2023-09-29 22:14:21
The group of European Greens disembarks these days in Madrid. The great coalition of environmental parties concludes this Saturday a three-day meeting framed within the Spanish presidency of the European Union. These annual meetings help political groups design and rethink strategies, and this year they have substantial importance with an eye on next summer’s elections. But the event will also serve to stage the total rapprochement between the leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, and this political space.
The acting second vice president will preside this Saturday at the closing of the Green Social Summit, an event in which Sumar has been intensely involved. Díaz’s presence at an event of this type is not new, he already participated by videoconference in last year’s meeting, but this time it coincides in time with Sumar’s political deployment. In fact, the poster of speakers is full of profiles of its hard core and also of the closest political parties within the coalition itself, such as the comuns, Más Madrid and also Verdes Equo.
Never before had a state left-wing party turned in this way at a meeting of European environmentalists. It is not only about a large participation of profiles close to Sumar in this event, but about the consolidation of a political alliance in two directions.
Yolanda Díaz has incorporated the environmental agenda as a transversal element of her political platform and during the campaign she even promised to be the “first green president” of Spain; a movement in the political axis of the left of a depth unprecedented until now.
On the other hand, the Greens see Sumar as a way to gain ground in southern Europe, where they have traditionally had much less pull. Yolanda Díaz’s coalition could enter a Government in the coming months, a very valuable letter of introduction just when there are just a few months left until the European electoral campaign begins.
Furthermore, Díaz has in its hard core many profiles belonging to the old Initiative for Catalunya Verds (ICV), now integrated within Catalunya en Comú, such as the platform’s own spokesperson, Ernest Urtasun, who is in turn an MEP and vice president. of the Greens in the European Parliament. Another of his great supporters also comes from that political family, Josep Vendrell, his chief of staff and main political supporter. Or the spokesperson for the commons in Congress, Aina Vidal, who spoke this Friday at one of the tables.
“A historic bloc of the left, green and progressive”
This gradual approach to Los Verdes has generated some tensions within the political space that Sumar encompasses, especially in sectors of Podemos where they do not welcome an alliance with a family that is ideologically heterogeneous. This weekend’s event actually coincides in time with the Festival of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). The minister will not intervene in this forum even though it is the only political card that she retains.
This dilemma is not new and was already exposed with the Unidas Podemos coalition for the Europeans, although it was resolved in a more or less natural way. Izquierda Unida and the Initiative per Catalunya Verds used to run together despite later joining different political families. Urtasun, for example, was an MEP in 2014 in the Greens group even though he went with IU – a member of The Left and the European Left Party – in May 2014. Podemos, which precisely broke into those European elections, since the principle has been integrated into the left. Four years later, Urtasun was elected again, now within Unidas Podemos, and also joined the Los Verdes group.
At the same time Unidas Podemos, a state ally of Catalunya en Comú, is part of the Left group (formerly GUE/NGL) in the European Parliament through Podemos and IU, with Syriza, Francia Insumisa, Die Linke or the Left Bloc. . Within Sumar there is now also Equo, which is a member of the European Green Party, which in the previous elections allied itself with Más País and which in 2014, for example, ran with Compromís.
Yolanda Díaz has tried from the beginning to build bridges between these two political families. In fact, at last year’s meeting of the Greens, in which she participated via conference, she opted to create a “new European political subject that unites greens and progressives from diverse traditions.” Sumar sources explain that this will be the message she will convey this weekend: “Social justice and climate justice are two sides of the same coin, and that is why Sumar’s environmentalism is that of the social majorities and working people.”
The Minister of Labor, Sumar maintains, believes that it is necessary for the left, the progressives and the greens to act in Europe as “a historic bloc” to act both against economic inequalities and the effects of the climate emergency.
Meeting in October with The Left
In fact, her team remembers that the second vice president will also be present at the meeting of The Left in Madrid in two weeks, on October 10 and 11, where she will coincide with the leader of IU, Alberto Garzón, and also with the leaders. from Podemos Ione Belarra and Irene Montero. “It is very important that the European families of the greens and the left have chosen our country to hold their annual meetings. It sends an unequivocal message about Sumar, which aspires to be the common home of the transformative forces in Spain and Europe,” they say in Sumar.
In the political platform of Yolanda Díaz, which today is only an electoral coalition but which plans to develop as a party once the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez passes, they believe that these two events are “a starting signal” for the Sumar project. towards the European elections. In the short term, it is the most important political event that this emerging political force will face.
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