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In addition
Cassandra Nash
YOLANDA DIAZ is Spain’s Minister of Labour and Social Economy.
She is also its Number Two vicepresident (there are currently four) and opinion polls consistently name her the country’s most respected minister. The last one placed her in front of Pedro Sanchez, who heads Spain’s government, with a 41.4 per cent approval rating compared with his 36.7 per cent.
Third in the popularity rankings on 32.6 per cent, came Iñigo Errejon who occupies no position at all apart from leading the Mas Pais party.
They are all left wing but only Sanchez belongs to the longestablished PSOE party. Diaz represents UnidasPodemos, a loveless marriage of convenience between Izquierda Unida, which incorporates what remains of the Spain’s Communist Party, and Podemos founded in 2014,.
The party emerged from the Indignados movement which occupied the Madrid’s Puerta de Sol in 2011 before the municipal elections in May, claim ing that the PSOE and Partido Popular no longer represented their interests. Meanwhile Errejon’s Mas Pais party is a breakaway from Podemos, of which he was a founder member.
Looked at dispassionately, Spain’s far Left is a fragmented mess of old wounds and new ambitions.
With municipal and regional elections in May and a general election before the end of December, Diaz wants to unite all the parties that lie beyond the PSOE in a new alliance called Sumar.
The PSOE would probably like to see Diaz on its own list of candidates, which is unlikely if not impossible. Meanwhile the socialists suspect that if the farLeft parties decide to go it alone, they will not get enough votes between them to shore up the PSOE regionally in May or nationally in December.
The PSOE is consistently the mostvoted party although it cannot be denied that those votes have dwindled with each election under Pedro Sanchez. He needs Diaz to succeed in uniting Sumar, aware that if she does not, or cannot, he could be returning the keys to the Moncloa come January.
