Sumar retains 31 seats and plots to reaffirm the coalition government with the Socialist Workers Party

Somar retained 3 million votes in the United We Can space – despite the concentration of votes achieved by the Socialist Workers’ Party, reaching 7.5 million ballots – and remained above 30 seats, which would allow him to try to reassert his coalition government with Pedro Sanchez and his alliance with progressive and multinational formations. “Today Spain and Europe are breathing better,” said candidate Yolanda Diaz. The applause received, at the edge of eleven o’clock at night, upon his arrival at Somar’s headquarters – Espacio Lara, headquarters of the Diario Madrid Foundation – revealed the intense pressure with which his candidacy was dethroned to form the restive left coalition and retain the vote in the political space after the tensions with Podemos.

Soummar failed to overtake Vox by a narrow margin of votes, making his votes more profitable in the seats, but his numbers were sufficient to try again for inauguration with the Socialist Workers Party. The twist of the night at Sumar headquarters turned from initial anxiety to later hope and then to optimism, given the evidence that the thousand times scariest and most terrifying scenario by opinion polls, PP-Vox’s absolute majority, did not come true. When the count reached 40% and the Socialist Workers’ Party remained ahead of the PP, it became clear that no matter how far the count developed in favor of the People’s Party, an absolute majority was beyond the reach of the right.

“Today people will sleep easier because democracy has won today and come out stronger. We have won,” declared Yolanda Diaz when she appeared minutes before midnight in a festive atmosphere that celebrated the possibility of reconstituting the coalition government as an electoral victory. The Acting Vice-President considered the re-certification of the alliance with the Socialist Workers Party and the rest of the so-called Inauguration Bloc as a fact, and affirmed: “From tomorrow I will start a dialogue with all the progressive and democratic forces of our country to guarantee the government in Spain.”

Surrounded by the first swords of Sumar and the Coalition of the Left – Ernest Urtason, Mónica García, Ioney Pilara, Alberto Garzón, Rita Maestri and Onigo Eregón, among others – Díaz declared that the election results showed that “hope defeats fear” and declared that “starting from tomorrow we will better govern our country, we will give to reason a better peace”.

The result – almost identical in votes to that of Unidas Podemos in November 2019, although with a lower number of seats – fortuitously solves the open crisis inward due to the reconfiguration of the left, since the possibility of returning to power alongside the Socialists nullifies any assault on the internal opposition and validates Diaz’s leadership over a very complex political space made up of fifteen organisations. In this sense, Diaz realized that the electoral progress shortened the runway of his electoral platform and after the complex negotiations to include Podemos in the coalition, he stressed that the history of the new program is “very short” but insisted on thanking “those who supported the initiative from the beginning”, in particular those who participated “in the working groups and in the listening process” that Diaz toured the country for a year.

Diaz emphasized that Sumar’s role was crucial in the campaign by avoiding polarization and changing “the text that talks about the problems of citizenship”. In this sense, he affirmed that Soumar will not be “distracted, and from tomorrow we will continue to work for a better country with more rights.”

Analysis 23-j