Sumar Movement is trying to recompose itself at two speeds. As it postpones its state assembly to transform its structures into those of a traditional party, the rollout of the organization in some territories has begun. The first will be Galicia, where a constituent assembly is planned for the weekend of November 23 and 24. And a week later, Euskadi will do it. In both territories, the formation activated its own frameworks and activism for the electoral campaigns at the beginning of the year.
The state-level party is in a transition that will take longer than expected. After the departure of Yolanda Díaz from organic leadership last June, Movimiento Sumar is temporarily led by a collegial leadership of four people. This interim period expired in December, when the assembly was originally scheduled to open the new stage.
But on November 10, the Coordination Group, the supreme body between the congresses, decided to postpone this appointment until March 29 and 30, 2025. The new assembly will thus take place almost a year after the first, the constitutive event of the organization . During these 365 days, there will be almost nothing left of the theses of the time when the documents which laid the foundations of a broad front were approved, with a leadership shared with parties which never saw the light of day.
The new assembly therefore aims to restructure these documents to give the organization a traditional party form. There will no longer be space in the address reserved for parties. The assembly will not make major changes in its operation, because the Movimiento Sumar has been operating de facto for several months with this type of organization. It’s about adjusting the documents to reality.
The decision to postpone the assembly came in the midst of crisis management following the departure of Íñigo Errejón. The former parliamentary spokesperson was at the head of the team responsible for writing the political presentation of this congress. However, leading sources later clarified that the idea of delaying the date had already been mentioned before due to the open debates around the territorial deployment planned by the party.
The question of articulation in different communities is a debate that has run through Sumar since its beginnings, since it was initially conceived as a project that incorporated its own cadres as well as the different parties of the alternative left.
Many of these parties, however, are linked only to their territories, such as Más Madrid, leader of the opposition in the regional assembly, the comuns or Compromís in the Valencian Community, which although never participated in the construction of a state political project. This level has always viewed with suspicion the deployment of any structure on its territory.
Once the hypothesis of a broad front has been rejected, the Movimiento Sumar must decide on the nature of this deployment. The question is more or less resolved in Catalonia, where the communities have functioned until now with total loyalty to Díaz’s project, but it will be more problematic in Madrid, where Mónica García’s party wants nothing to do with another left for its territory.
While the training defines what it will do in the main communities, it has activated the processes of Galicia and Euskadi. These are simpler places for several reasons: there are no non-nationalist territorial formations that could strain the state-level coalition and they have already mobilized activists and cadres for the elections that took place in February and April of this year respectively.
But there is one more detail that facilitates this development. Movimiento Sumar Galicia and Sumar Mugimendua are organizations federated to Movimiento Sumar, with their own CIF and autonomy.
Galicia will be the first territory to hold a constituent assembly: on November 23 and 24 at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The main application is led precisely by the people who have been most involved in the construction of the project over the past months. Paulo Carlos López, current spokesperson, and Verónica Martínez Barbero, who has just been appointed spokesperson for the parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies.
The first aspires to the position of secretary general, the main position of the party, and Martínez Barbero will assume the presidency. The list with which they are presented to this assembly is closed by Marta Lois, candidate in the last Galician elections and who was previously Sumar’s first spokesperson in Congress. Today, she works at the university, far from the political front.
The Euskadi assembly will take place a weekend later. Although the deadline for submitting candidacies has not yet started – it will be active between November 19 and 22 – the main face of the party is Alba García, who led the candidacy in the last elections to the Basque Parliament and who has Since then he exercises the spokesperson in the territory, although the main promoter of the party is Lander Martínez, who is part of the State Executive and is a deputy in Congress.
Both federations have proposed similar starting documents, which are based on the same political and ideological principles of Movimiento Sumar, although for Euskadi the planned organization changes compared to the Galician or state organization. In this case, the highest representative body will be that of the co-spokespersons, three people who will exercise shared leadership, similar to the system that has operated so far in the commons.
With these two congresses, the Movimiento Sumar will begin to formally have parties in two territories important for the political project, although the work begins at the very bottom. In neither territory did they achieve institutional representation in this year’s elections. In Galicia, Lois did not obtain the seat and in Euskadi, the only elected deputy was Jon Hernández, from Ezker Anitza.
The rest of the territorial deployment will begin after the State Assembly, if everything goes as planned, although the Secretariat of the Organization led by Lara Hernández has already made some decisions for the future. One of them occurred before Errejón’s departure: the integration of the cadres of Más Andalucía and Más Asturias into the Movimiento Sumar.
Andalusia is the territory that the entire left is starting to think about, because it is, with Castilla y León, the first to have planned an electoral call. Movimiento Sumar in fact recently inaugurated its first headquarters in Seville and a few days ago held a meeting with activists to begin activating the territory.
