Three signs of weakness of Yolanda Díaz before Podemos that Sánchez pays

 Three signs of weakness of Yolanda Díaz before Podemos that Sánchez pays

In the last month and a half, the course of the great battle of the left has changed, which is the one that is being fought within the walls of the space of United We Can. The president's partner is deflating

Year 2007. Pre-campaign of the general elections. The then Minister of Development, the pizpireta Magdalena Álvarez, takes the stage in Malaga and pronounces and proclaims to her countrymen: "Before I left that I doubled." At that time, she held the honorary title of being the first minister disapproved by the Cortes in democracy, due to her highly questionable management. But it is already known: what does not kill you, makes you stronger. Or so "Maleni" believed at the time, because in April 2009 José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero ended up getting her off the moving train, in a remodeling of his government in the second legislature.

Álvarez's proclamation could well be applied to Irene Montero, the pain of a government that lives a constant way of the cross, dragging the original sin of being the first coalition executive in a country without tradition or mentality of it. The week that ends leaves a certainty: the great battle of the left is, and will be more and more, the one that is fought within the walls of the space of United We Can, between Yolanda Díaz and Podemos. Or, to refine more: between Yolanda Díaz and the tandem formed by Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero.

It is unquestionable which side Pedro Sánchez is on, who has established a relationship of trust with his second vice president and Minister of Labor as he never had with Iglesias. And that he knows that he will continue to need a partner if he is able to continue at Moncloa beyond December (which is less and less clear). But it is undeniable that the power and influence of the President of the Government in the reconfiguration of the space to his left are very limited. It is in the hands of the members of United We Can.

Since the war in Ukraine began, Vice President Díaz had managed to keep Podemos in a kind of corralito, while she negotiated with the socialist wing the measures of the successive anti-crisis decrees, the General Budgets of 2023 and the increase in defense spending, according to the commitment acquired by Sánchez with NATO.

The summit with Morocco

However, in the last month and a half Díaz has shown three signs of weakness against Podemos that have changed the course of the battle. The first was to agree to the decision of the purples to boycott the High Level Meeting that the governments of Spain and Morocco held in Rabat on February 1 and 2, as the culmination of the new stage of the bilateral relationship that both countries began after for Sánchez to hand over Western Sahara.

The Minister of Labor was supposed to accompany Sánchez at that summit, because there were several agreements with Morocco on his business. She and 11 other ministers. But Díaz preferred to follow the guidelines set by the purples. With the conclave underway, Ione Belarra appeared from Madrid, taking the lead and not Yolanda Díaz: «We think that this summit comes to consolidate a shift in Spain's position on the Sahara, a shift that the PSOE carried out in an unilateral and we already said that the conditions for our participation did not exist," he said.

Adding delay

The second sample has been to postpone the presentation of its platform, Sumar, whose coming-out should have taken place in February, once the "listening process" in which it embarked months ago had concluded. Or that is, at least, what Díaz's entourage had slipped in December; Given the impatience of Podemos, that she wants to sit down once and for all to negotiate a coalition with the Galician. However, the controversy over the reform of the 'only yes is yes' law scared the Minister of Labor, which she decided to wait for. It is not known until when, but Irene Montero herself made it ugly in an interview on February 22: "We are late, we should be agreeing now," lamented the head of Equality.

The 'only yes is yes' reform

And the third sample is the discipline of voting – or submission of voting – that Sánchez's partner maintained on Tuesday with Unidas Podemos, in taking into consideration the PSOE's bill to reform Montero's star law. The socialists say that they expected more from her and from her ability to drag the purples to an agreement; but, from what she has learned, she didn't even try too hard. The fact is that the ranks of the parliamentary group remained tight around the head of Equality.

Tuesday's vote made visible another reality that works against Díaz in the internal give and take: Podemos is not only Podemos, but its strength lies in the fact that it contributes another 18 extra-governmental seats to the coalition: the 13 of ERC and the five from Bildu. And that must also be taken into account by Sánchez.

The Catalan and Basque separatists were able to vote against the admission to process of the refnorm – not even abstain – despite the hundreds of sentence reductions that the norm has caused. Also, defending Irene Montero as if the PSOE had touched one of their own.

“They have fallen in the polls. And what happens? What are the rights of women who can go through a survey? They have decided to take action on their own Government. We are not going to allow it, because it is our own shame and it is the shame of others," said ERC deputy Pilar Vallugera. On her part, Isabel Pozueta, from Bildu, endorsed the main argument of the Ministry of Equality and Podemos: that this reform "returns us to the paradigm of the previous Penal Code."

On the contrary, the relationship of the second vice president with both pro-independence formations is more than improvable, and that is a great handicap. The wounds left by the negotiation of the labor reform last year have never healed (both Esquerra and the abertzales voted against).

With the Republican spokesman, Gabriel Rufián, the relationship is directly bad. "The only thing I ask from the left is that Yolanda Díaz does not negotiate her project as she negotiated the labor reform, because then there will not be a list of leftists, there will be one hundred and fifty", it is just one of the many taunts that Rufián has launched at the Galician in the last few months. He neither forgets nor forgives.

It will be the Justice Commission of Congress, and not the Equality Commission, which will assume the parliamentary processing of the PSOE bill. One of the key names in these weeks of negotiations will be the deputy spokesman for United We Can in that commission and general secretary of the PCE, Enrique Santiago, a trusted man of Yolanda Díaz. So much so that this caused him to be purged as Secretary of State for the 2030 Agenda – the Ministry of Belarra – in the summer. We will have to see if Santiago's appearance on the scene helps to change the course of this story or if there is no agreement possible.

If there is not, the next time that Yolanda Díaz and Podemos will measure forces, probably definitively, is in the municipal and regional elections on May 28. Díaz does not appear, but she trusts that the polls will lower the smoke to the purple ones.