Yolanda Díaz wants you to be happy

Rosalía has started her Motomami tour with all the power expected of her. The left had been waiting for months for the start of Yolanda Díaz’s tour (Galega Motomami?) And she was getting desperate because she didn’t know where to buy tickets. What was she waiting for? Was she still forming the band? Did you have doubts about the repertoire? Would there be as much fusion in the songs as she had promised?

Friday was the day at the Matadero de Madrid, a cultural center with an appropriate name to start a popular movement, because politics is a meat grinder. To deny that idea, Yolanda Díaz spoke of tenderness, joy and hope. She is like that. Many smiles. Lots of positive encouragement. This is not the time to settle and wait to see what new idea the left-wing parties come up with. To the 5,000 people gathered, she told them that they should take the initiative.

“They tell me these days that I’m slow,” said the vice president to respond to those who were beginning to get nervous. Pandemic, a war in Europe, runaway inflation. Events are happening at great speed and it seems that everyone is late for everything. There is more than a year left for the elections in Spain, but there are times when the calendar accelerates to rates that are difficult to assimilate. Díaz is convinced that there is time to create something new, which, on the other hand, is a very common situation on the left.

He spoke of taxes, feminism, precariousness. Above all, she spoke of feelings, of those that should motivate people to build something new. We have to “love each other,” she said. “You cannot build from no love”. “In public affairs, nothing can be done without tenderness.” Many politicians will think that she spoke in Sanskrit.

Perhaps it sounded at times too naive or sentimental. However, no one ignores that politics is full of feelings, and most of them are quite negative or depressing. You just have to listen to a debate in Congress. Díaz is committed to leaving the bad vibes aside or the persistent pessimism that overwhelms the left to nothing that things are going wrong given.

So nothing to say that we live in the world that advanced the series ‘Years & Years’, as is already the tradition on Twitter. Much less begin to remember scenes from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, even more so after the news about abortion in the United States. Nothing to settle for not everything going to hell because it’s not the thing to feel good vibes.

“We don’t want dystopias. We want to be happy,” said Yolanda Díaz.

Many of his messages sounded somewhat like the first Podemos campaigns. Nor can the wheel be reinvented after a few years. To differentiate herself from what she sees as the past, and it is a past that led her to become Labor Minister in a coalition government, Díaz refuted the idea that a new coalition of parties is necessary.

It seems that you consider all this a failed bet or one that worked but will not work anymore. Although in the end it will be necessary to present a list in 50 provinces in the general elections. He did not mention Podemos or the United Left. He spoke that Sumar “is not about parties, it’s not about acronyms. It’s about collective intelligence.”

The paradox is obvious. The “listening” process announced long ago by Díaz began with a public act in which there were many people interested in listening to her. Now the labor lawyer says that a national process must begin in which people like those who took the stage to accompany her intervene: an environmental activist, a lawyer who defends immigrants, a psychiatrist, a union representative at Amazon or a university professor.

They will have the floor, he said. “In this citizen movement that starts today, the leading role is yours.”

Not many politicians attended the event. The general secretary of the PCE, Enrique Santiago, MEPs Ernest Urtasun and María Eugenia Rodriguez Palop and deputies from United We Can were present. The new platform gathered support from the world of culture, such as the actor Antonio de la Torre, the writer Bernardo Atxaga or the musician James Rhodes. The day will come when the political parties that support Sumar will have things to say about the program, the campaign and the electoral lists. That time has not yet come, but it will come. The more powerful the mobilization that Sumar provokes, the more room for action Diaz will have.

He doesn’t really want to do things as usual in games. To begin with, he showed full understanding of what he is told by people who complain that politics is useless. “I know that politics has left you behind.”

Until we see how Sumar grows and how far, we will have to wait. Yolanda Díaz’s tour will have fewer acts than her followers and her journalists expect. The idea of ​​promoting a citizen debate process to put together a new alternative is real. She will have to show that the idea of ​​leaving the leading role to the people is serious, although it will be her presence that will surely provide fuel, preferably non-fossil fuel, for the initiative.

The Yolanda World Tour is here. Her outcome is uncertain, like almost everything now, but for now Yolanda Díaz wants you to be happy. It is better to start like this than with long faces.