The ERC spokesperson in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, and the former minister and Podemos MEP Irene Montero are talking at this time in Barcelona in an event focused on the future of the left in Spain. The debate, titled in Catalan What should be done? (“What has to be done?”) is moderated by former Commons MP Xavier Domènech and began with the question of what to do in the current panorama of the rise of the right.
“Why can’t ERC inspire the Spanish left like at other times?” Rufián began by saying, when asked what the alternative left has to do to overcome the reactionary wave. The spokesman for the Republicans in Madrid thus puts the focus on his party. Already this morning, on Catalunya Ràdio, Rufián has asked his leader, Oriol Junqueras, to take the reins of the negotiation on a possible confluence of the alternative left that blocks the extreme right. “It doesn’t make me less pro-independence to say that I want the Spanish left to do well. The ideal scenario is a subjugated PSOE,” he defended. “I have no interest in governing Spain, I want it to be governed well,” he added, a message that he later repeated: “I don’t want to be minister of Spain.”
Montero has asked to think beyond the simple electoral fact. “One of the challenges is to put our project for a better society at the center and be proud of them. We must recover the compass of principles,” he added. This must result, he added, in “the ability to make things happen” such as intervention in housing prices.
Beyond the derivative of how Esquerra Republicana fits the landing in its garden of a proposal for electoral unity that it flatly rejects and compromises the figure of its strong man in Madrid, the act will also give some clue as to how the purples envision their race for the general elections.
To begin with, the announcement of the joint event in Barcelona, on March 19, already marked a certain turn in Podemos. The purple ones did not even send an official representation to the talk between Rufián and the Madrid deputy for Más Madrid Emilio Delgado last February. Even before the meeting took place, the party spokesman, Pablo Fernández, practically belittled it by calling it “just another talk” like there are many about “cinema, music, politics, science or quantum physics” and considering that it did not deserve his assessment.
In that forum, the Republican not only presented his proposal to maximize the progressive vote but also defended the need to count on Irene Montero for any unitary project of the left. “Whoever thinks that these people are unnecessary is wrong. They are essential,” he said.
The disdain in the ranks of Podemos continued after the event. Its general secretary, Ione Belarra, criticized Rufián’s idea two days later of supporting the leftist list with the best previous results in each province. “If the whole approach is one of calculation in the electoral law, of parliamentary mathematics, of candidacy with more electoral options, then it is clear what the conclusion will be in the end. That we must support the PSOE and vote for the PSOE because it is the largest candidacy,” he said in his speech at the Citizen Council, the highest body of the party.
Less than a month later, Belarra is in the front row of the Pompeu Fabra auditorium, in an event urged by Montero herself, who has always sympathized with the republican spokesperson. In between, a resounding failure of the alternative left in the elections in Castilla y León, which already aggravated the Aragonese scenario, and the self-criticized pact in the extremes to integrate into Por Andalucía en las Andaluzas. And Sumar, for his part, is looking for a way to reinvent himself without Yolanda Díaz at the helm. “What are they going to give me? I’ve been doing this for ten years, I know how it works,” Rufián had lamented at the event in Madrid, who now sees how Podemos takes charge of the logistics of What should be done.
