Sumar

The forgotten 28M elections were won by Feijóo and VOX, which focused its criticism on the PSOE-Unidas Podemos (UP) coalition government and its support for Basque and Catalan separatists.

After the defeat, Sánchez would, in his own way, bring forward the general elections. It was not only a punch on the table for feeling misunderstood by Spaniards, despite the economy doing well, but also a strategy to place the post-electoral PP-VOX municipal and regional pacts at the centre of the debate for 23J.

And in the midst of these cross accusations, the radical leftist movement Sumar has emerged. What is Sumar and what does it aspire to?

It is good to remember that the historical evolution of the Spanish radical left, from the fall of Eurocommunism (1982) and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through Perestroika (1985), is full of splits, betrayals, desertions, unions and disunions.

Eurocommunism, adopted in the mid-1970s, was intended to whitewash this political system based on Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist ideology. This was the moment when the Spanish communists began to consider democracy as a fundamental value of coexistence and freedom (not before).

However, the registration of the PCE (Communist Party of Spain) in this movement was only a mirage. Although it facilitated its legalisation and participation in the first elections of Spanish democracy (1977). Elections in which the PCE would experience its first split, that of the pro-Soviet PCOE (Spanish Communist Workers' Party).

Of course, after the elections, the communists tried to regain their radicalism, advocating a democratic rupture. Hence their rejection of the monarchy and the red and yellow flag, as well as promoting separatism here and there.

What is more, Carrillo's moderation was disliked. The radicals saw how the PCE, since its legalisation, was abandoning its hallmark: revolutionary radicalism. And the poor electoral results of 1977 and 1979 were the consequence.

It should be noted that Carrillo initially advocated the decolonisation of the Sahara in favour of Morocco, but then, under pressure from the radicals, went on to support the Polisario, thus breaking with the Moroccan Communist Party (PCM), whose leader, Ali Yata, advocated the territorial unity of the Maghreb country.

But the PCE continued its implosion with intrigues and conspiracies that endangered its very existence. Thus, the PCE(r) - with R for reconstructed - founded in 1975, was another split that brought together former Marxist-Leninist militants and other radicals who had formed the Marxist-Leninist Organisation of Spain (OMLE) in order to rebuild it.

The OMLE had Maoism as its ideological reference point. A similar movement had arrived clandestinely in Morocco through Abraham Serfaty and his Marxist-Leninist Forward Organisation. All of them eventually disbanded in 1980 and 1984. The radical Moroccan organisation was dismantled in 1975.

In 1986 the PCE, formed by the Catalan PSUC, the Socialist Action Party, Izquierda Republicana, the Progressive Federation, the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain, among others, would promote Izquierda Unida (IU). An instrumental party to contest, in coalition, the elections that same year. It won a meagre 7 seats. It later became a political party (1992) and has survived to the present day with more pain than glory. Felipe González, with the help of Anguita himself and his famous virtual "pincer" with Aznar's PP, had been in charge of this.

The collapse of the IU began with its coalition (2016) with Pablo Iglesias' Podemos and its confluences. It did not take long for its comendadores to split and abandon it. Iñigo Errejón, its number two, founded, together with Carmena and other former podemites, Más Madrid and Más País.

The IU-UP coalition ended like the "rosario de la aurora". Its recent electoral defeat would give way to the betrayal of Yolanda Díaz by creating Sumar. The first to support the coup was the Minister for Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón. Both proposed by Iglesias. With the Sumar movement, which regroups 16 small regional left-wing parties that nobody knows, he proposes to whitewash radicalism under a new brand.

A new organisation born of controversy. The radical Yolanda Díaz sacrifices Irene Montero, to place the Polisario Tesh Sidi, as well as including in her programme, covertly, the referendum for Catalonia. A tribute to national and international separatism. Alignment that clearly marks the Marxist-Leninist line of the PCE militant, Yolanda Díaz, which, on the other hand, agrees with the founding basis of the Polisario.

I doubt that the emergence in the elections of 23J of a philopolisario will be to the liking of the victims of ACAVITE (Asociación Canaria de Víctimas del Terrorismo), who are still demanding justice and reparation for the 281 murders committed by this gang against Canarian citizens.

The fact of relying on podemitas, filoetarras and independentists throughout this legislature that is ending, and of which Yolanda Díaz is a member, would punish the PSOE in the last municipal and autonomic elections. The forcefulness of this defeat, against CIS forecasts, was due to the inclusion of ex-Etartarras with blood crimes on Bildu's lists. Their subsequent withdrawal was of no use.

The ecological, feminist, LGTBI rights and gender-based violence tendencies claimed by the radical left do not seem to have the power to mobilise enough people in Spain to change the sign of the elections. Proof of this is that the radical right, VOX, has just tripled its representatives, going from 529 to 1687 councillors.

The strategic orientation of the PP and PSOE towards centrality seems to be the key to the elections. Or rather, the abandonment of the political centre had turned these elections (and the previous ones) into a battle of pacts with radicals, on one side or the other. All this, in the absence of any commitment from the PSOE and PP to avoid deadlocks and, above all, a repeat of the general elections.

At this juncture it is difficult to speak of a multi-party system in Spain, but rather of a two-party system with extreme affinities. In which Sumar and VOX only aspire to be uncomfortable wild cards for the PSOE and the PP.

In the run-up to 23J, the emergence of Sumar on the Spanish political scene is mobilising the VOX electorate. A dynamic that can be read in the opposite direction. That is, the rise of VOX is mobilising the electorate of the radical left, including Basque and Catalan pro-independence supporters. A balancing act that threatens the country's political stability.

For the moment, polls show that Sumar's participation would only confirm the rise of a PP that is demanding a majority for itself, while the PSOE is surrendering to a Sumar immersed in its endless quarrels and permanent contradictions.

Sumar, just like its predecessors, is a "sum and verse" of nonsense, disloyalty, lack of internal democracy and organic disintegration.