Yolanda Díaz arrived at Congress on Wednesday with a undone face, sustained by her closest team. He sat on the added bench and collapsed as soon as Pedro Sánchez spoke a few words in memory of his father, Suso Díaz, who died on Tuesday night. The second vice president began to travel the duel in the most complicated way: she went up to the gallery to defend the position of her group, to claim the presence of her political space in the government, to ask her coalition partners for a new direction to the legislature. And to turn his speech into a tribute to the person who surely explains his way of understanding politics.
Suso Díaz died Tuesday night because of lung cancer. He was 81 years old who dedicated to trade unionism and politics. He was imprisoned by the Franco regime, militated his entire life in communism and was for many years an important union leader, general secretary of Workers' Commissions of Galicia between 1988 and 2000. And he attended during the last years of his life the political rise of his daughter, the first minister of labor with a card of the Communist Party of Spain from the recovery of democracy. This is how Suso became Yolanda's father and no Yolanda, Suso's daughter, as it had always been on the Galician left.
Perhaps because of that political and trade union commitment he drank at home since a child, Díaz did not change his plans and went to Congress on Wednesday. “It is what his father would have wanted,” they argue in his team to explain his presence in the gallery. “It is what his father believed, it is a way of paying tribute,” defends a deputy of the parliamentary group. The vice president took an early morning flight to get to Congress. “Today I go up here, Mr. Feijóo, in my father's name, because I would not want to govern the rights in our country,” he claimed in a speech that raised the entire bench to add and also to numerous deputies of the PSOE and ministers of both colors.
The second vice president tried to maintain the guy during her speech. “This world is dark and there are few lights. This government is one of those lights. I will not allow that light to go out. The political space to which I belong will not let that light go out. But the change of course has to be decided, the turn is towards democratic regeneration and to the left. We want to win again and to do it we have to do this. We need facts, no words,” he told the president.
“I know that you are honest, but progressive citizenship is distressed by corruption and because they don't want the right to govern,” he told Sánchez.
The speech received a closed applause from the entire adding bench. In private, leaders of all the forces of adding, who has not stopped chaining internal crises for months, recognized their satisfaction for the performance of Díaz, who measured the distance with the PSOE and took the opportunity to criticize the Popular Party with hardness. “Mr. Feijóo, I remind him that his party is the only one in Europe who was condemned for a lucrative basis for benefiting from corruption. You have risen to the gallery and have not asked for forgiveness,” he recriminated to the leader of the PP, who had given him condolences in social networks and with a brief allusion at the beginning of his speech.
Sumar had put a strong demand for Sanchez for this appearance, the president's first to give explanations about the case of corruption around the former socialist leader Santos Cerdán, in which former Minister José Luis Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García are also investigated. A scandal that has put the government against the ropes.
A measure of the importance that the plurinational coalition gave to this plenary is given by the decision of the vice president to appear on behalf of the parliamentary group, a movement that did not share all the political formations of adding. The generalized conclusion after his speech is that it was a success that has served to resolve the tension with which the minority partner of the Government lives in recent weeks, caught in the dilemma of defending the action of the Executive but distantling at the same time of corruption that affects the PSOE.
That paradoxical position in which the political space is located was reflected in Díaz's election to sit next to the deputies of adding and not in the seats reserved for the executive of which he is part.
Although the leaders of Add that participated last week in the coalition monitoring meeting came out very upset by the “immobility” of their partners, things began to change in the last hours, as several voices aware of the conversations recognize. And the results, they add, were noticed in the measures against corruption announced by Sánchez in their speech.
“Of the measures that we present has accepted ten,” Diaz told the president in his speech. And among them, one of the main requests of the adding matches since the Koldo case broke out, the creation of an independent office against corruption. The group has in fact advanced that they will lead to the next period of sessions already registered to promote this body.
“This is the way,” also celebrated the United Left leader, Antonio Maíllo, after listening to the president of the Government. “Izquierda Unida had the confidence that proposals had to be assumed and the PAR initiative reconnects the investiture block,” he said in statements to the media in which he warned, of course, that now it remains to put those measures underway and activate the “social agenda.”
“We are not going to allow these measures to sleep the dream of the righteous,” the Communs spokeswoman in Congress, Aina Vidal, who also pointed out the lack of commitments by Sanchez on the social measures that adding has also required in recent weeks, warned in recent weeks.
In one of the strengths of his speech, Díaz announced to Sánchez that they will take the next Council of Ministers a decree to give back the permits for care, one of the most important agreements signed by PSOE and add for the investiture and that two years later remains in a drawer.
“We have to reset the legislature, we will do it with the Royal Decree of the Permits. We will expand the Paternity Permission to 20 weeks and we will comply with the board to give back at least four. Next week we will present the decree in the Council of Ministers and we expect the commitment and votes of the PSOE to carry them forward,” he warned to the PSOE.
Díaz finished his speech and apologized for having to leave the plenary. He was hugging his team, in tears. Shortly after he took a plane to attend his father's funeral in the afternoon. “In the pain, the greatness of those who fight with love is also revealed,” Nahuel González, Deputy of Sumar, wrote with a photo in which the group spokeswoman, Verónica Martínez, comforts the minister with a kiss.
