The ashes that remain from the most ambitious party that has had the most recent stage of Spanish democracy will surely be inherited by a Galician from 1971, Yolanda Díaz, distinguished by a verb that includes the gentle brilliance of her native language and the ability to put nervous to the most temperate of his political opponents, the secretary general of the right wing of the Popular Party, Teodoro García Egea.
Since Yolanda Díaz is vice president of the Pedro Sánchez Government, replacing Pablo Iglesias, the founder of Podemos, it is her turn every week to respond to the aforementioned senior official of the party that aspires to govern Spain using that verb that she inherited from Álvaro Cunqueiro, the fantasy writer who succeeded Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán on the throne of Galician literature.
As it is up to her to defend numbers, in her capacity as minister of the most complex of the social portfolios of the Government, Labor and Social Economy, the aforementioned García Egea struggles to get her out of her boxes.
However, the soft Galician, with a privileged memory, always has a data, the more complex the better, and the more numbers it contains even better, to leave the architect of the present political opposition defended by the aspiring Pablo Casado (PP) without arguments.
Educated in the factory to smack with a gloved hand, she is also the most solicitous of the opponents, a path that has led her to reach an agreement several times between the institutions most difficult to reconcile, the unions and the employers. She has achieved this by being just as flattering with some as with others, and that is how she is seen in the photographs, smiling on both sides as if she also had two faces.
It has another of the Galician attributes, patience, with which it reached the most difficult of social agreements, the political (and economic) repeal of the most stubborn of the laws approved in the recent past by the Popular Party, that of the Reform Labor. With the agreements reached, it will be more difficult to go on strike and it will be impossible for them to leave without receiving in exchange rights that the union left considers inviolable.
The extraordinary thing about this new legislation, contested by the Popular Party before it was released, is that it has been celebrated by previous leaders of the PP and burned in the public pyre by Casado and the current representatives of the parliamentary right. The kicking that has followed what is supposed to be the worst defeat of the legacy of the economic castle of Rajoy has, however, been embraced by the CEOE, the main strip of business representation, so that there has been an unprecedented chasm in the Spanish history of the relations of the two suits of the right, the economic and the political.
That destruction of old units without damage has been manufactured with smiles by Yolanda Díaz, and she is now in the air. Also in flight of herself. His predecessor in the vice-presidency of Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, was always considered a conflictive ego, even with himself, capable of being interested in the opinion that one has of him as soon as he stops talking about him … Like Camilo José Cela or José María Aznar or like so many scrambled egos that have been in the Spanish public scene, the leader of Podemos combined that ability to take an interest in himself while explaining the humility of his intentions as a public servant.
In such a way that he went down in history looking at himself in the mirror as Narcissus and when he left, he also took the broken mirror with him.
Yolanda Díaz has remade that mirror. In other ways, no doubt, as if he had learned from the mistakes of his predecessor, he has managed to make humility his fetish word, not because he really practices that Franciscan virtue, but because he wraps himself in it in such a way that it seems that he has the bare feet when in fact she is wearing the shoes that Cinderella wore after showing herself to be the loser of a night of dreams.
That expression of humility with which he presents himself in the luxurious forums of the Vatican or in the press conferences that he stars after the Council of Ministers or after his successes in the field of trade union struggle, is right now his identity card, his passport to a future in which it is included and excluded at the same time.
With other women in politics of her ideas, the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, or the Valencian vice president Mónica Oltra, launched a platform that aspires to expand the left area of Spanish life. And although that project is still underway and has her as the maximum leader, every time she is asked (and now they only ask her about that) about the future, she crosses herself out, evoking the humility with which she faces it, as if was rewriting If, the poem in which Rudyard Kipling advises fleeing from the pride of winning.
With that way of expressing both humility and its opposite, she recently explained that she knew before anyone else, in the Government, that there would be a pandemic, but she did not say it so as not to bother; With that stole on his shoulder, a mirror of vain humility, he faced as if it were the only visit to the Argentine Pope, whom he presented with a book by his countrywoman Rosalía de Castro, whom he adorned with virtues that marry the mantle of humility. that he also gave to the holy father and that some nuns had made and that now the pope will have among his possible outfits.
That Saturday visit to the Pope of Rome was the prelude to his recent union success, after which he presented himself to Spanish society as the one he wants and does not want. Her political nature pushes her to run for the highest judiciary in the nation (“my country”, she sometimes says) and at the same time to refuse herself to accept what her political heart says … In a long interview in EL PAÍS Jesus Sérvulo and José Manuel Romero made him last Sunday, Yolanda Díaz modulated in every possible way that Franciscan character with which he adorns his best oratorical finery, which includes what is politically correct today.
The journalists asked him about who wins and who loses in the trade unionist-business race. She said, “That’s very masculine. Who has won? The workers, and the country ”. As for who in the Government mistrusted the success of his administration, he expressed a variable of his humility proposal: “I am prudent.” About his way of relating to the success he stars in, these were some of his prayers: “I owe myself to my agreements and I keep them.” “I have had nothing but congratulations on this reform and I think it was not easy in this government.” “I will be prudent [con respecto a los interlocutores que dicen que ella no los ha llamado para reunirse]. When I say that we have spoken with everyone, it is even with groups that have only one deputy ”. In relation to the agreement itself: “It is a historic agreement.”
That mirror that she carries with her makes her say that she doesn’t work “for political applause”, she doesn’t care. “It’s very masculine,” he says, “that thing about power struggles. I’m not worried about medals, I am worried about my conscience ”. As for politics itself, she deduces from what she hears that Spain “is fed up with politics”, and does not say it, it seems, as an occurrence, but because “Spain is already getting to know me” and she knows that she herself does not know wants to “present to the elections” to which it is heading, without a doubt, the platform that she herself seems to preside over. No, she does not want: “I want to do something much more difficult, which is to open a conversation with Spanish society and change the parameters, because I believe that society is modern and it wants this, it does not want more politicians.”
“I am frank.” “Do I want to be vice president? Everybody already knows that not ”. “The goal is to improve my country and have a project, which is the only thing that encourages me, a project for the next decade. I’m already doing it in part ”. “I’m not into it and I mean it sincerely.” “I am not in a political project. That is metapolitics. This is not a political project, I think it is a social project ”.
With that dictionary of phrases, being and not being, being and not being, the most Galician of the descendants of Valle-Inclán and Álvaro Cunqueiro fulfills the old saying of his country according to which a Galician always pretends that he is going up or down when usually it is neither in one thing nor in the opposite.
Yolanda Díaz is exactly in the middle of the ladder now, and it is not known if it goes up or down, but she seems to know it much better than Pablo Iglesias, her predecessor, who stood in the middle of success without knowing that in reality for a long time he had lived with a failure that made him proclaim his triumph ahead of time.
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