The regional elections in Galicia revolutionize the Sumar parliamentary group.
The until now spokesperson for the leftist coalition in Congress, Marta Lois, will leave her seat next week, after the plenary session that is expected to approve the controversial amnesty law in the lower house, as confirmed by sources from the formation.
The departure of the Galician deputy, who will focus on her role as candidate for the Presidency of the Xunta, forces a change to the face and voice of the organization in parliamentary headquarters.
In the absence of official confirmation, Sumar's parties assume that it will be Íñigo Errejón, leader of Más País, who will replace her in office.
The formation of the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, will also take advantage of the changes to reinforce Izquierda Unida and plans to grant Enrique Santiago the position of substitute spokesperson, which would give the party the right to sign to present parliamentary initiatives.
Lois will formalize her resignation from the record just five months after taking office, being a complete stranger to national politics, and she will do so after next Tuesday's plenary session and the meetings of the Sumar leadership and parliamentary group.
Although her entry into the Galician Parliament is not assured, the movement of the political science professor contrasts with that of the last candidate in the space - who ran with Podemos under the Galicia en Común brand -, Antón Gómez-Reino, in the 2020 regional elections. After En Marea became the leading opposition force in the Galician Parliament in 2016 and internal problems divided the group, its candidacy did not obtain representation and it never left its seat in Congress.
Economist Manuel Lago, Díaz's advisor in the Ministry of Labor last term, will enter as deputy in Lois' place.
Errejón, one of the ideologues of the first Podemos and who left the party in 2019 after his confrontation with Pablo Iglesias, was already parliamentary spokesperson between 2016 and 2017, a position in which he was replaced after Vistalegre II (the assembly that divided the training) by Irene Montero.
The top leader of Más País has been gaining both media visibility and political weight in recent months, to the point of becoming a fundamental value for the new project of the second vice president, who faces her first assembly on March 23.
Errejón is the person in charge, together with Lois, of preparing Sumar's political presentation, that is, the ideology and political thesis of the project.
His figure arouses, however, some misgivings among different forces in the political space, although all of them recognize his communication skills and, therefore, his worth for the position.
The spokesperson's task, sometimes, is also to negotiate certain initiatives with other forces and some voices doubt his left hand when it comes to doing so with formations like Podemos.
With the changes, it is expected that the party that until last December was coordinated by former minister Alberto Garzón will gain weight in the group with a substitute spokesperson, a position that is recognized by the Congress Board and that is currently held by the general secretary of the party in the Chamber. Come down, Txema Guijarro.
In September, Izquierda Unida was left out of the distribution of deputy spokespersons, which the Sumar leadership did grant to Catalunya en Comú, Compromís and Chunta Aragonesista.
IU then criticized the exclusion and later the lack of “democracy” in some of Sumar's decisions.
Even today, his formula for participation in the assembly of the new formation is up in the air, so the gesture of Díaz's leadership can also serve to smooth over differences in a year with several electoral events ahead, with Galician, Basque and European elections and the fundamental challenge of measuring forces with Podemos.
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