Sumar and Podemos have reached an agreement to appear as a coalition in the Galicia elections on February 18 just three weeks after breaking up in Congress, where the purple ones unilaterally slammed the door on the general alliance to go to the Mixed Group .
Now the two political forces make a virtue of necessity and have reached a new pact that, in the absence of formal ratification by each of the parties, will once again unite their destinies in elections. In this case, the Galician ones. This alliance will count as a third major political actor with Esquerda Unida (EU), the Galician brand of IU, the federation to which the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, belonged until 2019. These three parties will be joined by other smaller ones such as Equo or Green Alliance.
This conjunction of forces has no other objective than to re-enter the Parliament of Galicia, where the space of the alternative left to the PSOE disappeared after the 2020 elections after a resounding result that left them without any seats. To achieve that return, Díaz launches Marta Lois as a Galician candidate, a person she absolutely trusts and whom she appointed in August as spokesperson for the Sumar Parliamentary Group in Congress. With hardly any time to settle down, he returned politically to Galicia, where he already served as a councilor in Santiago.
Lois’s election was known yesterday, on the eve of the presentation of Sumar Galicia’s candidacy, which took Yolanda Díaz to Santiago this Wednesday, where the promoter of her party announced the “pre-agreements” with Podemos and the US and where has exhibited the candidate for the Xunta. The promoter of Sumar Galicia has supported her election unanimously.
Reaching the agreement with Podemos has not been an easy task. The talks were interrupted for several days when in the middle of the negotiations the news broke that Podemos was abandoning Sumar and going to the Mixed Group. In fact, for weeks it seemed that the alliance was not going to happen, according to sources familiar with those conversations. However, the mutual needs of not dividing the left’s vote in the face of the challenge of entering Parliament and of favoring a change of color in Galicia have ended up prevailing over distrust and open wounds. And the thing is, not only did the rupture in Congress hurt, which Sumar has described as “transfuguism”, he was also unnerved by the belligerent attitude that the Podemos leadership had later taken with continuous attacks in which Díaz was accused of being a servile left sold to the interests of the PSOE.
Despite all this, Sumar and Podemos open a parenthesis in their confrontation “to participate together and with strength” in the Galician elections. This unitary space has all the means to be repeated also in the elections of the Basque Country, which have not yet been called but which in the fuchsia space are predicted for April. There the talks are going at a good pace and until a week ago the parties were more optimistic about closing an agreement than they were about Galicia.
During the presentation of the candidacy, Díaz has claimed Sumar as “key” to forming a left-wing majority with the socialists and the BNG and thus being able to dislodge the PP from the Xunta. Thus, he has begun to mobilize the progressive electorate with the message that if Galicians vote “like July 23” there will be “change in Galicia.”
Sumar is presented as “determining” to reach that left-wing majority and as a boost for the “progressive” bloc. The candidate, Marta Lois, has taken on the challenge of leading the unity list with “responsibility, humility and enthusiasm.”