- She will have to decide to what extent he is involved in the 28M campaign, in which several of his allies are competing.
- Díaz has launched a donation campaign to get 100,000 euros, of which he has half.
- On Monday she opened the door for the first time to go to the elections without Podemos and the purple ones warn that the PSOE “presses” so that they do not agree.
Many months have passed until the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, defoliated the daisy, but last Sunday the vice president confirmed that she will stand for the next general elections and began to walk a path that will lead to the December elections. While on this road, however, Díaz will have to face several unavoidable milestones for his candidacy: some are immediate, such as deciding what role he will have in the May 28 municipal and regional election campaign, and others will have to be faced in the coming months, such as the negotiation with Podemos to try to get the purples to join Sumar.
The 28M campaign
Perhaps the first of the challenges that Díaz will have to face as a candidate for the generals will be to define her role in the campaign for the regional and municipal elections next month. Sumar does not attend these elections, but all the parties that have already supported him do, and so does Podemos. And the problem for Díaz is that, in many communities, they will do so by competing with each other, so the vice president will have to be very careful when participating in campaign events.
The two territories where the division to the left of the PSOE threatens to cause tensions in Díaz’s project are the Community of Madrid and the Valencian Community. Both are key autonomies for the left. And in both, Podemos and IU -which will run jointly in the elections- will face two forces that are within Sumar and that, a priori, are more powerful than them: Más Madrid and Compromís, who have refused to agree on a unique candidacy with Unidas Podemos. Hence Díaz, who has promised to “help where he can,” has to make bobbin lace so as not to snub any of his allies.
Sumar’s financing
While deciding which events to attend during the 28M campaign and to what extent he is involved in it, Díaz will have to build the Sumar structures. And for this, money is essential. The vice president, as she has stated, seeks that her project “does not depend on the bank or on private interests”, and since she presented her brand a few months ago, it has been financed through contributions from supporters of her. On Sunday, a few hours after the presentation of his candidacy, Díaz released a video to encourage donations with the aim of reaching, in the first phase, 100,000 euros, of which he stated that he has already achieved half.
The legal formula
Another of the tasks that the vice president will have to face in the near future will be to decide what legal form Sumar adopts. For now, the organization is only an association, and associations cannot stand for election. To do so, Díaz has three options: turn Sumar into a political party, form an electoral coalition of all the parties that support her with the Sumar brand, or do the same with a group of voters.
The choice of one model or another may seem like a minor legal issue, but the truth is that the decision that is finally made will be decisive when it comes to defining how the broad front to the left of the PSOE will work. The three options have their pros and cons, although the grouping of voters seems practically ruled out because it is the least economically advantageous, among other things. If Díaz registers his own party, he would protect himself as the leader of an organization and would not depend on the apparatus of other parties that he does not control, but he would go back on his word since he has been assuring for months that Sumar will not be a political formation.
The Role of Podemos
The real elephant in the room. Despite the fact that Díaz has tried to downplay it this week and has even opened the door for the first time to go to the elections without them, the absence of Podemos at the presentation of his candidacy last Sunday is currently the main problem for which faces Add. The purples, today, continue to be the main party to the left of the PSOE, and this week they have tried to put the ball in Díaz’s court, assuring that they feel “worried” because it, they say, does not defend “outright” the unit.
Behind these differences, there are two conflicts: one to define the weight of each actor within Sumar and another, more in-depth, on the strategic and political roadmap that the new project must follow. The first of them is the one that has had the most prominence at the moment, and last Monday Podemos insisted on once again asking Díaz to commit to holding primaries in which all citizens can vote, a request that the vice president rejects arguing that it wants to define with all the rest of the parties the list election model. “It is not true that we have differences around the primaries, from the beginning I have said it,” she snapped.
The primaries model
The truth is that Díaz, indeed, has been committed for months to holding primaries. The crux of the matter is their details: how many ballot boxes there will be to vote on, whether they will be physical or virtual, or what electoral system is used are issues that can greatly vary the final result and, therefore, the composition of the lists. Podemos continues to demand that the leader of Sumar sign a document with them in which she commits to holding “open” primaries, that is, with a newly created census in which any citizen can register. And she, for the moment, has refused.
Díaz’s entourage explains that, if he has resisted signing that commitment to hold open primaries up to now, it is because that decision cannot be made only with Podemos, but rather all the formations that he aspires to congregate around Sumar must participate in it. Podemos, however, does not reject Díaz from signing the same commitment to all parties. But in the purple direction there is another suspicion: that Díaz has agreed to cede certain positions on the lists to formations such as Más País, Compromís, or Chunta, and that prevents him from holding primaries in which all the parties compete with each other and in which, for Therefore, the result would be more unpredictable.
The “country project”
Beyond the construction of the Sumar structure, still in its infancy, the vice president is much more advanced in preparing her electoral program, which Díaz calls a “country project for a decade.” Programmatically, few surprises are expected, since the leader of Sumar herself has affirmed that all the organizations to the left of the PSOE are very close ideologically to each other. However, to prepare the document, Díaz set up 35 working groups last September divided by subject and led by figures such as the political scientist Ignacio Sánchez Cuenca, the environmental activist Yayo Herrero, or the philosopher César Rendueles, as well as the labor lawyer Fernando Salinas, a former member of the CGPJ.