Podemos enters a phase of identity reaffirmation. The party celebrated its Spring Festival yesterday to accelerate the race for the May elections and it did so without forgetting Yolanda Díaz and the process of reconfiguration of the alternative left to the PSOE that, for the first time since 2014, threatens the hegemony of the purple party in that space. In the midst of a dispute with the leader of Sumar, who was refused support in the announcement of her candidacy for the general elections, the messages to the second vice president by the main figures of Podemos, including Pablo Iglesias, combined the “hand tended” to reach a pact of “unity” with the harshness of the veiled criticisms and the undisguised reproaches before their “insults, neglect and contempt”.

The party held this year in Zaragoza, and which emulates the historic purple version organized by the Communist Party, was, for the date, the launch of a long sprint until May 28. But above all, it wanted to be the beginning of an identity withdrawal and a claim by Podemos in order to achieve its survival to the electoral cycle. Hence, the bottom of the messages were a harangue to the militants and voters to raise the resistance of the formation.

The leaders demanded that theirs tighten the ranks and conspire with them to be united and prepared for the events that are approaching. From challenging the forecast that Podemos “sinks” and is “dead” to enduring the pressures of those who ask it to step aside to make way for other forces and leaders. The first is settled in the regional and municipal elections of 28-M and, the second, the June negotiations with Sumar and the rest of the space allies, where the purple party demands a leading role and fair treatment to agree with Díaz .

As if it were an omen about these challenges, Podemos had to face yesterday the tossing of a hostile climate in the Zaragoza Water Park and some devilish gusts of wind that between the air and the dust led to the interruption of the central meeting and move it to a tent. In the end, leaders and supporters took refuge in a shelter, a metaphor for the political moment that Podemos is going through.

Pablo Iglesias did not intervene in the rally but he played a relevant role in sending the toughest messages to Díaz. The former secretary general advocated “continuing to lend a hand” to Sumar “despite the insults, the neglect and the contempt” to achieve “unity.”

The former general secretary of Podemos acknowledged that there are many “very hurt” and “very offended” militants with what his party is experiencing with Díaz, although he avoided citing her, but claimed “high vision.” «This political formation has to continue defending one of its most important elements of identity: unity. It’s not always simple or easy,” he said. “When they insult you, they belittle you, when all the media cannons of power build an offensive story, I understand the feeling of many colleagues demanding respect,” Iglesias deepened.

However, he pointed out that “unity” is “much more important than the dignity of all this militancy” because it is a priority to achieve that objective to try to stop “a process of democratic involution” marked by the war in Ukraine and the influence of the NATO.

For her part, Irene Montero sent a forceful message to Díaz to respond to the words she uttered at her debut in Magariños when she proclaimed herself “free” from “tutelages.” «Women belong to nobody. And I, a woman, am not anyone’s either,” said the leader of Sumar, who criticized the concept “woman ‘of’.”

Yesterday Montero took her at her word and replied: «I am a woman ‘of’. I am a woman of Ione Belarra and of Podemos and I am proud to belong and to never be alone. And she finished off, to the euphoria of some 2,000 people: «Of course we are women ‘of’. We are women of our parties, of collective projects because nothing can be achieved alone, and if we can shout ‘yes we can’ it is because we always do it together».

With those words he insinuated the idea that Díaz has undertaken a personal process. It is not the first time that this has slipped. Montero claimed, in contrast, the parties as “collective projects” and tools that rise up “against injustices” or that the “powerful” fear. Words that actually try to combat the story that Sumar is a “citizen movement” and that political organizations have to accompany it, but in the background, as the second vice president defends.

Montero – who closed the rally as is customary for party leaders, although formally it is not – proclaimed the vitality of Podemos: “To all our adversaries, let them know very clearly: they have before them the most alive dead they have ever seen in their life”.

In this phase of closing ranks and identity withdrawal, Podemos remarked yesterday in the different interventions that it is a party that provides a different way of doing politics. Fightier, tougher, but that achieves social advances. What Díaz and the PSOE call “noise”, Podemos presents as “courage”.

Montero delved into it when he recognized that Sumar and Podemos are “very different.” And he defended that in the face of the styles of doing politics, his training can boast of “being the engine of transformations.” Thus, he praised his party as the force that in difficult moments “puts its body and face” and is willing to assume the “political cost.” This is an idea that Podemos has been emphasizing to contrast this attitude with that of those who “put themselves in profile.” Alluding to Diaz. Phrase that, by the way, he went out again yesterday. Hence, Montero ended up proclaiming that in this electoral cycle “more important than that the right does not win is that what is left is capable of continuing to make transformations and that its pulse does not tremble” to demand rights and demonstrate courage. Understand the “what remains” as the result of the future candidacy of the generals.

To prop up this identity phase, they insisted on victimization and presenting the situation as a matter of survival. “Ending Podemos continues to be the main objective of this electoral cycle,” said Montero. It was also expressed in similar terms before by Ione Belarra and Iglesias. That we are in “the umpteenth attempt to kill Podemos and make it not exist.”

In the midst of the gale of wind and dust on the central stage, Belarra warned that Podemos will not accept being “an ornament of the PSOE.” “Here we are no matter how much it bothers those who want the left to go back to being the way it was before, relegated to a corner of the board,” he said. “We are not that and we are not going to be.” Another message to Díaz for his claim to remove space from the “corner” of the board and for indirectly placing Podemos at a pole of radicalism in the face of the ambition of social transversality that Sumar yearns to occupy.

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