The Broad Front promises 'No more dramas' after the break with Podemos

MadridThe song Los niños del barrio was playing when the leaders of the Broad Front appeared this Saturday in Madrid before more than a thousand militants who were waiting to learn about the project that brings together the left in the State for the November 29 elections. But not everyone was there. Los niños from Podem were missing, with whom the possibility of running together in Madrid, Barcelona, and other territories vanished this Friday night after an "agonizing" negotiation, acknowledge some voices from this space, who arrived at the event having barely slept. Gabriel Rufián was also not there, who had risen as the unifying face of all the forces to the left of the PSOE to curb the threat of a PP-Vox government. Nor was Yolanda Díaz, who three years ago was the candidate for this space – then under the name Sumar – for the presidency of the Spanish government. This Saturday she had a parallel event at a university. Today, Ada Colau returns to the political front line, candidate of the Broad Front for the presidency of the Spanish government and number one for Barcelona – Ernest Urtasun will run as number two on the ticket in the Catalan capital –, and Emilio Delgado will be the number one for Madrid.

No one present at the event missed the fact that the road to this point has been marked by the rift with the purple party, or rather by the chronicle of a definitive divorce, for many people announced. For this reason, in what has been the debut of this space – the presentation of the Broad Front candidacy – they promised No more dramas, in the words of Delgado, who adopted the expression popularized by the song by Mary J. Blige.

'Tabula rasa'

The tabula rasa of the political leader, however, has not prevented other voices from echoing what had happened twelve hours earlier "We are not all here. But there are fifteen of us political organizations that want to stop fascism and that do not want any left-wing vote to go to the bin", claimed Tesh Sidi, spokesperson for Més Madrid in Congress, one of the groups that make up the Broad Front. Colau herself echoed this, not hesitating to apologize. "I'm sorry –she said–. I know there will be disappointed people [...]. Everything was offered [to Podemos], with extreme generosity, but if someone does not want to sit down, they cannot be forced to", lamented Colau during her speech, in what was a clear reference to those of Irene Montero and Ione Belarra, although she did not explicitly mention them.

At the very same time, and just a few kilometers away from the Broad Front event, the purples were holding their state citizens' council and sending a different message: Irene Montero, the candidate for Podemos for the presidency of the Spanish government on November 29, asserted that they had provided the generosity. Montero also accused the leadership of the Broad Front of having "blocked" many territorial agreements outside of Barcelona and Madrid, cities that Podemos wanted to remove from the equation of a possible agreement. "Some [territorial] negotiations were very advanced or practically closed," Montero stated. In the end, an understanding was only reached in the Valencian Community and the Canary Islands.

The feeling within the Broad Front is that Podemos had no intention of reaching any agreement, points out a source from the space. There are even those who believe that if an agreement had been reached, once the elections were over and the seats were already occupied in Congress, the purples would have gone to the mixed group, as happened in December 2023, when they broke with Sumar. Also that the purple party sought to fracture the left when they announced an agreement with ERC in Catalonia that left the Comuns, integrated into the Broad Front, perplexed. In the Catalan space, there are those who remain incredulous regarding Gabriel Rufián.

Containment dike

"They have been exposed. [...] Let's see what happens in the [State] elections", commented a voice. This reflection, however, challenges everyone, including the Broad Front, since total unity on the left has been sold as the indispensable formula to stop an extreme right and a right-wing on the rise in Spain, but also all over the world. Without this formula and with an installed disenchantment – Colau herself has acknowledged it – among potential voters, the question is whether all of this could have the opposite effect: paving the way for Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the Moncloa.

"Teeth, teeth, teeth and carry on", commented a member of the Broad Front, who thus reformulated the famous phrase by the singer-songwriter Isabel Pantoja: "Teeth, teeth, that's what pisses them off". The blow has been hard, she confesses, but they have no desire to "continue dragging themselves along". The one who has most championed this tone has been a powerful Pablo Bustinduy (Sumar): "We have 43 days to mobilize the working class", he exclaimed. The Sumar minister has asked to put aside the "distractions" and has claimed the need for this new space to also pressure the PSOE on social and economic matters. In this control over the socialists, they coincide with Podemos. "We haven't come this far to explain our wounds to each other", said Emilio Delgado. In the end, as the song itself says, "neighborhood kids learn the hard way".