Yolanda Díaz returned this Monday to chair an event in Sumar after her resignation as organic leader of the political space. In an act without any reference to the name of the coalition, beyond the magenta color of her signage, the second vice president of the Government surrounded herself with the rest of the ministers of her quota and the deputies of the parliamentary group to show the unity of action in a battle with which they seek to regain the focus lost in recent months: the negotiation with the PSOE of the General State Budgets of 2025.
The coalition has been going through difficult times for months and the confirmation of these problems was the resignation of the Minister of Labor, also in charge of coordinating the space, after the results of the European elections, on June 9. While the group has since tried to define how it will organically articulate itself, this Monday all the parties that participate in Sumar in the Government or in Congress attended an event that served as a launch of the political journey and an example of cohesion.
“We are at a crucial moment. We believe that we must move forward and that means taking measures that concretely improve the lives of workers and their families,” Díaz defended at the beginning of the event, in which he gave details of the 35-page document in which the coalition has proposed a battery of measures to open the negotiation of public accounts within the government.
In Sumar, they are aware that housing is a pressing problem for the majority of citizens and that social protection measures will have little effect if the government does not find a solution to the surge in rental prices throughout the country. The socialist leader and President of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, had already planned that this month the Conference of Presidents would focus on housing autonomy and that is why the coalition is dedicating a good part of its most important measures to this issue.
One of the most striking points of this package concerns the application of the Housing Law already in force. The text that Congress approved at the end of the last legislature, after intense negotiations between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, was born with a problem that is difficult to avoid: its implementation depends on the autonomous communities and municipalities. And since May 28, the majority of regional governments have been in the hands of the PP, which refuses to use it to contain rental prices.
The government cannot force communities to implement the law, and most state regulation is limited to giving legal cover to administrations to implement price caps in areas where they have raised rates extraordinarily in recent years. But Sumar has found a way to penalize regional governments that decide not to implement this measure: withdrawing public subsidies related to housing.
Internal dialogue
Sumar took advantage of the budget negotiations to improve internal communication channels that were damaged after the European elections. The document presented on Monday benefited from the participation of all the coalition parties, who were working on the text before the summer.
The parties held a meeting before the holidays, attended by the organizing secretaries of Movimiento Sumar, 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.
But the text was also worked on with contributions from the coalition ministers: in addition to Díaz for Labor, Pablo Bustinduy for Social Rights, Mónica García for Health and Sira Rego for Youth and Children.
This work has also been extended to the parliamentary group. Formations such as Compromís, Més per Mallorca or Chunta Aragonesista have incorporated their contributions to the document. Several of the parties consulted were satisfied with the final result of a text in which the main sensitivities of the political space have been integrated. Izquierda Unida, for example, published after the event a list of its contributions to the text. This Monday, before the event, Sumar brought together the ministers and representatives of the forces that make up the parliamentary group to close the last details.
This Monday’s event erases the image of division that has hovered over the space with some problems in recent months, for example in regional financing. The initial positions publicly expressed by groups such as Izquierda Unida, Chunta or Compromís after the agreement between PSC and ERC for a concert in Catalonia have clashed with those exposed by the Sumar or Més movement itself.
These divergences have also been worked on within the parliamentary group, as was seen last week in the defense of the position on an initiative in plenary on this subject, in which Àgueda Micó, spokesperson for Compromís, intervened, a group that had warned that they would not support any agreement that did not consider the Valencian Community.
The document presented this Monday addresses the issue of regional financing through a measure that the general coordinator of IU, Antonio Maíllo, had transferred last week: the restructuring of the debt with the communities. The agreement provides for Airef to carry out a detailed study of the financing deficits of the autonomies. “Once these deficits have been calculated, the government will activate the corresponding compensation mechanisms provided for in the organic law on financing of the autonomous communities,” the proposal states.
