Sumar closed the political journey in an ocean of uncertainty after the resignation of Yolanda Díaz as general coordinator. While the coalition dispels the organic doubts raised by the announcement of the second vice president, activity returns to Congress and forces the parties to make decisions. One of the issues that will be on the agenda in the coming months is the negotiation with the PSOE and the rest of the groups for the general budgets of next year and that is why the left alliance has opened the channels of communication to prepare a document and focus the priorities of these conversations.
The Sumar parties held a meeting before the holidays, which was attended by the organizing secretaries of the Sumar Movement, Comuns, Izquierda Unida, Más Madrid and Verdes Equo. The meeting served to begin a “reflection” on future budgets, according to coalition sources at the time.
This meeting served to begin the preparation of a joint document with the main proposals for this future negotiation, in which they will request, among other measures, the construction of 500,000 affordable rental homes and the remuneration of the first four weeks of parental leave. This text has already passed through the coalition ministries, received the first approval of the parties at this meeting and was opened to contributions from the parties, according to coalition sources.
The idea that Sumar’s parties have reached is to meet again in the coming weeks to finish drafting the document, which will serve as a starting point for budget negotiations with the PSOE within the government, after Moncloa confirmed this week that it intends to continue processing the public accounts.
Yolanda Díaz’s coalition had already regretted in April the decision of the Ministry of Finance to extend this year’s budgets – at the time the PSOE claimed that the early elections in Catalonia would make negotiations impossible – and that is why, in recent weeks, they have been putting pressure on their public and private partners to continue processing next year’s budget.
The government has decided to do so even though it is in no way assured of the support of its partners, mainly Junts and ERC, entangled in their internal processes and in a struggle to know who will maintain hegemony in the independence space.
In an interview with EFE, the Minister of Culture and spokesman for Sumar, Ernest Urtasun, said on Friday that he would try to attract these two groups to support the budgets with greater economic support for co-official languages. If the PSOE obtained the “yes” of the independentists to appoint Francina Armengol as president of the Congress thanks to the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the Lower House, Urtasun now wants to use a similar strategy to equalize the new accounts.
“I am convinced that I will find sympathy from parties like ERC and Junts in this matter,” he said in the interview, in which he spoke specifically about the increase in funding for languages in the department he heads in the Government. “Our obligation is to understand each other,” insisted Urtasun, who, if he wants to play the role of mediator with the separatists, must hurry. The Government has until September 30 to present the 2025 public accounts project to Congress.
A new decision-making model
The dialogue within Sumar for this first negotiation with the socialists works as a test of the new organization with which the coalition wants to operate in the post-Yolanda Díaz phase, after a few months in which, under the leadership of the minister, the parties regretted an excess of verticality in decision-making.
After his resignation, the parties that make up the coalition agreed to open a new period in which the formations would have a leading role, with more horizontal modes, but the model to follow for the future remains unclear. At that time, Izquierda Unida proposed holding a party table to organize priorities and provisionally guide the political strategy.
After several twists and turns, a meeting that was initially supposed to be attended by the leaders of the organizations became this meeting of the secretaries of the organizations that took place in early July. A meeting that risks being repeated in the coming weeks without the parties having agreed on a stable model of decision-making in the new stage.
The idea shared by all the formations is that the coalition builds a stable decision-making mechanism to prevent, as happened in Unidas Podemos, the hegemonic formation with its positions from ending up dragging the rest of the organizations.
At the same time, the Movimiento Sumar, Yolanda Díaz’s party, has been waiting since the beginning of the year to resolve the interim situation that the minister left with her resignation after the European elections.
The party is now led by a transitional leadership, composed of Lara Hernández, Elizabeth Duval, Txema Guijarro and Rosa Martínez, at least until the assembly scheduled for the fall. Sources from the party confirm that this congress will take place, and it is expected that the new leadership will emerge for the next stage.
