Hear
ATHENS.- When Pablo Iglesias and then Can They left the Spanish government, Pedro Sanchez He believed he had taken a stone out of his shoe, especially for his international relations. Her harmony with the discreet vice president Yolanda Diaz, leader of Sumar, seemed total. However, the controversy generated by Díaz’s recent proclamation on Palestine – in which he asked that it was “free from the river to the sea”– shows that the differences in attitude between the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and its partners on the radical left are rather structural.
After Díaz’s controversial statement in a video uploaded to his X account, while celebrating Sánchez’s announcement about Spain’s imminent recognition of the Palestinian State, the government of Israel He called her “ignorant” and anti-Semitic. and announced new measures in the framework of the bilateral diplomatic crisis. The second vice president, for her part, said that with that slogan – which for her critics, represents an incitement to the destruction of Israel-, she actually sought to support the two-state formula for the Middle East.
This Saturday, the Spanish Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, of the PSOE, claimed other statements by Díaz about the conflict and affirmed that the Israeli offensive in Gaza is a “genuine genocide”, a comment that will continue to inflame bilateral tension.
Yolanda Díaz was also one of the main spokespersons for the criticism against Javier Milei when the Argentine president was in Madrid the last weekend. “Milei and other governments of hate return with cuts and authoritarianism,” launched, before the diplomatic crisis broke out between the two countries.
As Minister of Labor and second vice president, Díaz was characterized by a calm management of discrepancies, and by a rather low profile in international politics. However, perhaps due to her current need to compete with Podemos to gain space on the left of the PSOE, Díaz is adopting more strident positions in line with the postulates of the classic left. Last week, the PSOE and Sumar voted differently on up to nine motions in Congress, most of them related to the international sphere, on issues such as the self-determination of Western Sahara, the shipment of weapons to Ukraine or the condemnation of repression in Venezuela.
And behind Díaz’s omnipresent sweet smile hides an ambitious policy with a will of steel. His former party colleagues in Podemos would also add “unscrupulous”. Not in vain, Iglesias and his people consider that Díaz committed a sin of high treason for having tried to engulf and dissolve Podemos within Sumar, his electoral experiment before last year’s general election. And this, despite the fact that Iglesias himself was the one who had chosen her as her successor just over a year before.
Emboldened by surveys that placed her as the highest-rated politician in Spain, and with the aspiration – or fantasy – of competing with the PSOE to be the progressive force with the most votes, Díaz believed that Podemos had become a liability. She wanted to occupy a more centered space. After the general elections, where Podemos and Sumar reluctantly ran under the same list, the foreseeable rupture between both parties was consummated.
“Díaz is a politician with a lot of intuition, who knows how to measure power relations very well, and acclimatizes to them”explains political scientist Antón Losada, Galician like her. In fact, although he has always been a member of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), in his political life he has appeared on the lists of a veritable alphabet soup of parties and platforms, always choosing the most successful of the various splits and confluences of the left. Galician and Spanish: he was the leader of Esquerda Unida, he was part of the Alternativa Galega de Esquerda coalition, and later the brands En Marea and En Común, in addition to Podemos, of course.
However, this time, for the moment, the sense of smell seems to have failed, because the result of their bet has not been as expected. Although Sumar has come out ahead of his Podemos rivals in the elections held since the breakup, The electoral harvest has been meager for both. For example, in the Galician elections no one managed to enter Parliament. And in the Basques, Sumar was left with one seat, a poor balance compared to the six that Podemos had.
Born in a town near La Coruña, Díaz grew up in a family of solid communist credentials. His father, a member of the PCE, was general secretary of the Comisiones Obreras union, and his uncle became a deputy in the Parliament of Galicia. Already at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he was studying law, he had the makings of a political leader.
“We played politics, she was already a politician. She had a clear vision, for the future, of any debate. When we went out to have some wines, there was the table for the young people and the table for the elderly. Although she was our age, she was at the senior table,” recalls a former classmate. She was a nice, pleasant girl, with whom they used to have conversations at the university photocopier. “She liked me from minute one,” he adds.
After graduating in Right, continued her training specializing in labor relations, and at the age of 27 she opened her own office as a labor lawyer in Ferrol. They say that it was her professional practice that allowed her to acquire the necessary skills to become a formidable negotiator, something that she demonstrated by forging the labor reform of 2022 with the support of both employers and unionsan unprecedented milestone during Spanish democracy.
His political career is the story of a dazzling rise. In 2005, at only 34 years old, she was the headliner of Izquierda Unida – a platform that included the PCE – in the Galician elections, but did not win any seats. He held his first public office two years later as deputy mayor of Ferrol, the town where the dictator was born. Francisco Franco, but where curiously the Communist Party has always obtained good results. In 2012, he repeated his candidacy for the Galician Parliament, but this time at the head of a broader coalition that achieved great success with 9 deputies.
In 2015, she made the leap to Spanish politics and was elected deputy in the Congress of Deputies for La Coruña, a seat that she has subsequently revalidated in each election. In the following legislature, and within the framework of the coalition government between the PSOE and Podemos, Pedro Sánchez appointed her Minister of Labor and Social Economy. His success with the approval of the labor reform catapulted his popularity and paved his way to the succession of Iglesias as vice president of the government. Now he aspires to become the great lady of the Spanish left, like another communist was a century ago. Dolores Ibárruri, “the passion flower”.
