Like a broken marriage that decides not to separate for the sake of the children, Sumar and Podemos will continue to share a parliamentary group during this term. At least for now. Neither the team Yolanda Diaz contemplates expelling from its ranks the five deputies of the purple formation – despite the severe criticism that they are airing in public against the space with which they presented themselves in coalition to the general elections of the 23-J-, nor the party he leads Ione Herb He intends to leave after being left without any position of responsibility.
In this case, the excuse used to avoid divorce is not exactly a family issue, but rather a common political objective. From those around the second vice president of the Government, they argue that the sum of “plurinational” forces that participated in the same ballot at the polls share “the responsibility of leaving out the right.” With different words but the same essence, the successors of Pablo Iglesias They state, in turn, that “in the democratic bloc” everyone is needed to “stop the wild reactionary wave.”
Despite the coincidence in placing PP and Vox on the enemy side, Podemos insists that they are the only “engine” of the “deep transformations and real changes” that the country needs and that, after being left out of La Moncloa , will act with “autonomy” within the parliamentary group, a strategy endorsed by a large majority of its bases. This, they specify, does not mean that they will always distance themselves from the other 26 deputies who occupy the 31 seats achieved by Sumar, but neither does it mean that they act in a compact manner.
“Our voice is more important than our votes,” they emphasize in the party purple, whose priority objective is to recover a “protagonism” on the left that was “minorized” by the coalition agreement first and by the distribution of spokespersons in Congress and ministries later, in which they have had nothing to do with it. The same sources reveal that not all members of this heterogeneous space are in tune with the line that Díaz is printing, so they aspire to be able to “convince” them.
The first litmus test for Sumar’s unity will foreseeably be the approval of the General State Budgets, whose processing was activated on Wednesday by the coalition Government during its first meeting. In Podemos they assure that they have not yet decided whether or not they will support these accounts, but they advance that both on this issue and on the rest of parliamentary matters they will require direct dialogue with the PSOE. And they warn: if the party of Pedro Sanchez undervalues the importance of its five representatives, he will understand it “the hard way” when he “loses the first vote.”