“Dantesque spectacle”, “vaudeville”, “Turkish soap opera”. These are the terms that some of those involved in the negotiations for the union of the left with the left of the PSOE have used when describing the process. The multiple calls in the media and social networks to “live up to historical responsibility” and respond to “what the people ask for” led to mutual reproaches and have concluded in a misleading photo that has more to do with the expectations generated than with real possibilities. Ultimately, as political scientist Pablo Simón summarizes, “it was a game of incentives in which each party had to decide what it wanted: maximize representation, that is, there would be more cake to share among everyone, or protect or revive its own brand.” The answer to that question explains, to a large extent, the outcome of those conversations.
Finally, the so-called Frente Amplio and Podemos have only reached an agreement in the Valencian Community and the Canary Islands. In the rest of the territory, the former, led by IU, Más Madrid, Comuns and Movimiento Sumar, have sealed alliances with 11 other parties. The second, a collaboration agreement with ERC to include two members of Podemos in the Esquerra lists for Catalonia and for Gabriel Rufián to participate, as he himself has clarified, in a campaign event with Irene Montero in the capital.
Political scientist Cristina Monge describes that final photo of disunity as “a problem of perception.” "15 left-wing parties have joined and one has not, but the one that has not, Podemos, already had a very small representation: it is outside the majority of regional parliaments, it has four deputies in Congress, from when it ran for election with Sumar, and two in Europe. Its projection is more media than a real social and political base."
Podemos lacks roots in the territories. He obtained 0.9% of the votes in the Aragon regional elections; 0.7% in those of Castilla y León; 2.25% in Euskadi; 0.26% in Galicia... But this progressive loss of electoral support does not prevent the absence of its signature in the majority agreement from having a cost for the whole. And the reason not only has to do with mathematics and the seat distribution system in each constituency, but, above all, with emotions.
Even when there have been agreements on the horn, the previous battle contaminated subsequent electoral campaigns in the face of a dog. Belén Barreiro, director of 40dB., the house that does the polls for this newspaper, explains: "For unity to work electorally it has to be real and credible. The number of undecided people, the mobilization, whether or not there are more people who in this case consider the PSOE ballot as a useful vote depends on that, something that we are already seeing in the polls. Being united, but not completely, breaks trust, disappoints. And division is a traditional factor of electoral punishment, both in left-wing and right-wing parties, because what it conveys to the citizen is that the fight is for position, not for public policies. It is said that in Madrid and Barcelona the vote is not wasted even if it is disunited, because they are places where it is easier for the percentage of the vote to be translated into seats, but that is a mechanical argument and elections are not just about that, but about the ability to generate enthusiasm. You may not lose as much in those cities as in others, but what you do there affects the rest. With Vox as strong as it is now, an impeccable union of the left would not prevent, today, the change of color of the Government, but, of course, it would have given them more seats.”
“If the final message after that negotiation,” adds Monge, “had been that of a historic agreement between the left, an exciting effect would have been generated, but not because Podemos is very relevant numerically, which it is not, but because of a matter of perception in a context in which what it needs, above all, that space is to mobilize.” The political scientist contrasts this negotiation "through tweets and fanfare" with the "process that has allowed joint lists of the PSOE and the Frente Amplio to run for the Senate in 43 provinces, a discreet work that started from civil society, and that has been in the works for about a year."
Gaspar Llamazares, leader of IU between 2000 and 2008 and very critical, at the time, of the alliance with Podemos, wanted this time a total agreement, even though he shared with the political scientists consulted that at this time it was the formation of Ione Belarra "that needed Izquierda Unida in the intermediate cities and not the other way around." “The lists for the Senate are a success that compensates for the noise from Podemos,” he concludes.
That the agreement was not total also introduces a confusing factor. United left. Can. United We Can. More Country. Add with Podemos. Add without We Can... Forward Andalusia. For Andalusia. We can-Equo; Podemos-Green Alliance; IU-Add Movement; Podemos-IU-Green Alliance. Sumar-Green Movement. More Madrid-Verdes-Equo. Catalonia Yes, it is Pot. Catalonia in Comú-Podem. Comuns-Sumar... They are examples of the salad of acronyms and changing formulas of coalition or disunity that the electorate of the space to the left of the PSOE has had to deal with in the last 11 years at the national and regional level. Since the idea of a joint ballot has failed, a sketch will still be needed on November 29.
“The voter,” explains Simón, “needs something identifiable to be able to say: ‘These are mine.’ Continuously changing the name of the brand, the logo... is a very bad idea because people are not aware of politics all the time.” The latest 40dB survey. It gave Sumar 5.3% and Podemos – which left the coalition just a few months after the general elections – 2.3%. In the scenario of a joint candidacy, they would reach 9.5%. Translated into seats: five for Sumar/Frente Amplio and two for Podemos if they attended separately and 15 if they went together.
The trompe l'oeil of something that could never be, as the protagonist has now admitted, a single ballot for all of Spain headed by the ERC parliamentary spokesperson, Gabriel Rufián, was just that: a trompe l'oeil. For a good part of the electorate of that political space that eagerly followed the joint talks in packed assembly halls, such as that of Rufián himself with Emilio Delgado, from Más Madrid, last February, that was the best option. The surveys showed it right away. "Rufián," explains Barreiro, "already had transversal support from that electorate in March. Clearly, he was the favorite, with an abysmal difference over the rest. It was a popular demand that they had no reason to follow, and in fact, they did not follow, but that was the fact."
"I always said," Rufián declared on TVE last Friday, "that I was never going to leave ERC. My plan was never to lead the Spanish left, but to try to find points of collaboration." However, that was the expectation that he had generated, also with phrases like this one that he uttered last May at the XXI century club in Madrid: “If I can help create a confluence, a collaboration or a space of union to maximize electoral results between the sovereignist and Spanish political formations with me being the head of the list, let's go.”
"It was an expectation," recalls Monge, "that indicated that Rufián could play a leadership role on the left of the PSOE. That is what people understood, among other things because he did not contribute to denying it." Joan Tardà, one of Rufián's squires in ERC, already hinted at it in an interview in EL PAÍS last June. Asked how he thought these calls for unity were going to land on the electoral lists, he replied: “Rufián has placed himself as a hare in a greyhound race.” That is to say, he was never the hunter.
To understand what happened, Simón encourages us to focus more on the incentives of each party and less on the stories. In that space, he explains, there are three different baskets. "On the one hand, there are the Basque, Catalan and Galician independentists and nationalists, EH Bildu, ERC, the BNG. They have their own electorate and they have never been and will never go in total union with the state left because they do not need them: they are already competitive, also when the state left participate together, and they have no problem agreeing later, as was seen in 2023. Then there is an intermediate basket, that of the regionalist territorial forces that, depending on the circumstances, can join or not with the left, in a similar way to what happened with the PP and UPN or with the PP and Par. For example, now Adelante Andalucía is interested in defining itself as its own alternative, while CHA does the opposite reading because it does not see itself as strong and knows that it had a certain vote borrowed from the left to the left of the PSOE. And in the third basket are the state-level parties, IU and Podemos, to which we must add Comunes and Más Madrid because, at the same time. having participated in the central government, they are not mere territorial parties. Those in this last basket are the ones that, with an effective merger, could attract more parties from the intermediate basket so that the dispersed vote does not harm them and increase mobilization, but not everyone wants the same thing.
To show that there was one party, the Frente Amplio, that wanted to maximize representation, and another, Podemos, that was thinking more about reviving its own brand, both Monge, Simón and Llamazares give the same examples (the announcements of the agreement with ERC and the call for primaries) and allude to the same precedent: the analysis of the Belarra formation of the results of the 2023 general elections.
"At the moment when Montero made an agreement with Rufián, leaving out the commoners," says Simón, "it became evident that there was no desire for integration, but rather a desire to find an alibi so that Podemos could say that it was not going alone. Its strategy is that of winter quarters, protecting its brand by trusting in being able to revive it from the opposition, collecting discontent, with an institutional spokesperson, Montero, and a media spokesperson, Pablo Iglesias." For Monge, it is the old strategy of “the worse, the better.” “That is playing that Alberto Núñez Feijóo is already president and his reasoning is to establish his own profile to recover the brand from the opposition.” The precedent cited to support this thesis is the analysis that Belarra made of the results of the 2023 general elections, in which Sumar, the coalition of which they were part at the time, obtained 12.3% of the votes, a percentage that was key to re-editing the left-wing Government. While Yolanda Díaz celebrated having achieved “the impossible,” Belarra declared: “The strategy of making Podemos invisible has not worked electorally.” In the subsequent Government negotiation, Podemos demanded the Ministry of Equality for Montero, to which the PSOE refused. Nacho Álvarez, in Podemos since its foundation and to whom Díaz had proposed a portfolio, resigned from all his positions due to the position of his party, which demanded that he choose the portfolios. According to Sumar, they tried to find an alternative, including Belarra, but Podemos's position was either Montero or nothing. According to Podemos, the decision to expel them from the Executive "was made long before."
Various sources from the Frente Amplio agree that, although it was already very difficult, everything blew up with Rufián's decision to stay in ERC and agree to collaborate with Podemos in the campaign. The agreement was interpreted by Comuns, an electoral rival in Catalonia, as a direct attack: “He came to unify the left and is doing everything possible to divide them.” Llamazares also defines it as one of the signs of a lack of will to agree. Asked repeatedly about it in the last week, both Belarra and Montero have insisted that they reached that pact because it was “what the people wanted.”
The primaries to elect Montero as a reference, in any case, were held after the fact. The MEP, the only candidate, was elected with the support of 90% of the 26,590 participants. The party promoted voting and its rules unilaterally. Antonio Maíllo, leader of IU, commented that in a chance meeting with the former Minister of Equality on the street, he asked her to call him to talk about the primaries, but she never did. Participation in that vote was 54.3% lower than the express consultation that the party called in 2023 to authorize the negotiation of the list with Sumar and represents 600 fewer people than those who re-elected Belarra as general secretary in 2025. For Llamazares, that invitation to the primaries “was a joke.” Monge and Simón agree. "It was an excuse because the strength of Podemos," the latter points out, "is not its votes, but its online militancy. Here many organizations with different statutes had to be balanced. If the threat had been real, it would have been presented differently."
The Frente Amplio formations have been very careful to expressly reject these votes, although Simón believes that they should have “picked up the gauntlet and proposed that the primaries be in person.” The arrival of Ada Colau to the leadership, after a fight with Más Madrid, resurrected the idea of a possible understanding. Montero acknowledged several times in the media that he had been speaking with the former mayor of Barcelona for months and Colau set the entry of Podemos into the coalition as a priority. Pablo Iglesias had already advanced the strategy in his interventions in the media and social networks: go with IU (not the Frente Amplio) in constituencies where the division penalizes more and leave out Madrid and Barcelona, which are more proportional. Maíllo responded that breaking up the agreements was not an acceptable option and Colau herself publicly rejected it, although still with her hand extended to Montero, even putting her leadership at the forefront of the candidacy in question.
A little more than two hours before the deadline closed, the Broad Front offered Podemos in writing starting positions on the Madrid and Barcelona lists and a spokesperson for the group. Ángela Rodríguez Pam, who held the Secretary of State for Equality with Montero in the Ministry, had pressed for the pact in the morning when Delgado said on TVE that they had proposed that the number two on the list in Madrid go to the MEP. "If they are offered starting positions that guarantee having deputies, there is no possible excuse to refuse an agreement. Otherwise, what is the true objective of their strategy?" he tweeted. Former members of the party, as well as deputy Javier Sánchez Serna, spoke along the same lines.
