Add: organize or die

Those years when everything solid vanished into air and the discourse of indignation was imposed on sets and social networks, it became possible to build a political project without any organization behind it.

“In warm times you can find shortcuts,” reflects Íñigo Errejón, now parliamentary spokesperson for Sumar and then a prominent protagonist in that shock that cracked the Spanish political system.

“But when the cold comes, there are no shortcuts: you have to build organization.

The problem is that everything is going so fast that it doesn't leave you time,” he emphasizes.

The temperature has dropped significantly for that political conglomerate that one day threatened to corner traditional social democracy.

Sumar's own organizational presentation for its founding assembly on March 23 admits the “narrowing of the electoral field associated with space.”

The thermometer has dropped so much that last Sunday in Galicia it reached polar levels.

Sumar, the formation that aims to embody the bulk of that space on the left of the PSOE - or transformative left, as some prefer - sank to a paltry 1.9%.

What happened to his former Podemos colleagues was directly the freeze: a blushing 0.26%.

No matter how many painkillers are given, the crash is very painful.

They were the first regional elections that Sumar attended and also in the land that launched the political career of its leader, Yolanda Díaz.

The fiasco could be seen coming.

After the implosion of the movement of the Galician tides, that sector of the left had already been left out of Parliament in 2020 and the BNG was reborn on its ashes.

Díaz failed in his attempts to incorporate a candidate with pedigree and the 5% barrier imposed by Galician law to access Parliament exacerbated the flow of useful votes from the left towards the Bloc and its proven candidate, Ana Pontón.

Without denying the scope of the defeat, in Sumar they strive not to incur drama.

Now that Podemos is flying on its own, not even a hint of internal reckoning has been seen.

Díaz met last Wednesday with the parliamentary group and several attendees report that it took place in a peaceful and constructive atmosphere.

Not even in private, leaders of the main Sumar groups consulted for this report draw blood.

“No one has experienced it as a trauma,” says a representative.

“We have taken it calmly, which does not mean frivolously.”

Issues such as the havoc caused by endemic internal struggles emerge in the analyses.

“In Galicia in the last eight years we have been a joke,” an IU member crudely concludes.

“The break with Podemos affects, of course it does.

“It has been very sad,” reinforces another of the Catalans.

Errejón adds that Sumar is especially sensitive to the so-called dual vote and exchanges considerable portions of the electorate with sovereignist formations depending on the scope of each election.

Just seven months ago, on June 23, Díaz's team was one and a half points ahead of the BNG in Galicia.

In those same elections, the Catalan confluence placed second after the PSC when it had placed sixth in the 2021 regional elections.

But the main lesson of the Galician failure leaves no one in doubt.

From the group closest to Díaz to IU, from the common ones to Más Madrid or Compromís, a unanimous diagnosis resonates.

The second vice president of the Government summed it up before her deputies: “Organization is needed more than ever.”

Or as the number two of IU, Ismael González, had already pointed out before: “Structures without territorial roots are not maintained over time.”

And times, as Errejón says, have cooled.

Laying the foundations of that structure is the objective of the founding assembly on March 23.

Even before the launch of Sumar, Díaz had insisted on criticizing the traditional functioning of the parties and therefore had to face reproaches from those who called his project personalistic.

Now the plan is to build an organization similar and different at the same time to a classic party.

A “complex and choral organization,” according to its documents, with an “internal institutional architecture of enormous diversity.”

A kind of party-movement with à la carte formulas to welcome or collaborate with the 14 different groups that were united on 23-J.

The problem is how to structure it and how to manage it without falling into the esotericism of organizational formulas that a certain left is passionate about.

“The important thing is that the left goes together, what is not understood is the complexity,” summarizes a representative.

Sumar aspires to be “both a party and an electoral umbrella,” describes another leader.

The party will include IU, Catalunya en Comú, Más Madrid, Verdes Equo, Contigo Navarra and the Andalusian People's Initiative.

Formations such as Compromís, Chunta Aragonesista or Mès will remain on the sidelines, although with the desire to come together under the umbrella in general elections.

The official presentation states that within Sumar 70% of the positions will be chosen by vote of the members and the remaining 30% will be reserved as a quota for the parties.

IU has already expressed its frontal rejection.

She fears being cornered and made invisible in some territories by the local brand.

This is the case of Más Madrid, which warns that it will not give in to the goal of preserving its personality in the regional elections.

“We joined Sumar without demanding quotas, but in exchange we want autonomy,” sources from its management summarize.

"We are the second electoral force in Madrid, we have a broad presence in the associative fabric, in the municipalities... We are not going to give up on that."

With the groups that want to be under the umbrella although without integrating into the party, the relationship is anticipated to be even more difficult.

An example: Compromís asked for the vote in Galicia for the BNG, with which it has been twinned for years.

Although he goes with Sumar in the general elections, both could compete in the regional elections, since Díaz's group will maintain its own Valencian structure.

“A strategic mistake by Sumar,” lament sources from the Compromís leadership who, despite everything, are satisfied with the role given in the parliamentary group of Congress to its only deputy, Àgueda Micó.

The panorama is drawn so intricate that the different parties agree that, beyond the March assembly, it will take time to forge.

“We would need to take slow steps, but everything is going so fast…” Errejón assumes.

In two months there will be new elections in Euskadi and in four, the European ones.

Another stumble would be difficult to swallow.

With the Galician page closed, Errejón appears confident in taking advantage of his presence in the Government, where, he maintains, Sumar is capitalizing on the “political initiative” in the face of a PSOE that “seems to have run out of an agenda” and that is committed to a “consolidation” legislature. , without big new projects.

As proof, he uses the broad support garnered this week in Congress for a text to endorse Díaz's star proposal, the reduction of the working day, which not even the PP opposed.

Errejón is, together with Marta Lois, the author of the political document to be debated in the assembly, a text that radiates his unmistakable seal and that advocates taking the flag of freedom from the right as its main objective.

“The battle for freedom is the great ideological combat of our time,” write Errejón and Lois.

Without organization it seems impossible to overcome it.

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