Podemos is not going to give up its positions until tomorrow and all the parties are already counting on the fact that the management will be absent at the event at the Magariños Sports Center in Madrid, where Yolanda Díaz will announce her candidacy for the Presidency of the Government. Even so, the general secretary, Ione Belarra, has launched a last call this Saturday to the second vice president of the Government to sign a declaration in which she subscribes the commitment that the lists for the general elections will be decided in a process of open primaries .
The negotiations have been paralyzed since Monday and the positions remain at the same point. Podemos wants the declaration that the negotiating teams of both parties began to draft last weekend to include a commitment to open primaries, but in Sumar, where they guarantee that there will be a democratic process to choose the lists, they nevertheless specify that the A specific mechanism must be addressed in a negotiation with all the parties, more than fifteen, which Yolanda Díaz wants to unite on the same political platform.
Despite the absence of contacts, Belarra has launched one last call this Saturday, a last attempt to reach an agreement for that statement, but without moving an inch from his red line. “Yolanda Díaz has in her hand that tomorrow Podemos will be at the presentation of her long-awaited candidacy. It is enough that this afternoon Podemos and Sumar sign a declaration in which we commit to signing open primaries to choose the best team for the next legislature”, he said in his speech at the meeting of the State Citizen Council, the highest body of decision of the party between assemblies.
Belarra has made a plea in favor of the unity of the space of the left, even among those who, he has said, “have another way of doing politics” or represent “different interests.” That is the only way to reissue the coalition government and not only that, to turn the left into the first force. “We are not satisfied with revalidating the coalition government. We want to be the majority force, we need to govern with more force because many changes will not come until the transforming left is the one who leads ”, he launched.
The general secretary of Podemos has claimed that her party, throughout its short history, has “worked to build a broad, united and plural space, from the Communist Party to Los Verdes”, something that has only been achieved in Spain, as well as recently in France. “Today we have the opportunity to rebuild that unity. Podemos is going to work tirelessly for unity, it is the engine of the main changes and transformations in this country in the last decade ”, she defended.
But to achieve this unity, this wide space with actors who even represent “different interests”, Belarra believes that Podemos must be the essential force. “I think it is legitimate that there are some people, even within our space, who think that Podemos has to play a secondary role”, he stated in the first place, to counter that the “strength” of his party is “absolutely essential to revalidate the coalition government and continue promoting the pending transformations”. For this reason, the general secretary understands, if there is a disagreement in the space to resolve the weight that Podemos should have, the “only way” to resolve it is “with open primaries where anyone can vote, everyone, wherever they come from , to choose the best possible team for this immense task, to try to be the first force”.
“Applying the democratic principle, asking people is what always makes the most profound transformations possible. Without primaries, the PSOE militancy would never have won the game over the apparatus, Pedro Sánchez would not have become PSOE Secretary General again and today we would not have a progressive coalition government in Spain”, Belarra recalled.
“I ask Yolanda Díaz to close that agreement now and we all get together to campaign, to tour Spain supporting the regional and municipal candidates of United We Can. Municipal and regional elections are key to the lives of millions of people, to guarantee the right to housing, to guarantee public health and education, dependency care, guaranteed income or the effective right to abortion. For this reason, Podemos is going to give everything again in these elections ”, she has defended.
“Only We Can Stand Firm”
Belarra, to defend that main role, has maintained that his party was the only one that “remained firm” to defend the entry of the United We Can space into the coalition government. “Only Podemos remained firm when it had pressure from all the media progressives and the PSOE to sign a collaboration agreement” and not enter the Executive, he recalled to throw a dart at the people who opposed signing the agreement in 2019 of coalition.
He has also recalled the dispute within space after the start of the war in Ukraine, when Podemos opposed the shipment of weapons and Díaz did not support his position. “We have all signed that we are against the war, but when it was necessary to criticize the shipment of weapons, Podemos was left alone, he said. “We don’t just need to expand the space. We need a strong Podemos because it is the only condition for the possibility of fulfilling what we said we were going to fulfill”, he said.
Not in vain, Belarra has announced that the motto for the next regional and municipal elections of the party will be ‘Courage to transform’. “I am sure that sometimes we will make mistakes, but people know that Podemos can be trusted, we are a force that has not asked the banks for a euro,” she said. The general secretary of the party has also criticized that for these elections a unity with all the parties in the political space has not been reached and she has pointed to two specific formations: Más Madrid and Compromís. Belarra has criticized the “office pact” in which the Andalusian candidacy was created in the summer of 2022 as one of the examples that, in her opinion, should not be followed to build unity.
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