Hidden intentions or blunder
Among political analysts, journalists and members of party leadership, including in SUMAR, there is puzzlement about Yolanda Diaz's intentions in including Tesh Sidi as number three on her list for Madrid. Yolanda Diaz wants to ensure that Tesh Sidi is elected to the Cortes¸ even at the expense of sacrificing the leader of Mas Madrid, Iñigo Errejón, where Tesh Sidi comes from, and the number one PODEMOS ally of Yolanda Diaz, Ione Belarra. The optimistic forecasts of the current second vice-president's supporters would give her five deputies for Madrid, while the pessimists only give her three, which would leave out the two heavyweights of the radical left, the successor to 15-M.
The unanswered question is: why did Yolanda Diaz shoehorn Tesh Sidi in, is there a hidden agenda, or did she simply allow herself to be cajoled by bad advisors? The mystery is even greater if one takes into account that Ione Belarra and her PODEMOS movement attract more votes from associations and groups of "support for the Saharawi people" than Tesh Sidi herself, who has received a lot of criticism from Polisario activists and sympathisers based in Spain, for her political positions, for some of them surrenderist and for others opportunist. Yolanda Díaz did not need Tesh Sidi to win popular votes in support of "Saharan independence".
Even without having reached the nation's parliament, the young candidate is already making waves. The press, both sympathetic to Díaz's movement and less sympathetic, present her in a misleading, misleading and false way. Let's see why.
"Tesh Sidi is (will be) the first Saharawi to enter the legislature", they would have us believe. A misunderstanding and a falsehood. False because in the 1970s there were four citizens from the then "Spanish Provinces of the Sahara" as members of the Cortes: Jatri Uld Said Uld Yumani, then President of the General Assembly of the Sahara; Seila Uld Abeida, President of the Sahara Council; Suilem Uld Ahmed Brahim, Mayor of Villa Cisneros; and Hamuadi Uld Ahmed Hamua, Mayor of Villa Cisneros. In other words, Tesh Sidi will not be the first, nor the most representative.
The above statement is also wrong, because, if elected, Tesh Sidi will not be elected as a Saharawi born (in reality she was not born in the Sahara but in the refugee camps of Tindouf, was educated in Mauritania and came to Spain with an Algerian laissez-passer), but as a Spaniard. She will not be a Saharawi MP, but a Spanish MP. As Spanish MPs are those elected in the Catalan, Basque, Galician, Andalusian and other autonomous regions. The citizens elected as representatives in the Cortes are all Spaniards, and it is for that condition that they are elected. Galicians, Basques and Catalans enjoy an added bonus, because they come from the so-called "historical nationalities" (recognised as such during the Second Republic), which form an integral part of Spain. This is not the case of the Sahrawi, who do not have the status of "historical nationality" and whose territory is not part of Spain.
The second misunderstanding written in the press is "Tesh Sidi is a member of the Polisario". She is not. She is simply a guest at the congresses of the pro-independence formation, like other activists from the territories of the former Spanish colony who travelled from Laayoune, Dakhla, Boujdour or Casablanca to Algiers on a Moroccan passport. Tesh Sidi travelled to Tindouf to attend the Polisario congress on a Spanish passport; the other guests travelled on Moroccan passports.
If, as it is wrongly written, Tesh Sidi were a "member of the Polisario Front", the official nominations committee would have prevented her from standing in the elections, because no Spanish citizen who is a member of an armed organisation fighting (legitimate or not, it matters little in this case) against a government with which Spain maintains diplomatic relations, can be a member of the Spanish Parliament. Especially if we bear in mind that the aforementioned candidate to the Cortes obtained Spanish nationality by residence, and not as a "political refugee" or "asylum seeker for reasons of personal persecution".
This whole puzzle makes it clear that the motives that have led Yolanda Diaz to plug Tesh Sidi as number three for Madrid are still strange, and in any case will not help to add votes for the candidate Yolanda Diaz.
