The Podemos MEP and former Minister of Equality Irene Montero has gained the support of 24,136 people in the party's internal primaries, with which she is proposed as a candidate for the Presidency of the Government and head of the list for Madrid.
According to the data published on the website "www.primarias.info", a total of 26,590 registered members participated in this process between Wednesday and Thursday, with 2,453 blank votes also recorded.
The mobilization has been somewhat lower than in the last citizens' assembly of Podemos, held in April 2025, when 27,172 people voted to endorse the general secretary of the formation, Ione Belarra.
Montero presented herself as the only candidate in these primaries promoted by the party leadership, which had previously offered Frente Amplio to join the process. This platform refused to do so without first closing a global agreement at a negotiation table. The configuration of the list for Madrid remains the main obstacle for a joint candidacy to the left of the PSOE, just before the deadline for registering electoral coalitions this Friday.
The leadership of Podemos has defended differentiated agreements in a dozen autonomous communities and understandings in several constituencies with regionalist forces, with the aim of "not losing any vote," excluding Catalonia — where there is already an agreement with ERC — and Madrid. In this way, they assume direct competition with Frente Amplio in these two autonomous communities, considering that the dispersion of lists has a lower cost in these territories.
In recent days, the purple leaders have claimed that the duo formed by Montero and the head of the list of ERC, Gabriel Rufián, represents the "leadership" demanded by the progressive electorate, and urged the rest of the parties to join that space. The former Minister of Equality emphasized that she would accept the result of the primaries as it expresses the mandate of the citizenry.
From Podemos, they have also reproached the formations of the minority partner of the Government (Movimiento Sumar, IU, Comuns, and Más Madrid) for ignoring their proposal to organize joint primaries to resolve, in light of the existing discrepancies, who should lead the left's candidacy.
Frente Amplio, for its part, has reiterated its willingness to reach agreements for a united list. The leader of Más Madrid, Emilio Delgado, has insisted that they offered Montero the second place on the candidacy for the capital and has pointed out the difficulty of explaining to the electorate that an extraparliamentary force in Madrid leads the list for this constituency. For this reason, he urged Podemos to decide whether it wants to integrate into a joint candidacy, although he admitted that he sees it as very complicated.
This outcome is known after Podemos has sealed a united list agreement in the Canary Islands with IU, Sumar, and Nueva Canarias, while maintaining its position outside the agreements reached in Aragón and the Balearic Islands, which include Chunta Aragonesista and Ara Més alongside Frente Amplio.