Yolanda Díaz -1971, Fene (A Coruña)- labor lawyer and, since January 2020, a star in national politics by decision of Pablo Iglesias, first, and Pedro Sánchez, later. Founder and sole leader of the Sumar platform since 2022, she has gone through a real soup of acronyms, always in the field of the left: Esquerda Unida, Galician Alternative of the Left, En Marea, Podemos and Unidas Podemos. And always a militant PCElike his father, Suso Diazformer general secretary of CCOO in Galicia, and his uncle Josephformer deputy in the Galician Parliament for the BNG.
Daughter of a working-class neighborhood next to the shipyard Navantia, grew up immersed in the vicissitudes of political and especially union activism that her family experienced. Her breed suits the greyhound. Yolanda has always wanted to sound the alarm in defense of the workers, although now she prefers to refer to “the people.” She will provide them with “happiness” by rescuing them from the yoke of neoliberalism, capitalism, the rich, the oppressive elites.
A woman of smiles, affection and long speeches in public, she is also a tenacious negotiator and, according to her detractors, capable of changing a caress into a thrust without breaking a sweat, going from warmth to coldness with a swerve of the wheel and leaving those who are in trouble in the gutter. I had them as friends without blinking an eye.
Whoever was Podemos’s alma mater, Pablo Iglesias, the true promoter of Díaz’s career on the national scene, knows something about this. He catapulted her into Podemos, he introduced her into the Minister council with the Labor portfolio as a purple quota and he, finally, when he left the coalition government, promoted her to Pedro Sánchez so that she would be promoted to the third vice presidency. In the jump to the second vice presidency, a position in which she repeats, as well as the Labor portfolio, the former mentor from whom Díaz, already at the heights, was very distant, did not intervene.
The stage in which Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero considered her a close friend, an excellent person and politician capable of anything to fight for the workers and the country, is long gone. Now, that relationship only oozes resentment and misgivings.