Pablo Iglesias and Yolanda Díaz: total rupture?

Between the day that Yolanda Díaz was interrupted in a videoconference with EU ministers to inform her that Pablo Iglesias was going to publicly designate her as his successor and last Monday, when the former leader of Podemos lashed out at her on Cadena SER Almost 20 months have passed.

Long enough to ruin two decades of close political and personal friendship.

Díaz and Iglesias, old friends from the time when the left of the left was just a distant satellite to the Spanish political centrality, the companions who until not so long ago called each other several times every day, have not spoken to each other for more than a year ―apart from a fleeting encounter― and it seems difficult for them to do it again.

She, tired of a deaf offensive that Iglesias has been maintaining over time,

with increasingly less veiled reproaches in their public interventions.

He, convinced that there is an operation underway to corner his own in future electoral lists.

The word rupture is already circulating on everyone's lips at United We Can (UP).

And the concern extends to the whole of the left, whose chances of repeating government after 2023 hang in the balance.

The forces are disparate.

Díaz has in his favor the popularity that is confirmed in poll after poll and support within the UP coalition (the Catalan commons and the leadership of the IU and the PCE) and outside (Más País and its powerful Madrid brand).

Podemos has shrunk and in its own direction there is even a member who is with Díaz.

Supporters of this emphasize that in recent days, in the midst of the broadsides against her, the leaders of Podemos in communities such as Extremadura, Euskadi, Navarra or La Rioja attended the presentations of Sumar, the platform of the second vice president.

“What is in crisis is not the political space, it is Podemos”, summarize sources from the sector aligned with the vice president.

For this reason, they believe that it would be suicide for those faithful to Iglesias to go alone to the general elections.

Podemos —under the direction of Ione Belarra, although with an influence from Iglesias that he himself has shown publicly these days— continues to claim itself as the most important formation of UP and its leadership maintains that it has enough strength to secure a parliamentary quota alone.

The battle, as prominent leaders from different sectors admit, has a lot to do with future electoral lists.

Iglesias demands guarantees that Belarra and the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero —the two most visible heads of the party— will be in the top positions and will not be relegated by other candidates such as Íñigo Errejón.

“What we want is for our strength to be displayed in the coalition and for them not to try to dilute us,” points out a relevant figure from Podemos.

If this is not fulfilled, the same source abounds, the rupture will be served.

Díaz does not even want to hear about lists now and says that, if necessary, they should be decided in open primaries.

His strategy is to incorporate personalities to Sumar, regardless of party quotas.

And hers assure that she is not going to give in either.

Iglesias and Díaz, in Galicia in July 2015. OSCAR CORRAL

The gap.

The rupture of relations between Díaz and Iglesias is dated: October 12, 2021. That day he went out on the street in Madrid

with a scoop: the vice president would star in an act with women in Valencia, presented as a preview of her political platform —still unnamed at the time— from which the leaders of Podemos had been excluded.

The newspaper also offered photos of his inauguration party, held the day before, in which two of the guests, Díaz and Errejón, looked very friendly.

The team of the first alleged that the organizer of the political event that would be held a month later in Valencia —which Mónica García, leader of Más Madrid, would also attend— was the then regional vice president, Mónica Oltra, of Compromís.

Iglesias was furious, say sources familiar with what happened.

He interpreted that his successor was plotting a maneuver to corner his own with neither more nor less than with Errejón,

another who had gone from soul friend to intimate adversary.

The founder of Podemos sent a message to Díaz in very harsh terms, several sources agree.

So hurt was she that she didn't answer.

And there she cut everything.

Since then, they only chatted briefly last April, in an act of the newspaper

, and with witnesses in front.

A month later, they met again at a Cadena SER party and avoided each other.

On Monday, Iglesias used the grievance for the act in Valencia —which is exactly one year old this Sunday— before Aimar Bretos on the program

to demand “respect” from Díaz: “How do you think the militants of Podemos felt when Yolanda appears next to Mónica García and Mónica Oltra and neither Ione Belarra nor Irene Montero appear?

And we can, disciplinedly, swallow”.

Friends above politics.

Until then, everything seemed to be going reasonably well.

The Labor Minister used to say that her friendship with Iglesias was safe from political differences.

They had always argued a lot.

For highly relevant matters or for minor details.

After the first elections of 2019, Díaz was reluctant to Iglesias's strategy of not facilitating the investiture of Pedro Sánchez if he did not agree to govern with UP.

When she recruited Iglesias as an advisor in Galicia, for the successful campaign for the regional elections of 2012 in coalition with the nationalist Xosé Manuel Beiras, she flatly refused the idea that he had of putting her on the posters with her daughter, then a baby, in arms.

They often differed, but he always resisted that friendship that had begun in 2001, in a seminar in which Díaz, a communist militant since adolescence,

Then came many visits to Madrid, weekends together in a gang having drinks and debating about the future of the left;

they met their families, their partners and their children when they arrived.

The political earthquake that followed the Great Recession brought them even closer together.

After the emergence of Podemos, Díaz, still in Galicia at the head of the local IU brand, was enthusiastic about that new movement, full of an ambition that contrasted with the traditional defeatism of the rupturist left.

After making the leap to Madrid, he distanced himself from his organization, which he would end up leaving (but not the PCE).

“Yolanda seemed more from Podemos than those from Podemos”, comments a former IU colleague.

Iglesias has said that his priority after closing the government pact with Sánchez was that her great friend was the Minister of Labor to undo the labor reform of the PP.

The day she entered the ministry, she proclaimed, “I am here for Pablo Iglesias.”

The finger.

A kind of madness took over the Ministry of Labor on the morning of March 15, 2021. When the boss was involved in a videoconference with her European colleagues, a call was received to let them know: in a few minutes, Iglesias would publish a message on the who announced that he was leaving the Government to stand in the Madrid elections and that he was giving up his vice-presidency and the leadership of the UP space to Yolanda Díaz.

The still secretary general of Podemos had been secretly pressuring her for weeks to take over from her.

She had refused several times.

She now she left him no choice.

Díaz, who had never imagined himself in such a position, was uncomfortable with the way Iglesias did it, although friendship prevailed again and the matter was settled with a meal.

In Podemos they did not know anything either and not everyone welcomed him, as Juan Carlos Monedero now admits, the last of the members of the founding nucleus who remains faithful to Iglesias: “Pablo blindly trusted Yolanda and thought that it was worth it.

And I didn't share that look.

Not because Pablo has been wrong many times with his companies - which he has done, there is Errejón -, nor because I did not trust Yolanda, but because I have always opted for participation as a way of reinforcing Podemos as a party-movement .

And I have spent my entire life in a constant fight against the excesses of hyper-leadership.

I think unfortunately he was right.

Díaz threw himself into the Madrid campaign in support of his friend.

At the closing rally, on May 2 in Vicálvaro, Iglesias pointed to her successor and addressed the militancy: “I want to ask you to take care of her.

Not just when she does things right.

If she ever messes up, that day is when you have to take care of her more than ever.”

After the electoral failure in Madrid, the new second vice president began to dream of opening a "listening process" with the horizon of launching a political platform that went beyond the UP space.

In the summer she was already decided and she had dinner with Iglesias to explain it to him.

According to Diaz's interlocutors, she left very satisfied because she had seen her friend convinced her with the idea.

The need to find new formulas and rebuild alliances seemed to be shared objectives.

From the left, Fatima Hamed Hossain, Mónica Oltra, Yolanda Díaz, Mónica García and Ada Colau, in an act of female leaders in Valencia, on November 13, 2021. Mònica Torres

The deterioration.

Two months passed, the approach to Errejón and the private outburst of Iglesias took place.

And a kind of internal guerrilla began.

Within the Government, the tensions between Díaz and Podemos became more apparent.

The vice president's strategy of prioritizing discreet negotiation over a public clash with the PSOE contrasted with the noisy style implanted in Iglesias's party.

There were serious clashes with some episodes, such as the announcement —without consulting her and applauded by Iglesias— that the UP would sue for prevarication against the president of Congress, the socialist Meritxell Batet, after the withdrawal of her partner Alberto Rodríguez from the seat for a disputed ruling of the Supreme Court.

In his new occupation as a communicator and talk show host, Iglesias began to slip hints that implicitly pointed to Díaz.

This never replied and continues without doing so to this day.

But he didn't give up.

In the minister's team and in a large part of UP, a feeling of harassment was settling in, that the former vice president continued to pull the strings from behind to undermine a successor who did not abide by his guidelines.

On the other hand, it was said that the vice president ignored them.

The support of Galician politics for sending weapons to Ukraine raised the tone of the reproaches.

Then came the farce of the negotiations for the Andalusian elections in June, in which for the first time the formula of a coalition —backed by Díaz— that also included Más País was tested.

Podemos could not impose their candidate,

it was only added at the last minute and the size of the gap became apparent.

Once again it was illustrated by the gathering of

:

"Are you hurt with Yolanda Díaz?" Aimar Bretos asked the former vice president.

"I'm not going to answer that question.

-Why?

—Because no, because I am not going to generate any type of headline that harms Yolanda, nor the candidacy of the change, the broad front or whatever the hell it is called.

The launch of Sumar was received coldly by the leadership of Podemos, whose leaders complain that they have not been kept informed about it.

Monedero, although already out of the leadership, gives voice to the most frequent recriminations against Díaz in the party: “he has successfully dedicated himself to the Ministry of Labor and his personal political space.

And he has only surrounded himself with people outside of Podemos.

He has not fulfilled the mandate that he received along with the vice presidency.

He has tried to add the fragments that left Podemos, which was part of the mission, but he has mistreated Podemos to please the others on the left and obtain a better deal from bipartisanship than the one received by the leaders of Podemos, many of them dragging including court proceedings.

Among those close to Díaz,

Without turning back.

The decision of the vice president to stay out of the municipal and regional elections next spring, waiting for Sumar to crystallize, was seen in Podemos as a maneuver to weaken them.

It was interpreted that Díaz was abandoning them to their fate in order to later negotiate in better conditions with a view to the general elections.

Iglesias expressed that suspicion last Sunday, in his speech at the Autumn

, as Podemos calls his debate forum, although he attributed the operation, more than to Díaz, to “the media that advise it.”

"You have to be stupid," he stressed, referring to those who supposedly promote such an idea.

The internal conflict had already been about to explode days before and was involuntarily saved by the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, by breaking off negotiations to renew the General Council of the Judiciary.

UP had managed to reserve two seats for it in exchange for accepting the condition agreed upon by the PSOE and the PP of excluding people who held political office.

That ruled out Judge Victoria Rosell, the Government delegate against Gender Violence in the Ministry of Equality.

Sources close to Díaz affirm that the matter had already been closed internally when Podemos announced that it would reject any agreement that did not include Rosell.

The tension rose to the maximum and only Feijóo's fright managed to placate it.

It didn't last long.

Everyone sensed that Iglesias was going to leave some important message for the closing of the Autumn

, in which he had reserved the star role.

So it was, and the schism between the old friends was exposed openly.

Leaders of Podemos insist that they will not participate in any project in which they do not occupy a preferential place.

And, meanwhile, Díaz finally hints that the decision to be a candidate for the general elections has been made: "There is no going back."

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