“This is the biggest political mistake we have made.” This is how MEP and former Minister of Equality Irene Montero defined Yolanda Díaz in the presentation of the book she has just written, Something We Will Have Done (Navona), edited by her press manager, Lidia Rubio. It’s a phrase that actually appears in the book but which he repeated this Monday in front of around a hundred people in Madrid. “We made this decision thinking that it would serve to expand the electoral space and have more transformative power. […] To the extent that space was not expanded and we lost power, this is the biggest political mistake we have made,” he said.
The book covers his personal history in more than 300 pages, which is at the same time, logically, part of the political history of the last ten years in Spain. The text begins with his beginnings in activism, in politics then at Podemos and devotes almost half of its pages to talking about his time in the Government, at the Ministry of Equality.
But Montero wanted to send a message to the future. “It’s a book of hope. It is important to do justice and for people to feel reparation for the violence we suffered,” Montero described at the beginning of the presentation, at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, with writer and journalist Joana Bonet. The event was the first of a carousel with which he will travel through different cities in Spain.
During the presentation, Bonet and Montero went over some of the book’s key highlights. Many anecdotes told by the former minister in the book focus on these four years and try to illustrate, always according to her story, the difficulties and obstacles that the PSOE put in place to advance a large part of the legislative agenda for equality in particular and Podemos in government in general. Perhaps this is why the episode chosen to open the book returns to Pedro Sánchez’s interview during the 23J electoral campaign in which he talks about his friends in their forties and fifties who feel ” uncomfortable” with certain feminist discourses.
“With his words, the President of the Government rejected and punished the institutional feminism that we had carried out for almost four years since the Ministry of Equality in the first democratic coalition Government and with this he also challenged our presence, mine and that of Podemos, in government,” summarizes Montero in the first chapter of the book.
A few pages later, he recounts a scene that until now had not been revealed. Follow this same argument. This occurs during the negotiations on the reform of the law “only yes means yes”, which the PSOE had decided to advance against the opinion of Podemos after the crisis triggered by the sentence reductions that judges applied to many convicts for crimes of sexual assault. The text proposed by the socialists proposed returning to the system of sanctions prior to the law.
“María Jesús Montero asked me to sign, with the PSOE, the capitulation to the sexist and reactionary judicial offensive, and to clear the face of her pact with the PP to move it forward, and she wanted to put an end to the conversation by telling me: “Sign the reform, Minister. Your political career does not have to end there,” says the MEP.
Irene Montero continues for several pages to defend this law and the management that her ministry has carried out against a strategy of the socialists who, she explains, were not only seeking to give in to the reactionary sectors of the political and judicial sector. Also, at the same time, attack his party.
And Montero says that he had the complicity of Yolanda Díaz in this strategy. “Yolanda Díaz requested my resignation during several meetings that she called specifically for this purpose, because the space had not met for several months. During one of these meetings, he asked Isa Serra, shouting several times, when Irene Montero was going to resign. A few days later, they told me that Yolanda had seen that I had fired a colleague, and several reports appeared in the press insinuating that I could fire Pam or Vicky as those responsible for the crisis. Both came to my office to tell me about their responsibilities. I still cry with rage when I remember it,” he says in part of the book.
This Monday, after the publication of the first extracts and reviews in the media reporting this scene, Serra corroborated what happened while Movimiento Sumar denied it. “We are not going to value subjective opinions,” said the party’s communications secretary, Elizabeth Duval, when asked about this. Privately, party sources denied that Díaz requested Montero’s resignation during any meeting. They also reject the fact that Yolanda Díaz asked the former Minister of Equality, during the development of the trans law, to stop pushing for this negotiation.
“Yolanda was acting to force my resignation or that of an affected person on my team, instead of confronting the reactionary legal offensive together. The decision to promote the reform proposed by Justice and to abandon equality was that of Sánchez, but the one who increased the aggressiveness of the blows against us was Yolanda and who, with her, decided that we had to side with the PSOE and take advantage of it to try to wound Podemos to death,” Montero writes.
He also devotes a few lines later to criticizing the general secretary of the PCE, Enrique Santiago, who was once Secretary of State for the 2030 Agenda at the Ministry of Social Rights, under the Pablo Iglesias era. “On the night of February 1, I had a tense telephone conversation with Enrique with the aim of explaining our position so that the political space understands the importance of defending consent. In this conversation, Enrique gives me a series of arguments through which I detect that he is negotiating in his name or in the name of Yolanda with the PSOE, apart from Equality”, he explains. At the end of the conversation, Montero said, he received WhatsApp messages from Enrique Santiago “that he had sent by mistake to the wrong Montero.” In these messages, the Izquierda Unida leader summarized the conversation he had just had with him. the Podemos minister “This is the last time I speak with Enrique,” he said.
Montero refers in several parts of the book to the “political, media and judicial” persecution against her, against Iglesias and against the party. “What they did to us is because we did things,” he argued in the presentation, referring to the title of the book. “They are aware that when we have the slightest power to make change, we will do it and no one has demonstrated that,” he said. “We had to do something, that’s what they told women so many times to make them use violence against us,” he summarized.
Alliances without subordinations
Montero glosses over some key political events of the last decade. He devotes only a few lines to the departure of Pablo Iglesias and does not give many details about what happened during the negotiation of Sumar’s lists for the general elections, contenting himself with saying that there was a veto . But the decision to appoint Yolanda Díaz as head of Unidas Podemos when Iglesias left politics sparks self-criticism.
“Yolanda had a good image as a minister and we thought she could be a good candidate to expand the electoral space while taking care of Unidas Podemos, reorganizing the internal balance of power – we were not naive and we were ready to accept it – but respecting what was built because it constituted the greatest experience of left institutional power in Spain since the Second Republic, almost a hundred years ago. If things had been the way we thought, I think everything would have gone pretty well. But it wasn’t like that,” he explains.
With this in mind, he talks about the alliances that Podemos must build for the future. And this poses certain conditions to avoid repeating such mistakes. “We believe that our country still needs urgent transformations and we want to help make them possible. We are determined to develop a political force of government and power, because only with power can things be transformed,” he said.
“During these years we have learned that to transform ourselves we need power and, above all, not to give up our political autonomy. We know that we will not do things alone, that we must build and nurture alliances between progressive, democratic, feminist and plurinational forces. We also learned this during these years. But we want to coordinate, work together, and not subordinate each other,” she says.
“I consider that the PSOE could try, in the space of change, to establish a joint working relationship and not one of subordination, and also take charge of the result of the political operations that it has favored in recent years to replace Podemos , because they essentially share the same type of political project. Taking this path could allow us to carry out an urgent program of democratic deepening in Spain,” he adds in one of the last paragraphs of the book.
“Now our task is to put the left back on its feet,” Montero concluded during his presentation. “Develop the forces of peace, feminism and anti-racism and go further. Put hope at the center of our political action, life at the center of politics and change everything that needs to be changed,” he said.
