“I am ready to lead a candidacy that guarantees a progressive government.” These are the words that Íñigo Errejón spoke in September 2019 during the launch of Más País. The PSOE and Unidas Podemos have failed in their negotiations to form a coalition government and Spain is heading towards new elections. The political leader detected that there was room for a new left-wing brand that would help in the formation of a progressive government. This thesis did not work and with the arrival of Yolanda Díaz Errejón, he began a process of rapprochement that ended five years later with the integration of his party into the Movimiento Sumar, a process that the leader told him -even defends as “natural”.
In the summer of 2019, Errejón was digesting the effects of the regional and municipal elections. After his break with Podemos and the launch of Más Madrid, he obtained 20 deputies in the Assembly but failed to revalidate the town hall with Manuela Carmena at the head of the candidacy. Negotiations between Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias were not moving forward and led the country to new elections.
“Really existing progressivism finds a sticking point not in relation to our expectations, but in relation to its own. And there, the anxious wait grew with us. It is normal to look for an alternative, but, as we will see, it is also linked to an idea of rapid politics, very much inherited from the rhythm and style of previous years, which, ultimately, will be our greatest enemy with the bet of More Countries”, says Errejón in his book Again (Planet, 2021).
The launch of their political party was fraught with difficulties from the start, and the expectations that polls had placed on them after their emergence began to deflate as the campaign progressed. Of the 14 seats that some polls gave it, Errejón, in coalition with Equo and Compromís, was only able to retain two deputies. Without the possibility of forming its own group, it was relegated during the legislature to a corner of the chamber. The political leader has not established himself as the key to a progressive government either: the PSOE and Unidas Podemos reached an agreement a few hours after these 10N elections.
This failure, however, did not change the former leader’s thesis that it was possible to launch a state force to fill the electoral gap that his previous party had left in recent years. Little by little, he activated federations in different territories: Andalusia, Euskadi, Murcia and later Asturias Castile-La Mancha… Ideologically, he laid the foundations of a large green force with a state character.
Over time, Íñigo Errejón’s project, which was initially a state extension of his experience with Más Madrid, has distanced itself from the group led today by Mónica García, to the point that the two groups no longer have organic link, the deputy being entirely dedicated to his work in Sumar and the Madrid formation established in the capital and in the community.
All this at the same time that Errejón consolidated himself as a stable partner of the government, voting most of the time in favor of his initiatives and managing to introduce into the public debate, through viral interventions in Congress, important issues such as the four- hourly work or mental health.
His ambition to build a state organization, a Más Madrid present throughout the country, did not materialize. And in the middle of this process appeared Sumar, the project launched by Yolanda Díaz after succeeding Pablo Iglesias at the head of the left political space.
The desire of the Minister of Labor to build a platform that would unite the fragmented left over all these years then translated into the vocation of a political project going beyond Podemos. This idea eclipsed Más País’s aspirations to occupy this space, but it allowed Errejón to reconnect with an organization with a hegemonic vocation within the transformative left.
The private rapprochements between Díaz and Errejón, which began following negotiations on labor reform, then crystallized with a Ministry of Labor initiative on mental health, presented publicly by both.
“The first part started to understand that there was a different tone in what Yolanda was saying and what she was putting together with Sumar. Yolanda said things that we identified with and that seemed quite similar to us. When Sumar launched, we started to see that we had other acronyms, but when you evaluate things not so much by the acronyms but by the ideas, everything seemed good to us,” Errejón said in an article in this newspaper.
A “natural” convergence
These approaches developed as Díaz built his political project and were consolidated with the entry of Más País into the coalition agreement of all leftists for the 23J elections. After the elections, Errejón played a discreet role within the parliamentary group but the departure of Marta Lois opened the door for him to return to the forefront of national politics as Sumar’s spokesperson in Congress.
At the same time, the deputy was gaining weight within the political formation that Yolanda Díaz was building, responsible for the political presentation of its first assembly and already within its executive bodies. Más País was first integrated into the process as a political group but gradually put its positions and its structure at the service of the Minister of Labor’s project.
This process culminated this Saturday with the entry of the Andalusian Esperanza Gómez and the Asturian Xabel Vegas into the Coordination Group of the Sumar movement, as reported by this newspaper.
“The approach with Sumar was never so much to negotiate but rather to verify that we were talking about a political coincidence and that this political coincidence led us to a coincidence of another type,” explains Errejón in a conversation with elDiario .es. More than a year of work later, he explains, “this path deepened and ended in a natural way.”
According to Errejón, the incorporation of paints is part of this natural process. “It’s not that there are quotas, I haven’t negotiated with anyone. I have always had a very secular approach to this question: parties are vectors of ideas and their life cycle is linked to the functions they fulfill and the ideas they bring to society,” says he. “And the ideas that Más País brought to society and fought for are ideas and a legacy that Sumar collected, made his own and expanded,” he adds.
Errejón says he already experienced this synergy when he started representing the parliamentary group in Congress. “I didn’t have to change my speech even a millimeter to be Sumar’s spokesperson. I had to expand on topics such as Sumar’s legacy of work. “I pick up the things that Sumar does, and in the process we learn things,” he says.
“To people, they represent very similar things. I say this from the perspective that Más País was a ship and Sumar is an aircraft carrier. Sumar welcomes and shows generosity,” affirms the deputy, who believes that even if in the project launched a year ago by Yolanda Díaz there are people from different ideological or theoretical horizons, it represents overall the same position.
Errejón’s weight in the Movimiento Sumar continues to be important. The parliamentary spokesperson will coordinate the political presentation of the convention that the political party will face in mid-December and with which it seeks to consolidate itself as a party after the departure of Yolanda Díaz as organic leader. A presentation with which the deputy seeks to include in more concrete tools the main ideological lines that he expressed in his theses for the first assembly.
