Yolanda Díaz announced this Monday her resignation as general coordinator of Sumar after the poor showing of the Spanish left-wing grouping that she leads in the European elections on Sunday. The party obtained only three MEPs, finishing with fewer than the Ara Repúbliques coalition led by Catalonia's ERC and the Basques EH Bildu, and only winning 12,000 more votes than the Se Acabó la Fiesta candidacy ("The Party is Over") of the far-right activist Alvise Pérez. Moreover, it was neck and neck with Podemos throughout the state, and in Catalonia the candidacy of the latter, led by Irene Montero, surpassed that of Yolanda Díaz's party - a sharp turnaround on the fortunes of the two left-wing rivals in the general election on July 23rd last year. In an appearance recorded and broadcast by the party early this Monday afternoon, Yolanda Díaz resigned from her party leadership role without explicitly stating whether she wants to continue as second deputy prime minister in the Spanish executive, although she has said that her " obligation' is to 'ensure that progressive government turns disaffection into rights and hope'. Socialist sources in the Moncloa government palace confirm to ElNacional.cat that, of course, they expect her to keep his institutional positions.
"The people are not wrong when they vote and these elections have served as a mirror," indicated the Spanish labour minister, who made it explicit that with regard to Sumar's poor results, "they are my responsibility". On Sunday, she opted to be absent from the election night Sumar photograph; leaving the minister Ernest Urtasun and the party's candidate for the European elections, Estrella Galán, alone on stage. According to Yolanda Díaz, with her decision to step aside, a "collective debate" opens both within Sumar, as well as "in the organizations that are part of it".
From attempting to destroy Podemos to abandoning the leadership of the party
With this Monday's appearance, Yolanda Díaz closes a cycle in which she placed Podemos in danger of extinction, but was not able to create a powerful enough brand on the Spanish alternative left. She sought to devour the original anti-austerity brand, and to do so tried to decapitate its most visible player: Irene Montero, who was the very candidate who, this Sunday, led Podemos to a respectable 2 seats in the European Parliament and caused Sumar to have a disastrous result. Díaz's relationship with Podemos has been so bad that the party led by Ione Belarra split from the Sumar voting discipline in the Congress of Deputies and went to the Mixed Group, parliamentary home of the small parties and miscellaneous MPs.
This very Monday, minutes before Yolanda Díaz appeared, the Spanish Socialist (PSOE) spokesperson, Esther Peña, was asked about Sumar's poor results, and appealed to the unity of the left in order to stand up to the right: in Sunday's European elections, the sum of PP, Vox and SALF would have been enough to form an absolute majority in a hypothetical hemicycle of Spanish-only MEPs. In her media appearance, Yolanda Díaz acknowledged that she has not lived up to what was expected of her, and that she has not been able to "do the things she had to do" or the things "she best knows how to do".