This Monday, Sofía Castañón formalized her resignation as regional coordinator of Podemos Asturias after almost a year in which she had stopped performing that task due to medical leave. The final march, which she had been speculating about for a long time, once again lights up the most explosive powder keg that the purple party has, since Asturias is the scene of a fierce battle between the ruling party and critics. Now the fight returns.
There, unlike other parts of the country, the critical sector has great strength. Not in vain, they led the party in this community for six years (from 2015 to 2021) and, once they lost that control, they consummated their reconquest of power a year later, taking the top positions in the candidacy in the primaries for the elections. regional elections held last May.
The resignation of Castañón and the appointment of a manager to pilot the transition has already caused critics to begin to press for an extraordinary congress to be convened “as soon as possible” and to get out of this interim situation that, in reality, has been going on. since Rafael Palacios assumed control of the party as interim coordinator, provisionally replacing Castañón.
Critics demand that assembly to elect a new leadership but for now there is no date on the horizon. The fear they have is that this situation will continue over time.
The chaos that the party is experiencing in Asturias is such that the only purple deputy in the General Meeting is Cove Tomé, the main representative of the critical sector. For months she led an internal revolt against Palacios and against the national leadership for their maneuvers to silence her once she won the primaries. With confinement included for a week at the party headquarters in Gijón.
In a statement collected by Efe, Tomé emphasizes that the request of the “majority” of the militancy is “the democratic and participatory celebration” of the Citizen Assembly to settle the fact that Podemos Asturias has been adrift for “too much time without any direction at the front.” “.
Likewise, he denounces that “Castañón and his team have limited themselves to the indiscriminate sanctioning and/or expulsion” of teammates. It refers to what has been one of the consequences of this internal war between the ruling party and critics: the expulsion of former leaders such as Daniel Ripa, who was general secretary of Podemos in Asturias and who endured as the last non-affiliated baron in Pablo’s era. Churches. Until Castañón won a primary by a handful of votes. Not only Ripa was expelled, other members of the critical sector were also sanctioned, including one of the candidates, who finally fell from the May electoral lists in the middle of a tough dialectical battle.
Palacios is one of the main figures that make up the manager appointed this Monday by the national management, which includes people from his orbit and also those most trusted by Ione Belarra, such as Álex Zapico.
Castañón not only leaves control of Podemos Asturias. She also ceases to be a member of the National Executive, of the State Citizen Council and as Secretary of Culture. She closes a political stage that also took her to Congress between 2016 and 2023, where she was also one of the voices in the area of ??feminism.
In his farewell letter, he veiledly attacks critics. “I regret that the insidious noise has prevented me from advancing as coordinator in the country project that Asturies needs,” she says. For the rest, she dedicates good words to Palacios, Pablo Iglesias or Ione Belarra.
He also does so with Olaya Suárez, until now Secretary of Organization, and who appears in the pools as a possible official alternative to leading the party after the controversies led by Palacios, such as the annulment of the primaries in Langreo. Suárez, who is not included in the manager, maintains excellent relations with Irene Montero, who during the campaign went to support her as a candidate in Gijón on a visit in which the number two of Podemos avoided doing the same with the regional candidate despite the fact that They were all in the same city.
It is an example of the staging of the cold war that the Podemos leadership maintained for months with Tomé and the critics. The now deputy was never invited to the big events organized by the party (Autumn Uni, Spring Festival…), where the rest of the regional candidates had a prominent role. She didn’t promote it from social networks either.