The Andalusian left has chosen the most powerful and most popular name they had to try to awaken the dormant progressive vote, in a community of 8.5 million people that used to be identified as a bastion of the left, but has been governed by the right for seven years.
Antonio Maíllo (59 years old; Lucena; Córdoba), the federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida, will be the candidate for the presidency of the Board of the Por Andalucía coalition, in the next regional elections, scheduled for the spring of 2026. Maíllo returns to Andalusian politics with a double task on both sides of the board: to dispute the robust absolute majority of Juan Manuel Moreno’s PP, and the growing rise of Vox – which today add 72 of 109 deputies in Parliament-; and excite the left-wing electorate, which has been losing four consecutive elections – regional, municipal, general and European – and which covers a wide and heterodox landscape, from María Jesús Montero’s PSOE to Teresa Rodríguez’s party, Adelante Andalucía.
The three formations that today make up the Por Andalucía coalition – IU, Sumar Movement and Andalusian People’s Initiative – have chosen Maíllo as a consensus candidate, after a long meeting of the party table (highest decision-making body), from which Podemos, Alianza Verde and Equo have once again been absent.
The choice of Maíllo is a sudden twist in the script, but with a lot of strategy and a stretcher table behind it. Not even a month ago IU, the driving force of the coalition, chose its own candidate in primaries to head the Por Andalucía poster: the general secretary of the Communist Party of Andalusia (PCA), Ernesto Alba. Alba took the step forward because the person who was “destined” to take it – the leader of IU Andalucía and Sumar deputy, Toni Valero – chose not to take it.
Both Valero and Alba are trustworthy people and friends of Maíllo. In fact, the politician from Córdoba left the direction of IU Andalucía in the hands of Valero and, since then, the harmony between the past and the future of the left-wing coalition has worked well (compared to previous transitions).
Maíllo left the first politician in June 2019, after the regional elections that ended 37 years of socialist governments in Andalusia, and opened the door of the San Telmo Palace – headquarters of the Junta – to the right. The then Andalusian leader of IU, who had presented himself as number two in a left-wing coalition headed by Teresa Rodríguez (the original Adelante Andalucía), returned to teach Latin classes at his institute in Aracena (Huelva).
As passionate about literature as he is about politics, he returned to the front line in the spring of 2024, when he ran by surprise in the primaries to succeed Alberto Garzón as federal coordinator of IU. Maíllo faced the Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, and won. And since then he has toured the local groups of his formation throughout Spain, testing the distance between the leftist bases and their main leaders.
Very critical of the vice president of the Government and former leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, the Córdoban leader has been proclaiming the unity of the progressive forces for months, the words revolution and joy, and pulling the ears of the “hyperleadership” and “egocentrism” that still swarm in the leadership of the parties to the left of the PSOE.
Maíllo has been a member of IU Andalucía since its founding, in 1986, under the shadow of Julio Anguita, before the federal IU was created. He passed the exams for teaching at the age of 23, he has taught Latin classes in Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and in Aracena; He has been a councilor and several times a candidate for mayor, without success.
But his political career in the last 15 years has caused as many defeats as the left in Spain. He survived everything – even a cancer that left him without a stomach, but with the same voracious appetite – and went from ecstasy to illusion, from illusion to failure, from failure to melancholy, from melancholy to nostalgia and from nostalgia to a certain rebirth of illusion although, this time, with more laziness and more fang.
Between 2012 and 2015 he was part of the first coalition government in Andalusia -PSOE and IU-, from which he was expelled by Susana Díaz; In the early elections of 2015, faced with the push of the first Podemos, he felt the vertigo of seeing how his party lost the parliamentary group and was left out in the mixed group, but he saved the day with five deputies, the fair minimum. The rest was taken from him by a young anti-capitalist woman from Cádiz named Teresa Rodríguez, who would later be his ally, and later would be his rival again.
Maíllo signed with Rodríguez the first Podemos-IU electoral confluence in Spain – facing Pablo Iglesias – but he abandoned it a few minutes before it imploded, the result of the internal wars that ended with the expulsion of the Cádiz-born woman from the purple party and the birth of another unprecedented coalition government in Spain –PSOE-Vamos-IU–, led by Pedro Sánchez. In the last general elections, he enthusiastically supported Yolanda Díaz and Sumar, but then he distanced himself from her, seeing that she had not known how to put together the structure of a formation that could move beyond her leadership.
The politician from Lucena, “the teacher” as some of his colleagues call him, piloted the largest federation of IU in Spain, that of Andalusia, where there are the most members, where they have the most councilors and mayors, and where the PCE has the most headquarters. The battle in the primaries against Minister Rego seemed to give her a certain advantage. The sources consulted – from IU, Sumar and IPA – show their “enthusiasm” for having “convinced” Maíllo to return to Andalusian politics, with the difficult task of unifying the left and agitating for the progressive vote.
Source: www.eldiario.es
