Sumar already has a name that could lead his candidacy for the February 18 elections in Galicia. This Wednesday, the company's management will propose its speaker in the House of Representatives, the Galician Marta Lois, as the headliner of its first regional elections, two sources close to the process confirm. His appointment will be presented to the promoter of Sumar Galicia at a meeting at five in the afternoon and will be officially announced an hour and a half later at an event in Santiago chaired by Yolanda Díaz.
Lois (Vigo, 1969) is a person of the greatest trust of the Vice President and, until the elections of June 23 last year, a complete unknown in national politics. However, this university professor of political science, who acts as president of Movimiento Sumar, has already served as councilor for equality, economic development and tourism in the Santiago City Council with the Compostela Aberta group, the communalist movement that governed the city between 2015 and 2019 with Martiño Noriega at the top. Over the past five months, as Speaker of the House of Commons, he has stood out for his discretion and a profile that is not prone to getting into puddles.
For the Labor leader, who has been looking for a candidate since the summer and preferred a woman, there is a lot at stake in these elections, where she launches her project in some regional elections. Furthermore, he does so in his homeland and in a difficult situation for the Allied forces, which were expelled from the Galician parliament in 2020 after becoming the leading opposition force four years earlier. After Anova closed the door on a candidacy with Sumar, the vice president's options had narrowed. The election of Lois, if she decides to resign from her seat, opens the door to changes in the organization of the faction, where the position she held is crucial and largely determines the character of the project.
The elections in Galicia will be the first test of the year for Sumar, but also for Podemos, before the elections in Euskadi and the European elections. Since an alliance between Díaz's program and Ione Belarra's formation is virtually impossible, it will be more difficult for the party to regain representation. The organization launched this Tuesday an express consultation on the choice of the Xunta presidential candidate. According to the calendar, all interested parties who wanted to run for the primaries had to submit their candidacy throughout the day, which must be confirmed this Wednesday by the Autonomous Citizens' Council before voting takes place on Thursday and Friday. The results will be announced on Saturday.
Area Codes in the Belarra Organization
Meanwhile, in the deepest hours after the setback in regional and local elections on May 28, Podemos also began this Tuesday the processes to renew eight of the party's regional executives. In half of them, some candidates, all from the hard core of the leadership or relatives, have already officially announced or announced their intention to run for the leadership of the party in their municipality, a move that, if successful, will make national leadership possible would retain control of the territories. These are the speakers Isa Serra (Madrid), Javier Sánchez Serna (Murcia) and María Teresa Pérez (Valencian Community) as well as the head of Podem in Catalonia, Conchi Abellán. The party, which left government this term and broke with Sumar three weeks ago when its five MPs moved to the Congress's mixed group, faces a difficult start at the start of the year with the challenge of establishing a territorial structure strengthen, which was extremely weakened after the debacle in the polls, the launch of the ERE and the resignation of some voices criticizing the opposition strategy towards Yolanda Díaz's platform. At the same time, management is starting the primaries for the European elections on June 9th, in which it has already announced the candidacy of Irene Montero.
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Podemos currently has eight directorates that are pending renewal, either because it was required by law or because their leaders have resigned in recent months. These are Asturias, Aragon, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, the Murcia Region, the Valencian Community and Madrid. Three of them have not been represented in the regional parliaments since 28-M and five are burdened by the resignation of their coordinators.
This is the case, for example, in Asturias, where last September the former MP Sofía Castañón announced her final resignation from all party positions after months of absence. That same weekend, it was announced that Podemos had expelled its only regional parliamentarian, Covadonga Tomé, after deeming her actions to be damaging to the party's image. The MP had been highly critical of the party's central and regional leadership and even locked herself in headquarters for days before the May election campaign to demand that one of her members who had been suspended from militancy not be removed from the list becomes. . The crisis in the principality dates back to December 2021, when Castañón's executive (near Belarra) won the primaries for the first time amid allegations of fraud and the party was split in two. In the last regional elections, Podemos lost three of the four MPs it won in 2019, while the candidacy of IU and Más País rose from two to three and entered government.
The coordinators of Aragón (Maru Díaz), the Balearic Islands (Antònia Jover) and the Valencian Community (Pilar Lima) were still in shock due to the poor results and announced their resignation after March 28th. In all three cases, Podemos evolved from being part of the regional executive to opposition or even remaining in an extra-parliamentary situation, as in the case of Valencia. In this municipality, the party's co-spokeswoman, María Teresa Pérez, who served as director of Injuve in the last legislative session, has already run.
The party also lost all representations in the last regional elections on the Canary Islands and in Madrid. The case of Madrid, the region where the party was born almost ten years ago, is particularly symbolic. Isa Serra, candidate for the presidency of the Community in 2019 and advisor in the Ministry of Equality alongside Montero in recent years, proposed herself as a candidate following the resignation of Jesús Santos in the same month. The deputy mayor of Alcorcón, who was close to Díaz, left with a loud slam on the door. “The clash with Sumar is incomprehensible (…) My political differences with the leading core of Podemos are enormous today,” he said in a letter published on the same day that Belarra's party met with the vice president's coalition in Congress broke. The departure of Santos is compounded by the departure of the youngest candidates for the municipality and city council of the capital: Alejandra Jacinto and Roberto Sotomayor. With the party in disarray and no seats left, the challenge facing Serra if elected is enormous.
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