The Movimiento Sumar will finish defining at the end of this fall the direction that the formation should take after the resignation of Yolanda Díaz as organic leader. He will do this with a convention convened for December 14 and 15, the second part of the assembly last March, which, more than a continuation of this meeting, will be a launch of the party for the new stage. In addition to replacing Yolanda Díaz, the group will discuss its organizational model, its alliance policy and update its political theses with the preparation of a presentation coordinated by Íñigo Errejón.
The new assembly of the Sumar Movement will be the latest in a chain of congresses of forces across the country. From the one that the PSOE will celebrate to those of ERC and Junts, including those that the rest of the left has planned, with the assembly of municipalities or the Més-Compromís conclave. Thus, a new ideological and leadership map will provide some keys to the new political cycle after the general elections of July 2023 and the carousel of regional elections this year with the close of the European elections.
That of Yolanda Díaz’s project will, however, have particular importance after what happened last year and, above all, after the European elections. The results of these elections prompted the second vice-president to submit her resignation as organic leader and forced the coalition of parties she aspired to lead to begin a process of reflection on how this articulation should henceforth occur. .
One of the first conclusions was that Sumar had not functioned at the same time as an umbrella for the rest of the political organizations and formations. This diagnosis therefore forced us to reformulate the organizational document which was approved at the March assembly and which spoke of a hybrid leadership with 70% of the positions for Movimiento Sumar and 30% for the rest of the political groups: IU, Más Madrid, the commons, Andalusian Popular Initiative and Verdes Equo.
This is why the Movimiento Sumar will prepare a new organizational presentation, which Lara Hernández will coordinate as organizational secretary and which will serve, as expected, to adapt the structure of the political formation to a model closer to that of a party and not a hybrid tool. as the Villaverde assembly had pointed out.
In this new model, the parties will not be present as initially planned, even if a debate is on the table as to whether or not the deployment of the formation should be done in dialogue with other formations, particularly with regard to its territorial articulation, which has already been one of the Gordian knots of the discussions prior to the founding assembly.
Moving away from the hypothesis of a formation which oversees the rest, the Movimiento Sumar will also have to debate whether or not it maintains a double activism, an essential condition for certain figures of the project as important as Minister Ernest Urtasun can also have a foothold in their original parties like the common parties.
“We will have to clarify what is the best form of organization but for this debate we must wait until the document is on the table and for that it is still early,” Hernández said this Monday during a press conference during from which he gave some details of the functioning of the new congress.
The leader of Movimiento Sumar, however, did not give many clues on the idea that the organization should replace Yolanda Díaz. The temporary solution adopted this summer was the creation of a temporary collegial leadership, to which Hernández joined as organizational secretary; Elizabeth Duval, responsible for Communication, and Txema Guijarro and Rosa Martínez, respectively responsible for the parliamentary group and the government coalition. One of the questions that will be debated in December is whether this model is stabilized with the same people or with other profiles, or if the party chooses a single person for general coordination.
In an interview with this newspaper, Errejón was in favor of this first option, even if the debate is not closed and will be resolved in December.
Regardless, Movimiento Sumar leaders have worked to make it clear that Díaz continues to lead the political direction of the coalition in government and Congress. “Sometimes, leadership is not measured so much by labels or positions, but by results, by the one who sets up the spaces, to circulate in them. And I think on Monday, we clearly saw a space walking together. And it was also demonstrated what the leadership of this space is,” said Sumar’s parliamentary spokesperson in the same interview.
Along with the organic task, Sumar will also take care of updating the political document approved in Villaverde. Errejón will now return to these theses, centered on the conflict with the right over the concept of freedom, to anchor them in specific elements of current politics.
“Less than six months ago we approved a document with broad ideological lines and it is a question of anchoring them in a concrete strategic intervention document. We haven’t started working on it but my feeling is that it is obvious that Sumar has regained a lot of the political initiative, we are in a position to install problems. Resuming political initiative is the way forward,” he said at a congressional press conference on Tuesday.
Alliance policy
Another question that will haunt the conversations between now and the assembly will be the relationship that the Movimiento Sumar should maintain with the rest of the parties, beyond the organic question. There is no defined position or in-depth debate on this issue, but during its last party, the PCE organized a debate on the unity of the left in which representatives of Izquierda Unida, los comuns, EH Bildu, Compromís and also Movimiento Sumar. Podemos had initially announced its participation, but declined at the last minute and Más Madrid also rejected the invitation.
As part of Movimiento Sumar, Lara Hernández was present, presenting her personal theses on the type of alliances that the left should forge to avoid a scenario of “Italianization”. Among the conditions he set, he spoke of respecting the “plurality” of starting and finishing positions, of not building these alliances on “ideological principles” but rather of directly calling into question the social majorities , and he also spoke of “democracy”. .”
“The processes of creating alliances must be open, they must be participatory and we must create the conditions for any alliance to be concluded through participation, through voting and through one person, one vote,” he said. , in reference to the primary systems that both IU and Podemos They demanded from the beginning the construction of a broad front of parties.
However, it is a first message and a personal position that the Movimiento Sumar will have to debate over the coming months, in a process that will serve to lay the foundations of the coalitions that the party wants to build for the next electoral cycle , which will begin within two years, if there is no progress, with the elections in Andalusia and Castile and León.
