The Podemos candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Irene Montero, and the head of the list of ERC for Barcelona to the Congress, Gabriel Rufián, have urged this Saturday in Madrid to go to the polls with "memory and conscience", avoiding, as they have emphasized, the trap posed by the so-called useful vote that the Socialists are carrying out. "The PSOE, if it can, eats you up," the leader of the purple party has stressed.
Both electoral partners have shown full agreement at their first joint rally in Madrid, after the one held two weeks ago in Barcelona, and they have advanced that they will organize a third event in the capital to address, as Montero pointed out, all the people who were left out of Espacio Delicias this Saturday.
The complicity has even been reflected in their clothing, since both appeared wearing yellow sweaters without having agreed on it beforehand, as the Catalan leader 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 wore jeans: his were blue; hers were gray.
Rufián, who this time has acted as a "warm-up act", has stressed in his opening remarks that Podemos’ rank and file knows perfectly well that taking on the right "has a cost", but also facing the PSOE, because the socialists "try to eat you up."
Criticism of the useful vote and of the PSOE’s role
"The PSOE, if it can, eats you up. But if we want our country to be the way we dream, we can’t let ourselves be. That’s why they appeal to the useful vote," Montero insisted afterward, stressing that it is the tactic, in her view, that the PSOE has always used to "eat up their left". "All the Lord’s life it’s been like that. They tell you: we haven’t done anything in four years, but when elections come, vote useful," she said.
In her opinion, that approach amounts to asking citizens to vote for what they "don’t want". "The only moment when one person living in Carabanchel or in Usera has the same power as Juan Roig (the owner of Mercadona)—that day it’s told to you no, that you don’t do what you want, that you vote for the PSOE," she criticized.
"Well no. In an election the people vote for what they want, what they feel, what they have in their memory, for whoever they know will defend their interests. You have to vote for what you want, what you feel, what you think, what you dream. It isn’t your vote; it’s the vote of the person who asks you for your vote so that afterward nothing changes, so that afterward no problem gets solved, so that afterward they do the same thing as always," the purple leader has hammered home.
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