Ione Belarra, upon her arrival at the Council of Ministers in April (Madrid) .Andrea Comas
We can face his future without Pablo Iglesias. The march of the leader who built a political heir party of 15-M places the formation before its most difficult challenge. Ten years after the movement that filled the squares with indignant and in a context of pandemic that has generated another type of exhaustion, the party born in 2014 decides on the strategy to relaunch itself. Electorally diminished in recent times, the processes of Galicia and the Basque Country, already with Podemos in the central Government, confirmed this decline. This year, the elections in Catalonia and Madrid allowed him to save the furniture, but far from the momentum of the first years.
Ione Belarra, Minister of Social Rights, is the main candidate to succeed the former vice president at the head of the general secretary in the Citizen Assembly (Vistalegre IV) that will conclude on June 13. Its environment has already transferred the intention of building a more feminized Podemos, less Madrid and that is committed to strengthening and extending confederal alliances to gain presence throughout the territory. He has also been in favor of a continuity in the direction with the bulk of the team that was elected in 2020 - and that had the head of Equality, Irene Montero, as
number two
- although without confirming names.
Faced with a very closed leadership around the figure of Iglesias, who was leaving behind the dissident voices, Belarra will coexist with Yolanda Díaz as a potential candidate for the presidency of the Government of the electoral brand Unidas Podemos (UP).
The third vice president, only with a PCE card, is not a militant.
More information
We can after Iglesias
The long goodbye of Pablo Iglesias
Under this framework, former leaders, members of the current Executive, deputies and analysts reflect and provide some keys on the challenges of the future of training.
Differentiated leadership.
Jaume Asens, president of the parliamentary group of UP in Congress and secretary of Human Rights of Podemos, considers that the resignation of Pablo Iglesias can work as a “revulsive to relaunch the political hypothesis”, also under the premise of a more “collective leadership, feminine and with elements of greater plurinational diversity ”. His departure, he believes, "allows consolidating" Diaz's alternative and making a "more natural" replacement.
"That a Navarrese colleague and another Galician are going to be the fundamental referents of the UP space makes a difference inward and outward," says Antón Gómez-Reino, deputy and secretary general of Podemos Galicia. "We have to build in the sense of an organization that wants to govern and look more like the whole of the State, compared to others that seek to be like the most conservative Madrid," he adds.
The vision of Juan Carlos Monedero, one of the founders of Podemos, for the future leadership model would be similar to that of the PNV, where “there is a difference between the party, the parliamentary fraction and the Government, so that it is the party that establishes the programs and the one who negotiates ”. That implies, in his opinion, that it would be necessary to “tend”, although not immediately, that the positions within the training “are not at the same time institutional positions”, in order to achieve full dedication, he explains.
The political scientist Pablo Simón goes further. “It happens to Podemos that when he enters the Government he is absorbed by this task. All his good cadres go to the Executive, but they neglect the party and nobody is dedicated to that work of making structure, organization, training ... And that is the key to the survival of a political force, "he says. The analyst also expresses doubts about Diaz-Belarra bicephaly, because it can generate, he believes, "a dysfunction that rarely goes well."
Territorial organization.
For Simón, one of the main challenges of training is organizational. “Podemos has most of its organization totally disjointed”, he opines, “and in the next electoral appointment in 2023 it is not worth just having a candidate who is popular, but rather you have to be able to fill the list, have people and structure ”, he emphasizes. A leader points out that the municipal fabric that has formations such as IU or the Commons in Catalonia may be key in the future.
Xulio Ferreiro became mayor of A Coruña in 2015 with Marea Atlántica, linked to Podemos. "At that time there was a movement in favor of some break-away candidacies," says the current dean of the UDC Faculty of Law. That victory was part of a broader movement, of a “municipalist nature”, and that was replicated with different formulas in other cities: Barcelona en Comú, Zaragoza en Común, Now Madrid, Compostela Aberta… A year later the regional movement En Marea achieved become the first opposition force in the Parliament of Galicia, but in the local elections of 2019 he lost the mayoralties in the community (also Ferrol), and in the general, where he competed against Podemos, he did not obtain representation. Already in 2020, in the autonomous regions and under the Galicia en Común brand, the Iglesias party did not win seats."More was known about En Marea from internal discussions than from the work of the deputies," says Ferreiro. The former mayor also points out that Podemos sought to develop his project in the territory, but at the same time with a "very weak organization, few cadres and, above all, little implantation, compared to the municipal candidates that had more people and political muscle."
Confederal alliances.
In the future, the alliances should be different, says the former councilor from A Coruña. "We opted for a model not of alliances, but of expansion of the party, of the United We Can coalition in the face of their own dynamics that were taking place in the territories and that could have supported, recognized and respected each other," he considers.
Gloria Elizo, third vice president of the Congress of Deputies and one of the few openly critical voices within the party, also advocates a “horizontal debate, not with the prevalence of Podemos over the rest of the spaces”, which “recognizes the capacity for intervention everyone's policy ”, from IU, to Adelante Andalucía —the brand led by Teresa Rodríguez, now outside Podemos—, the Commons in Catalonia, Compromís in Valencia or even Más País, founded by Íñigo Errejón. Elizo believes that it is necessary to go "much beyond a mere call for the renewal of managerial positions" and believes that there is a space to the left of the PSOE with a fragmentation problem that must be overcome "by raising the gaze above the acronyms to try to bring together all these forces.
“There has always been a space to the left of the PSOE. The problem with this space is that it depends a lot on the strength of the Socialists, ”says political communication expert Luis Arroyo, who has worked for that party. Territorial implementation, he says, is very complex when "you lack resources and also have always had a very virtual structure," he says in reference to the Podemos organization.
Weight of membership and collegiate bodies.
Pablo Echenique, parliamentary spokesman and Secretary of the Program, believes that this stage will give way to a greater role for the collegiate bodies and also for the militancy. “The organizational model in which we have been working all this year has included representatives of the Podemos circles in the management bodies. We have to reinforce the militancy, which has been growing. A militancy that is part of civil society in neighborhoods and towns to be present in specific problems and that gives projection to regional and local leaderships ”, he affirms.
Attract the youth.
Lucía Muñoz, who at 27 is the youngest member of the United We Can Congress in Congress, believes that there are two fundamental axes on which the new party, environmentalism and feminism, must steer. "These are two of the most transformative struggles, which also have great force now, and which we must know how to develop in terms of public policies," he says. Although Podemos is already a young organization, for Muñoz, one of the party's challenges consists in attracting the interest of the new generations of voters, a task for which it also works in coordination with Rebeldia, the youth organization linked to the party and created in 2019.