During her visit to the Valencian Community, Yolanda Díaz had one of the most difficult stops in the caravan of events that she is carrying out in the campaign for the regional and municipal elections on May 28. The second vice president, appointed in her day by Unidas Podemos, had debated when designing these electoral acts between offering her support to that coalition or to Compromís, the hegemonic force of the progressive space in the region and to which Díaz has winked. during the formation of Sumar. The result was a Solomonic decision: strong support for the UP candidate for the Generalitat, Héctor Illueca, and a call to the population to vote to revalidate the mayoralty held by the leader of Compromís, Joan Ribó.
The key week of United We Can decant the majorities in Madrid and the Valencian Community
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The act that was programmed on Wednesday in Alicante did not offer too many doubts. A campaign rally, organized by Unides Podem, with the presence of local candidates and Illueca himself. The image had powerful symbolic power: one of the main regional weights of Podemos on the same stage as Díaz after months of tensions with Ione Belarra’s party. Purple T-shirts proliferated among the public and the leaders received a warm welcome with shouts of “Yes, we can”, which some accompanied with their fists and others with rhythmic applause.
“The game is played here, with names and surnames, those of Héctor Illueca, they are the guarantee of the Botànic, of a government of progress, that we continue to govern for the common people,” cried the Minister of Labor. “It is very clear that the people of Valencia want social rights, dignity, minimum wage, feminism… They want joy, another way of doing things (…) We have to defeat them politically, that vote is called Unides Podem and that vote is called Héctor Illueca. Yes, you can, ”she encouraged later. Yolanda Díaz appealed to the “concentration of the vote” to make possible the reissue of the current government of the PSOE, Compromís and those of Illueca. According to the surveys, this possibility of a third Botànic pact passes through the entry of the list of the confederal space in parliament.
“Make it possible for Ribó to maintain the mayor’s office”
The second scene was programmed from the Valencian beach of El Saler. A large group of ecologists belonging to the platforms of the Comissió Ciutat-Port met there on Wednesday to try to explain to the vice president the negative effects that the presence of the city’s port, which the Government (PSOE) has decided to expand. From the sand of the coast, bathed by the polluted sea, the giant cranes of the port and the silhouettes of the freighters stand out on the horizon, which could multiply if the project goes ahead.
The objective of the visit, organized by the group itself, was to be able to take advantage of the presence of the vice president to strengthen her fight against the macro-project in the face of public opinion. But the eyes of the political journalists were focused elsewhere: specifically on the balancing act that anticipated the presence at that event of the two candidates from the left to the left of the PSOE for the city, the mayor Ribó and the candidate for Unites Podem, Pilar Lima.
After the walk, Díaz made some statements to express his rejection of the project, which has the approval of the socialist part of the national government, and then took the opportunity to explain the reason for his presence in the city during the electoral period. “I ask the people of Valencia to make it possible for the Valencia mayor’s office to continue in the hands of Joan Ribó with the support of the progressive forces,” he said before the attentive look of Pilar Lima behind him. She was asked if she was also asking for the vote for the Unides Podem candidate.
Yolanda Díaz’s strategy in this community makes sense, despite the discomfort generated on one side and the other by the support for Illueca first and then Ribó, both formations understand. In the Community, the candidacy of Unides Podem is decisive for the left to preserve its options to revalidate the Government and the difference between 4.9% and 5% means going from zero seats to seven in the regional parliament. And as a consequence, an almost certain victory for the PP that would revalidate power. Although most polls show a tight scenario in this struggle, those around Illueca are calm and believe that they will reach above that percentage. They maintain that in recent days there has been a transfer of voters from Compromís that the polls are not being able to detect.
But the situation is different in the city, where Unides Podem currently has no representation and where Lima is also struggling to overcome the barrier of representation but from a more complicated starting position. In order to prevent the PP from recovering the baton of command –in a city where it has not governed since 2015, when Rita Barberá lost the government in which she had sat uninterruptedly since 1991–, it is essential that Compromís once again exhibit the muscle of four years ago, but with the warning that the polls already imposed on him then: the difference between left and right was barely 200 votes.
However, Yolanda Díaz’s statements in favor of Ribó instantly felt bad within Unides Podem, which had foreseen that the walk through El Saler would be a non-electoral act and in which it was not scheduled, they regret, for the minister to do such an explicit position for her electoral rival, even more so when Lima, who left in the middle of Díaz’s statements to attend another act, was still present when the minister publicly covered the mayor.
The anger in some sectors of the coalition was cooled down a little later by sources from Podemos in the Community who understood the movement of the vice president. “Yolanda Díaz has stated that she wants Ribó to continue being mayor with the support of the rest of the progressive forces. What implies the vote and the entry of Unides Podem as a condition of possibility for that to be the case”, which valued the presence of Lima at the event. “The important thing today was to reaffirm our position against the expansion of the port, which could put such important ecosystems in the Albufera or the beaches enjoyed by the Valencians at risk,” the same sources pointed out.
From the Compromís side, they did not show excessive concern about Díaz’s support for Illueca on Wednesday, which in any case was much more resounding, with all that the presence at a campaign rally implies. “We are focused on what is ours,” said the candidate of the Valencian coalition for the Generalitat, Joan Baldoví, on Thursday. “I am of an age that I see everything well; I am running a campaign, I think it is very clean, elegant, focused on our proposals, on what we have achieved in these eight years, and everything seems perfect to me, ”he said. “I’m not going to fight with anyone over some statements,” he added.
Preliminary to the negotiations with Sumar
The difficulties that Yolanda Díaz has had when designing this campaign –not only in Valencia, but also in Madrid– are directly linked to Sumar, the project that the second vice president is designing to unite the entire left to the left of the PSOE in the same platform. To form his platform, Díaz had begun to talk before the elections with the forces of the progressive space but that instance of dialogue was postponed until after this campaign at the request of Más Madrid and Compromís, who rejected a real negotiation until after these elections where these formations, of a more regionalist or localist nature, play a large part of their prestige.
Yolanda Díaz’s ambition consists of rebuilding the space for unity that was generated in 2015 around Unidas Podemos and even widening it a little more, but for this she has the difficult objective of reconciling parties that split directly from the formation led by Ione Belarra or with which relationships that were once good but have gone sour over time. As of 28M, the negotiations will begin for the formation of the list for the generals, where the first stone will be the resolution of the tensions that have been experienced in this campaign in places like Valencia or the Pradera de San Isidro last week.
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