The federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida, Antonio Maíllo, has said this Saturday in Logroño that "the determining value for renewing a progressive Government" in the general elections of November 29 "is going to be the force that it puts into Frente Amplio".
In an appearance to the media, minutes before taking the floor at the event marking the 40th anniversary of IU in La Rioja, Maíllo has claimed the role of his organization, "which has always been predictable", recalling, as an example, that "there is never any doubt about our political position in the face of a general strike, because we have always done it".
"We are -he insisted- an organization that people know where it is going to be, on which side and from which side, the side of the working-class people. And that is why we are in Frente Amplio, because it is the determining instrument that is going to determine in the elections whether there is a progressive government in our country. That is why we need mobilization in the streets, votes at the ballot boxes, and courage in the institutions".
He has also reiterated his support for the general strike next Wednesday 11, "which is to acquire a right that the working majority does not have and with political proposals like the ones we have in Frente Amplio, where people know that we are going to confront the owners of more than a thousand homes that there are in our country".
"We are talking about the fact that barely around 16 proletarians have 180,000 homes. And, therefore, we have to have a position. PP and Vox are going to defend the speculators. The Socialist Party does not dare to take them on. Izquierda Unida and Frente Amplio are going to do it. And, in addition, we have a candidate who is a symbol of that struggle for housing, which is Ada Colau", he has emphasized.
From that "popular mandate of unity" to achieve "a better way of living" for the social majority, Maíllo considers that "in the support they give us for Frente Amplio, the key to a moment of dispute will be found", stressing that "the PSOE is not going to have the capacity to form any majority, and it will be Frente de Amplio, with popular support, that will determine that future for Spain".
A horizon, he added, "that does not get caught up in the reaction, in the rollback of rights, in the threat to public pensions posed by the Partido Popular and Vox", and, taking as a reference what happened in the United States and Brazil, it leads him to affirm that "in Spain, we are also going to give them a good shaking up, with the decisive support of the Frente Amplio as a differentiating element of what could be the possibility of a progressive government".
Alongside axes such as "the conquest of rights, labor reform, the increase in the minimum wage, housing, shielding public healthcare, strengthening dependency", he has emphasized that "we have another differentiating element, we are the left that rolls up its sleeves, that isn’t going around on X saying what has to be done but it isn’t done, we’re not saying what we say, but what we do".
"CONFRONT, NOT POLARIZE"
Already in pre-campaign terms, he has defended that "the debate serves not to polarize, but to confront", citing as an example the initiative for the tax on super-rich people—"right now the 1% of the population concentrates 26% of the wealth in Spain", he recalled—"those, we are going to squeeze them on taxes, and, of course, they are going to try to disqualify us".
In the face of those criticisms, he has asserted that "a vote for the Frente Amplio is the most useful vote". "Therefore—Antonio Maíllo has emphasized—total confrontation in the ideological sense and, above all, less media noise and more debate of ideas so that people have very clear what the consequences are of one or the other governing".
Asked whether the fragmentation of the left could cost them at the ballot box, the IU leader recalled that "in Frente Amplio there are 15 organizations; it is the broadest alliance project that could be put together, and there is only one—referring to Podemos—that hasn’t been".
"We have complied with the yearning of the popular classes and we have come together. That value is going to be rewarded by an electorate that will vote for an instrument that allows it to be relevant in the future. And we have clear what relevance in the future means: it doesn’t work out by going alone," Maíllo said, who has once again highlighted "the symbolic value that Ada Colau represents" as the head of the ticket.
In his opinion, Frente Amplio embodies above all “a collective, choral project, far removed from the fulanismos and from the egocentricisms and narcissisms of politics; it is the most suitable instrument in which the working class identifies itself; it is the largest and widest possible alliance that has been made.”
“The one who hasn’t been there is the one who didn’t want to,” he has stressed, underscoring that “that screen is already overcome; this is almost prehistory, but evidently I can tell you that there is narcissistic politics that also permeates some leaders who call themselves of the left, which conditions political agreements a great deal.”
In this sense, he has set “the ambition for the common good, the ambition that a society is changed not by leaders who are ephemeral, but by collective and organized projects that transcend the leaders themselves” against “a narcissism that is now very fashionable, fills audiences, but that will pass as many other leaders in other political periods also passed.”