Coming Out Ahead

Surprisingly, Sumar’s polling suggests that a reorganised left could come out of its gruelling term as PSOE’s junior partner in a stronger position — at least electorally. That would be a remarkable achievement given the challenges of the last four years.

Excluded from the major ministries, Unidas Podemos has had to accept a series of unpalatable decisions in foreign, defence, and immigration policies while painstakingly advancing its social agenda against PSOE resistance in areas where it holds portfolios. Particularly during Iglesias’s final months in the cabinet, defined by governmental deadlock and falling polling numbers, it looked like the Left would leave office an exhausted force.

As the Podemos founder stepped away from frontline politics, there was a recognition that his attempts to combine a left–populist critique of the Spanish state with participation in government had largely failed in the post-pandemic terrain. Highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias, and speech laws, as well as public infighting within the coalition, appeared as ‘noise’ to a weary, progressive electorate — even if what Iglesias had to say was often valid and important.

A series of regional election disasters further underscored how the major concepts of the post-Indignados Spanish left — rupture from the post-Franco 1978 constitutional regime, democratic revolution, new versus old politics — had lost their mobilising power. A prolonged phase of decline, it seemed, was inevitable.

Yet these first two years of the coalition also saw Díaz’s rapid rise, as well as her deepening alliance with Spain’s major trade unions, Comisiones Obreras and UGT. The close working relationship between her ministry and unions was key to advancing a more substantive labour law reform than many in PSOE and Brussels were comfortable with, as well as to securing a raft of measures aimed at protecting living standards as the cost-of-living crisis deepened.

Under pressure from the Left and the unions, PSOE has agreed over the last year to inflation-level increases of the minimum wage, public pensions, and key welfare programmes, as well as to the imposition of a temporary wealth tax and moderate windfall taxes on the energy giants and banks. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has also accepted Unidas Podemos’ emergency proposals to slash transport fares (including making commuter and medium-distance trains free for at least sixteen months) and to intervene in the electricity market with a partial cap. These were measures that greatly contributed to Spain ending 2022 with the lowest inflation levels in the eurozone (at 5.5 percent, compared to an average 9.2 percent).

Widening the Base

As Díaz launched Sumar in July 2022, she insisted the experience of implementing policies of social protection and state intervention could provide the Left with a fresh set of coordinates for a new majoritarian project — one capable of widening the Left’s electoral base, as the early Podemos had done in 2015. As one of the coordinators overseeing the platform’s programme, Antonio Baylos, professor of labour law, recently argued that Sumar’s focus had to be less on identitarian struggles and more on ‘a material politics’ that can offer Spain’s public a tangible alternative to discredited neoliberal formulas.

In this respect, Sumar’s messaging has emphasised bread-and-butter achievements in office while, at the same time, positioning the new platform as a deeper reforming project that has aspirations beyond the confines of the coalition government. At the unveiling of Sumar’s programme in January, Díaz even invoked the Beveridge Report and Clement Attlee’s 1945 UK Labour government as precedents. In a period of ‘epochal change comparable to the 1940s’, she argued that a progressive decade could be won in Spain with a politics based on social protection in the face of growing uncertainty, renewed agency for the public sector, and an expansion of labour and social rights.

Though Sumar’s ten-year programme ‘for a new country’ remains a work in progress, she has flagged several policy priorities. Talking about the conditions highlighted in the slogan ‘minimum wage, maximum rent’, Díaz says that the two immediate challenges facing Spain are combating income inequality and guaranteeing housing as a fundamental right. Longer-term goals include expanding democracy into the workplace and broadening social rights in healthcare so as to include free universal dental and optical care. In this respect, she is attempting a balancing act of pointing to the incremental gains of the last three years as proof the Left can govern effectively while also seeking distance from PSOE through the promise of a much more transformative agenda.

Díaz has also argued that nine years after Podemos’ initial electoral breakthrough, the Spanish left requires a major reorganisation — with Sumar having to go beyond a simple alliance between the existing parties. The platform’s initial phase of development has involved a series of public events across Spain, which have taken place without formal involvement from any left-wing party and have been conceived as a ‘listening process’ between Díaz and civil society. This route has created major tensions between Díaz and the Podemos leadership, with the latter refusing to attend Sumar’s formal launch in early April due to disputes over candidate selection.

But, Díaz argues, the platform needs to move away from internal wrangling. Seen from this perspective, the construction of Sumar at a distance from the existing forces has been necessary to ensure her capacity to exercise authority over a fractious left space. The aim seems to be to generate organisational muscle and a cadre of her own before sitting down with the parties to negotiate a joint electoral slate. An important part of this leading cadre is coming from the world of organised labour, in particular from the Comisiones Obreras union of which Díaz’s father was a founding figure during the Franco dictatorship. ‘This is another difference with Podemos,’ her adviser argues, ‘where most of the original leadership was recruited from student politics or a professional background.’

An Election Year

As Spain approaches local and regional elections in May and a general election in December, polls are on a knife-edge. Facing renewed corruption scandals as well as declining support in its traditional southern heartland of Andalucía, PSOE increasingly looks like the weak link in terms of securing a second term for the progressive coalition — with most polls showing them trailing the right-wing Popular Party by two to five points.

Much will depend on the economic situation, with workers facing fresh pain through soaring food prices and repeated European Central Bank interest rate hikes. Díaz has called for further emergency measures in response, while the unions are seeking a 13.84 percent minimum increase in salaries across Spain for the three-year period from 2022 to 2024.

No such national agreement seems forthcoming, however, and despite salaries rising on average by only 2.69 percent in 2022, the country has so far not seen an equivalent to the current strike waves in the UK and France — pointing to the limits of managing the cost-of-living crisis through a framework of social democratic governance and social partnership agreements.

Nor will managing intra-left tensions be easy as Díaz seeks to finalise a united electoral slate around Sumar. With the progressive and right-wing electoral blocs so evenly poised, the election is likely to be decided by who finishes third behind PSOE and the Popular Party — Sumar or the far-right Vox.

A second term in office with a more favourable balance of power is on the table for the Left, and with it a more transformative legislative agenda. But a hard-right coalition with Vox’s Santiago Abascal as interior minister is the other most likely outcome. In an era that often prompts writers to reach for historical parallels, the choice is more than a little familiar.