Sumar is a movement-like formation that was formed quickly and with currents aiming to run in the 2022 elections: it meant the liquidation (or, at least, a severe blow) to the Podemos project and the definitive push for Yolanda Díaz (it is good to remember, against the cliché of history and history, its own culture) as the leader of a new Spanish left. Díaz was supposed to represent a softer and more flexible, but also more pragmatic, leadership, as opposed to the hyper-leaderships that had weighed down Podemos since its inception: that of Pablo Iglesias, above all others, but also those of Errejón, Monedero, or Irene Montero herself. Sectarianism, as well as personalism and egotism, have largely been the weakest point of the transformative movements that have emerged both in Catalonia and Spain in recent years, from the independence movement to the 15-M movement, including feminism, environmentalism, and whatever you want.
Sumar was built with the participation of some twenty political parties, many of them with their satellites, rings, confluences, etc. Given this complexity, which could be understood as its most evident weakness, Sumar sought to champion and present itself as the party that best represented the plurality: ideological, but also linguistic, cultural, and national, of the Spanish state, which the Spanish left has often rejected and fought as vigorously as, or even more so than, the right. The conflicts generated by the articulation of such internal diversity have been, along with the problems inherent in being the junior partner in a coalition government (of the first coalition government in Spain, a country with little or no tradition of focusing on plurality), the main problem that has plagued Sumar in these less than three years. Left-wing pro-independence parties that joined from the Catalan countries, such as Compromís al País Valencià or Més por Mallorca, have suffered particularly, sometimes struggling to make themselves heard with the power they deserved, despite the excellent work of parliamentarians such as Valencia's Àgueda Micó or Mallorca.
At a time when all the Western left find themselves in a dead end of how to know how to respond to the collapse of welfare societies (no one really knows) and the rise of the extreme right, in a vicious circle of causes and effects, the more or less refounding assembly of Sumar (which aims, this time, to unite everyone, including Podemos), recalls a fact that is especially visible in Spain: that the ultra-nationalist right is so powerful and intrusive that countering it, and eventually defeating it, requires the combined efforts of all minorities, no matter how diverse they may be. This is a general principle, and even more so in light of the 2027 elections, which everyone is already thinking about.
