As Spain enters an election year that will include municipal, regional and national votes, the woman who is, according to polls, its most popular politician is touring the country to build support for leftwing candidates.
Yolanda Díaz, the deputy prime minister and a lifelong member of the Communist party, is heading Sumar (Unite), a platform to the left of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, that plans to put up candidates at the general election due on 10 December.
On Saturday, 2,000 people filled the Auditori in Barcelona to hear Díaz speak, while a further 1,000 were turned away. She made her entrance to pounding, Rocky-style music and a standing ovation alongside Ada Colau, the Barcelona mayor and a leading supporter of the Sumar project.
Colau introduced Díaz, saying she represented “hope and the prospect of utopia”. She said: “Yolanda gives us the right to dream and to hope. We hope she will be the first woman prime minister of Spain.”
Díaz lost no time in reassuring her Catalan audience that she recognised that 40% of people in the region would like to secede from Spain.
In an apparent sideswipe at Sánchez, who has declared the independence process dead, she said: “I hear big words that appear to say that you’ve closed a chapter of your history. I don’t know about that but, in any case, it will be time and the people who decide the history of our country.”
That said, Díaz is not pro-independence and her project is for “a diverse and plural country”. She says repeatedly that only through unity and the inclusion and respect for its various national identities can Spain avoid the barbarism of the far right.
“We’re living through an epochal change and we need to unite to formulate the radical policies to make this happen,” she said. “If we don’t unite, we will lose all the rights we have fought so hard to gain.”
The emphasis on unity might be seen as ironic given that Sumar appears to be a breakaway from Unidas Podemos (UP), the coalition partner of Sánchez’s socialist-led government in which Díaz is a senior minister, and that this split may benefit the rightwing parties it aspires to defeat.
Sumar’s policies on labour reform, housing, women and social policy in general do not seem to diverge much from those of UP. Furthermore, she expressed her support for Catalunya en Comú, which is essentially the Catalan wing of Podemos. It remains unclear if, why and where Sumar candidates will stand against Podemos.
While Díaz was speaking in Barcelona, Ione Belarra, the general secretary of Podemos, was in Madrid presenting the party’s plan to offer a universal basic income of between €700 and €1,400 (£620-$1,240) a month to everyone over 18 years of age.
Díaz, who is also the labour minister, has longstanding leftwing credentials. Both her father and uncle were active though clandestine trade unionists and Communist party members during Franco’s dictatorship and Diáz recalls the Communist leader Santiago Carrillo kissing her hand when she was four years old.
As a member of Izquierda Unida she played a leading role in persuading her comrades to go into coalition with Sánchez’s government in order to push it further to the left. She left IU late in 2019 but remains a member of the Communist party.
Díaz’s candidacy has galvanised those on the left who are disenchanted with both the socialists and Podemos and whom the independence movement has marginalised in Catalonia.
“Our project for the country isn’t an electoral campaign, it’s bigger than that,” she said. “We have the chance to improve people’s lives. I think as a people we are up to the task of making a better country.”
