Between the Andalusian elections of last May 17 and the indictment of the former Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the parties allied in Sumar raised the purpose of regrouping to turn around future prospects in which they see themselves dragged by the decline of the national left against the right and the far right. But the alleged corruption cases affecting the socialists have impacted this purpose, generating a problem: the need to distance themselves from their government colleagues, and an opportunity: to draw from voters disillusioned with the PSOE.
This dual objective hovered during the joint event held this Saturday in Barcelona among the leaders who are part of this space, formed by Izquierda Unida, Comuns, Más Madrid, and Movimiento Sumar, and which counted on the presence of the Ministers of Culture, Ernest Urtasun; Social Rights, Consumption and Agenda 2030, Pablo Bustinduy; Health, Mónica García; but also the federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida, Antonio Maíllo; the coordinator of Movimiento Sumar, Lara Hernández; and the spokesperson of the Comuns and mayoral candidate of BComú in the Barcelona City Council, Gerardo Pisarello.
Under the shared premise that there is “a political operation from the beginning to bring down the Government,” Urtasun and his colleagues urged the PSOE not to use this idea as “an excuse,” they called on the PSOE to “clean their house,” in Maíllo’s words, to “give explanations,” to “not look the other way” and to “take responsibility, face up and be brave,” according to the Minister of Culture. At the same time, all distanced themselves from “behaviors that are absolutely unacceptable for the left,” García reproached, against which she emphasized that “we are spotless.”
The idea that the forces that are part of Sumar are free of corruption cases, unlike the PSOE, was a constant, defended with special emphasis by the Minister of Health, who claimed that “We govern, we transform, without a single case of corruption or revolving doors” because “we come from another place” and “we are not the same,” and Urtasun, who after recalling the multiple unsuccessful complaints Ada Colau suffered during her time as mayor of Barcelona assured that “zero corruption does exist” and that “we have demonstrated it while governing.” “Here there is a clean political space because we were born to eradicate these unacceptable practices,” he argued.
The distance shown by the “serious” information affecting the PSOE was mixed with those concerning the shared government work, which is the umbilical cord that forces coalition partners to distance themselves from President Sánchez. In this area, the strategy also involves exposing the socialists for their lack of ambition. Minister Bustinduy was the clearest in this regard by demanding from the socialist part of the Government “exemplarity, transparency and housing, housing, housing.”
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The minister even assigned tasks to the Council of Ministers by demanding that the remaining year of the legislature be used with a social agenda based on recovering the housing decree that Congress failed to validate with the extension of rental contracts, but also with “a historic allocation” in dependency matters and a “benefit against child poverty.” Politically, Urtasun defined the PSOE’s mission as the need “that its headquarters in Ferraz is not a burden for the social majority of this country.”
The holding of this event under the slogan “One step forward” is another stop in the will of the confederal space to overcome the accumulation of adversities faced by this spectrum per se, where the lack of unity with the rest of the left-wing actors remains unresolved, not only because of the circumstances that have arisen in recent weeks.
Despite the Andalusian electoral process, which came to confirm that left-wing voters prioritize regionalist options – hence the success of Adelante Andalucía – and the Rufián factor, which has shaken the space with his reflections on the risks of fragmentation, this space insists on taking “a step forward,” together, hoping that the rest of the formations will join along the way.
