The Podemos candidate for President of the Government, Irene Montero, and the head of the ERC list for Barcelona to the Congress, Gabriel Rufián, have urged this Saturday in Madrid to go to the polls with "memory and conscience", avoiding what they consider the useful-vote trap promoted by the socialists. "The PSOE, if it can, eats you up," the purple leader has sentenced.
Both electoral partners have shown full harmony at their first joint rally in Madrid, after the one held two weeks ago in Barcelona, and they have advanced a third event in the capital to address, as Montero explained, all the people who have been left out of Espacio Delicias this Saturday.
That complicity was reflected even in their clothing, since both appeared with yellow sweaters without having agreed on it beforehand, as the Catalan leader has joked. Rufián’s, in a more intense tone —"yellow Esquerra", he pointed out— and Montero’s, somewhat more discreet, which she later covered with a Palestinian scarf of the same color. Both were wearing jeans: blue in his case and gray in hers.
Rufián, who this time served as a "warm-up act", has emphasized from the start that Podemos’s membership knows firsthand that taking on the right "has a cost", but also doing it against the PSOE, because the socialists "try to eat you".
Criticism of the useful vote and the role of the PSOE
"The PSOE, if it can, eats you up. But we, if we want our country to be like we dream, can’t let ourselves go. That’s why they appeal to the useful vote," Montero insisted afterward, stressing that it is the tactic that, in her view, the PSOE has always used to "eat up their left". "The whole life of the Lord has been like that. They tell you: we haven’t done anything in four years, but when elections come, vote useful," she added.
In her view, that message implies asking citizens to vote for what they "don’t want". "The only moment when a person who lives in Carabanchel or in Usera has the same power as Juan Roig (owner of Mercadona), that day it tells you no, don’t do what you want, that you vote the PSOE," she reproached.
"Well, no. In an election, people vote for what they want, what they feel, what they have in their memory, for the person they know will defend their interests. You have to vote for what you want, for what you feel, for what you think, for what you dream. It is not your vote; it is the vote of the person who asks you for it so that later nothing changes, so that later no problem gets solved, so that later they do the same thing as always", she has emphasized.
Montero has wanted to make it clear that on November 29, in her view, three paths open: the "involution" represented by PP and Vox, the left that runs "on the same ballot as the PSOE" and its proposal, the "plurinational and feminist republican alliance" of ERC and Podemos, which will not be "subjected".
"The front is us" and the ERC-Podemos alliance
"The front is us", the ERC candidate has proclaimed, who has turned to words from the President of the Generalitat in the Second Spanish Republic, Lluís Companys, calling for the defense of Madrid in 1936. "Catalonia loves you; as a Catalan, I want the best for Madrid", he has stated, before citing the former leader of Izquierda Unida, Julio Anguita, who in 2016 appealed to cooperation between the left-wing forces.
Rufián has used these references to denounce the "toxicity" of those who question his alliance with Podemos in Catalonia and to claim that convergence. "This was not about replacing Yolanda Díaz or a space that already existed and they have changed its name", he has pointed out, referring to Sumar. "This was not about submitting to the PSOE by entering the PSOE, but about submitting the PSOE from its left, with the sovereignist forces as the engine", he has added.
In his intervention, the republican leader has thrown darts at Junts and has gone after the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, especially for refusing, as he has denounced, to negotiate with the unions of public education. "Ayuso is the mafia", he has said, accusing PP and Vox of trying to "criminalize the strike" because they have "fear" of the power "of organized people".
"That is why on November 11 we have to fill the streets and paralyze the country. There must be neither production nor consumption. The country has to stop so that rents go down, the price of food and energy", he has urged, stressing that this general strike is also aimed at "the complicit governments that could have, and have done nothing".
Housing, great benefits, and olive oil
Rufián has dedicated part of his speech to the housing issue. "These elections are about being with the money of the one who asks for your vote against your people, or with the peace of mind that comes from having the keys to a house," he has said, before assuring that ERC and Podemos will be "savage" with those who place themselves on the side of capital.
"Buy baseball cards, wines, comics, whatever you want, but with apartments, don’t mess with me...", the deputy has exclaimed, and then immediately gone on to propose "frying taxes" for companies with large profits and attacked the Government's decision to force olive oil mills to remove from the market the 12% of the olive oil produced this season. He has denounced that now that this product is "cheap" it can be "intervened in the market," while "when it had an alarm, you had to fry with water and it was sustainable."
Corruption and use of the law
Corruption has also been present in the interventions. Montero has taken aim at those, according to her, who use the law to "protect the businesses of the people at the top, putting people's lives at risk." "To the two-party system in Spain, corruption doesn’t bother it; what bothers it is that corruption is known," she has said.
For his part, Rufián has reiterated that the left "can’t steal." "We have principles, they have interests," he has concluded, setting his project against that of the traditional parties.