Four of the six parties that make up the left-wing coalition For Andalusia, led by Inma Nieto (IU), have met this Monday urgently to expel their representative, the deputy of Podemos Alejandra Durán, from the Parliamentary Table, and replace her with another of its parliamentarians, the leader of Más País Andalucía, Esperanza Gómez, who also plays the role of deputy spokesperson for the group.
Barely two months have passed since the Andalusian Parliament was constituted, on July 14, and even less since Durán became part of the governing body of the Chamber as a member of the left-wing coalition with a voice, but without a vote. IU sources attribute the abrupt replacement of the purple deputy, advanced by ABCto “dysfunctions” in their behavior and “lack of preparation” to occupy a fundamental position in the Table, however, these sources refuse to give further explanations or offer any examples of these “dysfunctions”.
To date, only two plenary sessions have been held in the Andalusian Parliament: that of its constitution and that of the appointment of the nine senators by the autonomous community (both of formal format and little political margin). In these two months – August is a non-working day and the Chamber remains closed – the Table has met once more, but Durán’s role is quite limited, since he cannot exercise the vote like the rest of the groups.
The executive of Podemos Andalucía, in coordination with the state leadership, has met to analyze the last crisis of the coalition with deep discomfort. Sources from the purple formation assure that they had not been informed of this Monday’s meeting with the rest of the parties, they reproach IU for not even letting the first period of sessions begin to assess Durán’s work at the Table, and they frame their expulsion in a veiled strategy to force the Podemos deputies to leave the parliamentary group. “This is a humiliation, but it is not our will to leave on our own feet,” these sources explain.
Alejandra Durán, head of the Podemos list for Granada, is part of the Andalusian leadership and held a seat in the Parliament’s management body by virtue of the agreement reached by IU and the purple formation to unravel the coalition before the Andalusian elections last June. That bilateral pact between the two parties with the most weight in the confluence arrived late, minutes before the deadline to register with the Electoral Board and, consequently, Podemos was left out as a legitimate member of the coalition.
The rest of the political formations that did sign their alliance with the IU under the acronym of For Andalusia -More Country, Andalusian People’s Initiative and Equo- do not recognize the terms of the agreement signed between the communists and the purple party, and which involved a distribution of representation positions in Parliament and in parliamentary extraction bodies, starting positions on electoral lists and financing. The decision to expel Durán from the Table of the Chamber has been adopted in the “coordination table” of Por Andalucía, a body yet to be defined that lacks a regulatory development, but in which the six member parties must be represented.
Podemos was not at that meeting and they denounce the lack of legitimacy of said body to adopt political decisions of this caliber without the internal rules of the group having yet been reflected in a document validated by the Chamber.
The president and spokesperson for Por Andalucía, Inma Nieto, is the one who has submitted a letter to the governing body of Parliament to request his replacement by Gómez. Podemos has shown her disagreement and visible anger on social networks, expressly accusing IU of being traitors. This is the umpteenth mess of an electoral coalition that was born with expectations of widening the political space of the left by uniting the forces of all the parties of the Andalusian progressive arch, but that was reduced to five deputies, the minimum to preserve a parliamentary group.
In that group, IU only occupies one seat – Nieto’s -, while Podemos has three deputies, and Más País has one. The purples have more representation and political weight, but they are not part of the registered coalition, so their room for maneuver in the decisions of the parliamentary group is very small. The latest episode of internal crisis in the leftist coalition reproduces once again the pulse that preceded the presentation of the candidacy, with IU and Podemos throwing the junk at each other’s heads.
A political instrument that was born in fits and starts, with an image of disunity and disloyalty that ended up splashing the unborn political project of the Vice President of the Government Yolanda Díaz, at the time godmother of Por Andalucía and an accomplice of IU in its internal pulse with Podemos. This new chapter occurs without even starting the new period of sessions in the Andalusian Parliament, which celebrates its first plenary session this Wednesday.
The left-wing coalition, under the umbrella of Díaz, obtained five deputies and their legislative margin is residual: they have a quota to present a non-law proposal, an interpellation to the Government of Juan Manuel Moreno and two oral questions per session period, that is to say , from September to December (in addition to the direct questions to the president in the control sessions every 15 days).
Por Andalucía was going to be the advance guard of Yolanda Díaz’s political project facing the general elections -which has finally adopted the name of Sumar- and had the vice president and Minister of Labor during the electoral campaign, with three massive rallies in which she supported to Nieto and made visible a forced approach to the state leadership of Podemos (with Ione Belarra and Irene Montero).
After the electoral failure of the left in the Andalusians, which gave birth to the historic absolute majority of the PP in this community, Díaz has marked distances with this coalition, setting it as an example of what not to do. In a recent interview with this newspaper, he admitted that there were leaders of different parties under the same acronym that “couldn’t see each other, that they didn’t even talk to each other.”
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