The PP is the best-positioned party to win the November 29 elections, according to the ARA poll. And this projection is also reflected when choosing who should be the next president of Spain. The leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, tops the ranking with 26% of public support. However, he is closely followed by the current Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, whom 23% of those surveyed want to continue at the head of the state government. In other words, the struggle that the PP and PSOE are maintaining ahead of the November 29 elections is also personified in the fight for who should occupy the Moncloa Palace. However, neither of the two political leaders reaches a passing grade, nor are they the best-rated leaders in the entire State, as they are surpassed by the ERC candidate, Gabriel Rufián, driven by the opinion of left-wing voters.

Irene Montero (Madrid, 1988) is one of the last bastions of Podemos. The woman who was the second Minister of Equality in history and ended up excluded from the Sumar lists for the 23-J of 2023 has now returned to the political front line as the candidate for the purple party in the general elections of November 29th. She wants to return to Madrid two years after having been elected as a Member of the European Parliament.

“A man is worth what his word is worth,” tweeted Javier Ortega Smith in a jab at his former party colleagues that has accumulated over 940,000 views. It is the hangover from Santiago Abascal’s decision not to participate in Jordi Wild’s round of interviews. The Vox circle has tried to counter this and other criticisms by spreading the word that Wild had hired leftist fact-checkers to call Abascal’s words into question. Some extremist followers have even circulated names and photos of the potential fact-checkers, pointing, for example, to Carles Tamayo and Rocío Vidal (known as la Gata de Schrödinger). It was not them. The electoral narrative does not have to be reasonable, it only has to convince potential voters.

For the second time in history, Podemos is running in a general election alone in a large part of Spain. The hypothetical alliance to the left of the PSOE dominated the news in the days following the early election call, but the timid contacts between the 'morados' and the new Broad Front –which started with few options of succeeding– ended up shipwrecked. This has led Podemos to not only focus its messages against a hypothetical PP and Vox government, but also to insistently distance itself from the role that Sumar has played during the legislative term. Irene Montero's initial demand was to choose the head of the list in open primaries to confront the two models, but she ended up acknowledging that the dissonance was much deeper: “For years we have had serious political disagreements with Sumar; we are very critical of their proximity to the PSOE,” she lamented.

Left-wing parties have always advocated for a renewal of faces. It was one of the demands that emerged following the questioning of the two-party system that broke out more than ten years ago in the midst of the economic crisis. At that time, for example, Pedro Sánchez, the current president of the Spanish government and leader of the PSOE, was already on the political front line. However, within the space to the left of the socialists, for various reasons, there are leading figures who emerged with the 15-M movement who continue to be on the front line and who have a high profile ahead of the November 29 elections.

The Podemos event in Madrid this Saturday had a touch of ERC. And not just because Gabriel Rufián, the Republican candidate for 29-N, acted as an opening act for Irene Montero—it was their first joint pre-campaign event in the Spanish capital—, but because they both coincided in the color of their sweater: yellow. "That's how connected we are," said Rufián, who assured that they had not discussed it beforehand. He also revealed that he had never held a pre-campaign rally in a circus. Militants and supporters of the purple party were summoned to the tent of the show The Island of Neverland, which these days is hosted at the city's Espacio Delicias. A leisure proposal inspired by Neverland, the island of Peter Pan where children never grow up. Party sources explain that it is the only place they found with such short notice: initially, Rufián and Montero were supposed to debut in Madrid last Saturday, but they suspended it due to the tragic train accident in Urda, Toledo, in which 69 people lost their lives and for which three days of official mourning were decreed.

Politicians can go on television to talk about sex, as it must bring them votes. Irene Montero –Mònica Planas explains it to us– said on a program where she was sharing an interview with Gabriel Rufián: “It is increasingly difficult to find a guy who goes down on you well”.

On Tuesday night, the collaborative left-wing duo formed by Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero visited La revuelta. The La 1 program, in which Broncano harasses his guests by asking about their sexual relations over the last month, encountered two candidates who went beyond his usual calculations and turned sex into the background noise that ran through a good part of the interview.

Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero present themselves this coming November 29th as a bulwark against the right and the far-right, but also to ensure the PSOE does not look towards the right. Both wanted to convey this message in the first joint interview they have given during this pre-campaign after signing an alliance for the upcoming general elections. It took place on La Revuelta, on TVE. There, the interview began with gifts with a message. One of those Montero gave to the host, David Broncano, was a pair of kneepads for Santiago Abascal or Alberto Núñez Feijóo, because they are "kneeling" before Netanyahu and Trump. She added a leash for the dog that the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, brought to the program last week. "So it doesn't wander off to the right," Montero said. And this last point was the message repeated most often during the interview.

Gabriel Rufián has spent the last few months calling for a left-wing front for the upcoming general elections, but the only alliance that the republican leader has ended up signing –without an agreement with Ada Colau's Broad Front– has been with Irene Montero, the Podemos candidate. Both, in fact, already held an event together on April 9th in Barcelona and, in recent months, they have been strengthening ties, although their political affinity is not new. Rufián had come to Montero's defense several times in the face of the right-wing's offensive when she headed the Ministry of Equality. However, since when have both leaders known each other? Have they always had political complicity?

The date for the first pre-campaign event for Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero has been set. The ERC candidate and the head of the Podemos list for the Spanish elections on November 29th will debut at a joint rally next Saturday, October 24th, in Barcelona. The event is the result of a collaboration agreement between their respective parties for the general elections, under which the purple party will not run in Catalonia and will instead support ERC, which includes members of Podemos as independents on its lists, while Rufián will hold campaign events with the former Minister of Equality on Spanish soil.

With time already exhausted, the divorce of the state left-wing parties has been consummated. The negotiations between Broad Front and Podemos to run together in the November 29th elections have failed—there will only be unitary lists in the Canary Islands and the Valencian Community. "The Broad Front has done everything possible to build the broadest and most diverse political alliance possible," they noted past midnight from the party that, among others, is led by Ada Colau. Midnight was the deadline to register coalitions for the state elections on November 29th. Now, it will still be necessary to define the lists of candidates that must be presented before October 26th.

While the space to the left of the PSOE is still debating leaderships and negotiating in extremis a formula to achieve unity, the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) has predicted an improvement in the result of the progressive bloc as a whole. According to the public body to which demoscopy experts have long attributed a bias towards the left, the PSOE and the Broad Front –without counting the rest of the plurinational majority– could add up to a higher percentage of the vote than that of the PP and Vox. However, beyond this preference for a progressive government pointed to by the CIS –unlike what other private polls indicate–, the October barometer published this Wednesday also places some proper names as the favorites to reach the Moncloa.

Friday is the deadline to present coalitions for the upcoming general elections and, at this moment, negotiations between the parties to the left of the PSOE remain open. In 2023, the agreement to form Sumar arrived at the last minute (with Podemos inside, despite the veto on Irene Montero) and, this year, it is on its way to being resolved for better or worse at the last minute as well. In fact, the stumbling block remains how to unite the parties that make up the Broad Front – Moviment Sumar, United Left, Más Madrid, and the Comuns – with Podemos, which right now would run alone. The purple party, however, has sought an alliance with Gabriel Rufián and ERC, wanting it to be a catalyst and a way to put pressure on the Broad Front in the negotiation. Are there possibilities for a joint candidacy? What would happen with ERC if Podemos integrates into the Broad Front?

There is probably no historical reference further removed from what the Spanish left claims to represent than Louis XIV. The Sun King, the grandfather of Philip V, is the primary icon of absolutism, centralism, and a lack of respect for minorities. His power in France – and beyond – became so great that, to define it, a phrase is attributed to him that he probably never said: "The State is me".

After announcing that Gabriel Rufián will be their candidate in the next general election, ERC held a press conference this Tuesday to rule out any collaboration with state-wide left-wing parties that goes beyond incorporating members of Podemos into their lists. In fact, the party spokesperson, Isaac Albert, avoided answering the Comuns' criticism regarding the alliance with the purple party and once again shut the door on being part of the state-wide Broad Front coalition currently being negotiated by Sumar, Comuns, Esquerra Unida, and Més Madrid. However, the republican leader's words were contradicted by Rufián himself in a post on X: "ERC and Comuns must talk, listen to each other, and understand each other to unblock the situation. Beyond vetoes and hatreds that matter to no one. And I am on that. And I will do it until the end." "What cannot be is that the way to respond to the extreme right is to dilute the ERC acronym. ERC will run in Catalonia as ERC," replied Albert at the press conference.

While the Spanish right and far-right lead all the polls, which comfortably give them the next state executive, the Spanish left confirms its division, immersed in internecine struggles, especially between Sumar and Podemos. Thus, MEP Irene Montero officially announced this Saturday her candidacy for Podemos in the upcoming Spanish elections—which will have to be ratified by the membership in open primaries—. "I believe that good people are the majority and that people willing to contribute something so that things change are the majority, and for that reason, I will run in the next general elections," Montero asserted. In her view, "it is a difficult task, but it is worth using politics so that people live well."

Whatever politicians (and, of course, analysts) do or say is conditioned by a major force, which is the impact of the war in Iran, which has not yet ended because it hangs by a very thin thread, which is the fifteen-day ceasefire. Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund warned states that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst”, because prices will rise, there may be a shortage of products or supply chain disruptions, because there will be no orderly return to normality, money will be charged more dearly to curb inflation, and states will not be able to indefinitely support tax cuts like the one approved by the Spanish government on the price of gasoline. All politics will have to operate under the impact of the war on people's pockets and public budgets. In this sense, this Trump war does no favors to the European far-right partners, such as Vox. But Pedro Sánchez polarizes the vote in Spain and voting against it or voting against the far-right is and will surely be a reason to go vote on the day it matters.From this fear of the far-right lives Rufián's project of uniting the left to the left of the PSOE.In yesterday's event in Barcelona, Rufián gave a headline, which is that Yesterday Rufián asked Esquerra to take the lead in the operation. Esquerra will not officially respond to Rufián. However, the party says that if it were up to Esquerra, the right-wing would never govern anywhere, not even in Spain, that they are aware that democracy could be at stake, but that it is not Esquerra's function to solve the discussions and egos of the Spanish left-wing parties. 

What should be the unitary left-wing front proposed by Gabriel Rufián? Aware that his party, ERC, does not subscribe to the proposal, the republican spokesperson made an explicit request to him this Thursday: "I ask my party to lead this. And if it costs me my position, I'll go home." Rufián wants Oriol Junqueras' party to adopt the proposal and unite, under its banner, this confluence in Catalonia. And in the State? The republican spokesperson in Madrid has argued that Podemos should play this role: "Podemos can help these confluences." The second stop on his tour of the State has taken him to Barcelona, to the auditorium of the Campus de la Ciutadella at Pompeu Fabra University, alongside Irene Montero, Podemos's number two, who has taken up the proposal's gauntlet.

In the survey by the Sociological Research Centre (CIS) last June, Gabriel Rufián first appeared as one of the names Spaniards considered as a candidate for the presidency of the State. The percentage was very low, 0.6%, but what was significant was that a leader of ERC, specifically the party's spokesperson in Congress, appeared in the predictions. The Rufián phenomenon has been growing over the months – in this March's survey the percentage had grown to 5.8% –, spurred on by his campaign for a left-wing front. All the sovereignist left-wing parties, starting with his own, ERC, turned their backs on him and the feeling was that Rufián was rowing against the current, even though he never tires of saying that what he defends is what he hears on the street and what the left has always been criticized for: lack of unity. And especially at a time of rising right and far-right. Sumar welcomed Rufián's proposal, but invited him to join the coalition that was already negotiating with Esquerra Unida, Comuns, and Més Madrid. A project in which Podemos, incidentally, is not involved. It is precisely for this reason that the person who has taken up Rufián's challenge is Irene Montero, the number two of the purple party.