach agreements. If one does not want, two do not agree ”, he said. “Everyone fits here. We are going to negotiate everything. I know what the parties are talking about: how much money, how many lists, how many released and little program. But I am very clear that when you want to be, you are there”.

Díaz has also stressed that when Iglesias was still part of the Government, they understood each other better between him and Pedro Sánchez than with her, because both had “very masculine” ways. “The one who was surely distorting there is me. In the way of doing politics they understand each other better than I do with them”. The second vice president does not see herself represented by the masculinized politics that Sánchez or Iglesias can represent: “I feel alien to that way of doing politics.” When asked by Évole if Sánchez and Iglesias were macho, she said yes, “like everyone else.”

Your vote in Madrid

Madrid is one of the communities where, both in the May 28 elections and in those of 2019, the leftist forces have been separated. Asked about the ballot she would choose this year -in the previous elections she voted for Iglesias-, if we can or More Madrid, Díaz has answered Évole that he already knows. “As all of Spain knows it,” she said.

When the journalist tried to be clearer and asked her directly about Mónica García, Díaz pointed out: “You have to understand that I represent Sumar today, what we are going to try from Sumar is exactly that, try to add, and not reproduce these things that We see every day.”

A policy without “defeats”

In this sense, the leader of Sumar has insisted that she does not conceive of politics as “a way to defeat the one next to you.” “There are people who go to Congress just for that, and I can’t understand it,” she added later, referring to Macarena Olona, ​​from Vox.

She has also had good words for some of those who have surrounded her in politics in recent years: “Pedro Sánchez is a great politician and in the space where I come from, I think he has been underestimated without a doubt. Easy readings were made about him, but he is a politician who stands in front of a party that has 140 years of history and he has taken the lead. That is why all underestimation is a mistake”. Her relationship with the President of the Government, she has said, “is very good”, “he is very affectionate with me”.

Ukraine and the Sahara

Díaz has also had time to position himself on international and foreign policy issues. When asked by Jordi Évole about the war in Ukraine and the shipment of arms by Europe, she pointed out that “if she were president she would fulfill a fundamental objective, which is to deploy her own European security policy”. The Russian war is illegal, illegitimate and all my solidarity with Ukraine. When there is an unlawful aggression the Ukrainian people have the right to defense”, she has asserted herself.

As for Spain’s current position on the conflict between Morocco and the Sahara, Díaz has been emphatic: he would change it. “I have a very clear position and it is not that of Pedro Sánchez. You have to take Morocco seriously, of course. But Morocco is a dictatorship”.