In the elections to the European Parliament in June 2024, Podemos will likely recover the ballot with its own logo. The party founded by Pablo Iglesias a decade ago has established the essential requirements to rejoin a coalition – elaboration of lists through a system of primaries and prohibition of personal vetoes – which in practice prevents the recurrence of a confluence such as the one he carried out with Sumar to attend the general elections last June 23.
But not only that: in a shift in the strategy to try to reinforce its “autonomy,” it has also gone on to directly clash against the platform of Yolanda Díaz, with which it shares a parliamentary group in Congress, accusing her of having orchestrated a ” operation” during the last two years to replace the purple formation with a “left servile to the regime.” “Thank you to all of you who saw clearly that we had to stop it cold,” the Secretary General, Ione Belarra, congratulated herself this Saturday during her participation in a political conference in which the foundations have been laid to attend the event alone. with the polls in Brussels next year.
The militancy has mostly supported this change of course with the vote in favor of 86.5% of the 30,883 registered who have participated in an internal consultation that culminates the “organizational strengthening process” undertaken in the month of September to recover a party ” strong” and with “the ability to set the direction of the State” to “take democratic, feminist and environmental transformations further than anyone ever before.” In the new roadmap, double militancy is also rejected, to avoid adhesion to Sumar, and it is established that “in no case” will they dissolve into another party.
“We say very clearly that Podemos has to strengthen itself as an autonomous political organization and that we are only going to participate in pre-electoral agreements when it is useful and, above all, when there is respect for Podemos, with primaries and without vetoes. Stop disrespecting Podemos” Belarra exclaimed this Saturday before the around 1,000 attendees, according to the organization, who filled the Fernando de Rojas Theater in Madrid.
The Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, also intervened at the event, excluded from the purple quota in Díaz’s candidacy with which they achieved a representation of five deputies in Congress who now aspire to set their own profile: “We are not going to leave despite of the enormous political price that they want to make us pay for pushing for the main democratic transformations of this legislature and making possible what they told us was impossible.
The fact that it will be in the next European elections in which Podemos will try to recover the political prominence lost after its dissolution into the Sumar brand also contains deep symbolism. At that same event in 2014, the purples achieved institutional representation for the first time and five seats that were the starting signal for the 71 deputies they managed to obtain in Congress in 2016, their historic ceiling.