Yolanda Díaz prepares the beginning of the new year with her sights set on the project she aspires to build for the 2023 elections. Once the agreement on the labor reform is closed, and with the challenge of negotiating its validation and the increase in Minimum Interprofessional Salary In the coming weeks, the Vice President of the Government is already working on the next steps to lay the foundations of your candidacy, with the incorporation of new teams that address different aspects of the new political subject, as detailed this Monday by El Periódico de España.
In the coming weeks the call “listening process& rdquor ;, in which Díaz plans a tour of Spain and hundreds of meetings with actors from civil and political society and representatives of different social, economic or cultural sectors. The goal is to have a approximation as accurate as possible of the existing problems and needs, facing the construction of a country project for the next decade.
Although at the beginning it was planned to start this listening process in the new year, it was finally will delay at least until February due to the complex negotiations that still remain. In this way, the ‘official’ starting gun will foreseeably be after the elections in Castilla y León.
We can already tried to rush the times of the also Minister of Labor so that these elections were the “first stop” of his platform, but Díaz rejected these pressures maintaining his own calendar. So things, although this January will begin work to organize the candidacyIt will not be until after this appointment with the polls when the round of meetings and trips begins. The beginning of this phase will be in any case officially announced to dress it with formality.
Lack of means
The ambitious purpose of establishing a dialogue with society, however, collides head-on with the lack of financial means and personnel that the vice president of the Government has at the moment. Without a party of her own to support her in material and organizational matters, the leader has so far availed herself of the support of organizations such as Ada Colau’s party, which has become her main godmother politics, or ICV, the party of Mónica Oltra, in addition to having the excellent tuning of CCOO, which gives it windows of visibility with the organization of acts participated by the Galician, which thus manages to approach a broad base of the working class.
The lack of its own logistics has been saved by different actors, but in the coming months you will need more hands and heads to tackle the complexity of your company. Until now, the vice president had a small team attached to the Ministry of Labor, some of them have been with her since the beginning of her political career in the national arena, and others disembarked from the party of the commons shortly after Díaz was appointed by Pablo Iglesias as the next leader of the space. This is the case of his chief of staff, the former deputy Josep Vendrell, or Rodrigo Amírola, one of his head advisers; both came from the parliamentary group of the commons in the Catalan Parliament, where they worked with Jèssica Albiach.
The arrival of these new paintings completed the political profile of the leader, which until then only occupied the portfolio of the Ministry of Labor and was more focused on technical aspects. Since his ‘promotion’ to the Vice Presidency, Díaz has taken more care of his speech, and has managed to generate strong social expectations on the project that it aspires to build by relegating the parties to the background and marking distances with Podemos, whose wear and tear could be a drag at the electoral level. An objective that they take for granted, after months in which they have managed to avoid major clashes with the purple leaders and have launched the image of the labor leader, who for months has been the best valued leader, according to the CIS.
Although they have been sufficient for this initial phase, the means available to the Galician are presented as limited in the face of the new stage that opens in her project. At the beginning of the academic year, a reduced team more focused on aspects of political discourse, in which trusted profiles of the ministry participate, such as the Secretary of State for Employment and Social Economy, Joaquín Pérez Rey, advisers such as Amírola or Xaime Subiela or the Director of Communication, Virginia Uzal. This group has politically profiled the project, and has designed the launch of some key messages, which managed to be underpinned without opening great wounds in Podemos.
However, the team is very limited: Díaz currently has the same number of advisers as he did in the Ministry of Labor. Although the position of the Vice-presidency gave him the right to five more advisers, The truth is that these positions, which until March depended on the ministry of the then vice president Pablo Iglesias, were left after the ‘transfer of portfolios’ attached to the Ministry of Social Rights of Ione Belarra, without Díaz having claimed this ‘quota’. Thus the things, the team of the vice president multiplies the working hours to fulfill the tasks of the Government and at the same time deal with aspects more typical of the candidacy.
Expand teams
In recent months, Yolanda Díaz has been taking steps to expand the human teams in order to take off her project. The vice president has held multiple meetings with profiles from different origins to incorporate into her project. Since Díaz officially announced in September his intention to launch his own candidacy, there have been produced a multitude of offers to the leader to collaborate in the project; many of them had formed part of the first Podemos and they had later left political life, others were still within the party, and others were prominent profiles who had so far remained outside the political arena. The vice president has gone, almost involuntarily, weaving a network of contacts that in some cases they have already taken place in meetings and that, ultimately, will lead to new ways of working in space.
In the coming weeks, work on the candidacy is expected to begin, with the idea of configuring different work teams made up of cadres that, each from their own field, will row to advance in the configuration of the different aspects of the platform, from the more purely organizational issues, to specialized groups by areas that give it a discursive base. The objective is to broaden her profile beyond labor issues and give her a comprehensive character as a candidate, while advancing some of the main lines of what the candidacy will be.
As in the early days of Podemos, the people who will form these new teams will work voluntarily for this cause, in many cases combining it with their current jobs, given the impossibility of being hired to the there is still no organization or its own CIF, circumstance that limits the movements of the future candidate. However, this sum of hands and heads to the project will allow Díaz to contribute new ideas in the construction of his candidacy, in addition to expanding his network and extending his ties to different territories.
Launch without injury
The construction process has not yet started, but Díaz has already laid some of the main foundations of his project in recent months. One of the main challenges was launch a message away from Podemos and the traditional discourse of the left and advocate for independence from the parties without opening too many wounds in this space.
Although in recent months there has been some discomfort in the organization Led by Ione Belarra, the conciliatory character of the vice president and her team has managed to ‘take off’ the idea without obvious disagreements. Some appearances of Pablo Iglesias in the media asking for a relevant place for Podemos in the future project have generated some media noise about the future role of the party, even forcing the Galician leader to react.
Diaz, for the moment, has achieved neutralize these pressures with a strategy based on avoiding dialogue through the media and in keep your own calendar, oblivious to the different requests of the purple ones to advance the times. A plan with which his team wants to avoid attrition and save the future candidate from controversy.