"Teaming up with Gabriel [Rufián] seems like a great idea to me," Irene Montero said a few days ago, in a significant change of attitude. In Sumar, Montero's most hated enemy, Yolanda Díaz, has withdrawn from the front lines, making it clear that she will finish her current term as Vice President of the Spanish government, but will no longer run as a Sumar candidate. It was also a few days ago that Yolanda Díaz made clear her willingness to consider the possibility of uniting (or subsuming) Sumar into a broader project of the left—to the left of the PSOE—to run in the general elections, as proposed by the ERC spokesperson in Congress, the aforementioned Gabriel Rufián, now the white mermaid ( white blackbird(You'll have to excuse me) of the left, of what Salvador Espriu called the bull's hide. That is to say: Catalan, Galician, Basque, and Spanish leftists, pro-independence and pro-union leftists, united to stop the shift to the right and the far right. This was largely the subject of some of Espriu's major works, such as the play Esther's First Story or the poems of The bull's hideWe are in the vicinity of Iberianism, the idea of an Iberian Peninsula formed by a set of cultures and languages (Portuguese, Castilian, Basque, Galician, and Catalan, which includes Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands) that should coexist in peace, respect, and mutual understanding. This is an idea that Espriu took up from Joan Maragall and that has been defended by other intellectuals: more recently, the Portuguese José Saramago and the Asturian Xuan Bello.
In turn, the proposal for a left-wing front is inspired by the recent experience of a similar front in France (a failed experiment, due to Macron's abuse of power in imposing prime ministers of his ilk, but also due to the front's internal disarray and Mélenchon's desire for control) and responds, without disguise, to the confrontational tone of the Spanish public debate. Opponents of the idea argue that neither Iberianism nor federalism has ever prospered in Spain and that it is impossible for them to do so because of the tendency (even the inertia) of Spanish nationalism to impose itself on national and cultural minorities, and that a front like the one that seems to be taking shape would perish as soon as it formed. For their part, proponents of the idea can argue that Iberianism, federalism, and a left-wing front are just as impossible as separatism and Spanish unionism, which are also ideologies that have repeatedly failed.
For now, Rufián's stated objective for the left-wing coalition project is to weaken Vox's electoral strength, which would indeed happen if the project were to succeed (whether it would be enough to prevent a PP-Vox majority is another matter). If it were to succeed, it would have another advantage: deviating from the expected outcome. That alone, sometimes, is a valuable asset.
