More than 200 days have passed since Yolanda Díaz announced that she was stepping down from running again as Sumar’s candidate for the upcoming general elections, and the government’s minority partner has become stuck in choosing a new leader. There are two major problems. There are quite a few profiles that were liked but have declined to lead the new left-wing alliance. And then there is the fact that finding a new name that convinces requires reaching an agreement among four organizations with different nuances: IU, Movimiento Sumar, Más Madrid, and Comunes. Time is flying against them, because politics waits for no one and the void is immense. “We are late,” is the reflection most repeated these days in private.
This acknowledged delay causes more or less concern depending on the interlocutor asked, but there is consensus that it is not good news. However, the official message conveyed from the alliance is one of calm. They are working on “many things” and the name will be announced soon.
The new date being used to reassure is the first weeks of October. However, before that, May was mentioned, then June, and later September. There was even a moment when IU pressured for the new leadership to be ready by April. The reality is that the people who have been approached have said no, which has greatly complicated plans and has been delaying the deadlines.
A long list of self-excluded candidates
EL MUNDO reported at the beginning of September that Alberto Garzón, former IU leader, and Ada Colau, former mayor of Barcelona, were some of the figures who had been offered to lead the new Sumar and had declined. Both are currently out of active political life and their return was intended. A clue to how much they are turning over the search for a profile.
The first to reject the leadership of the new Sumar was the Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, who was the favorite of the four parties but does not want to for personal reasons. Attention then turned to Ernest Urtasun, as he was the minister who had inherited the leadership of the Sumar sector in the Government after Díaz stepped back. However, the Catalan has long avoided it and sources close to him insist he has not moved from there. The lack of names has not stopped speculation about Urtasun, but his statements suggest that yes, he will end up being a candidate but not as the alliance leader, rather as the head of the Comunes list. That is, as number one for Barcelona. This fits with his expressed willingness to stand beside the new leader and support him.
The choice of candidate is still open, awaiting consensus among IU, Movimiento Sumar, Más Madrid, and Comunes. For now, sources indicate that “nothing is definitive” although, logically, this is a central issue in the talks among the four forces.
Looking for an experienced profile
For some time now, there have been more voices within the Sumar space advocating for finding a candidate who is already mature, that is, who has prior political experience and knows how to handle themselves in public and before the media. There is not much time to shape a leader from scratch or to promote a figure completely unknown to voters because the vote is in 2027 – perhaps less than six months from the announcement. These reflections lead to thinking of a person who already holds positions in one of the formations. The problem is that some of the most prominent profiles within the involved organizations are committed in other areas.
Sources from the space highlight that everyone wants to resolve the leadership “as soon as possible” and justify the delay by saying there are still “many things” to finalize. Because not only is an electoral coalition being built, but also a new space of parties that will have a joint political direction and aims to find enough stability so as not to have to be re-founded every time there are general elections. Additionally, the space promoted by IU, Movimiento Sumar, Más Madrid, and Comunes has the vocation to later incorporate many other regional forces into the alliance.
With the candidate yet to be chosen, at least what seems more settled is the issue of the new name of the alliance. Sumar is a denomination that will disappear with Yolanda Díaz, and the new era that opens will carry another electoral brand and a renewed image. What is not known is when it will be announced. Whether before, after, or at the same time as the new leader.
Podemos probes and challenges with primaries
While the new Sumar remains entangled, Podemos probes the vacant seat to mark its steps within the dispute they maintain. Irene Montero launched once again last Saturday her candidacy for the general elections and did so by challenging the new Sumar to hold “open primaries” to choose the leader of a joint candidacy.
In reality, Podemos has had this idea since Montero announced she would be a candidate in April 2025. At that time, Pablo Iglesias explained it very clearly. The proposal was that whoever won those open primaries would lead the candidacy (in every sense) and the one who lost would fall in line (in every sense). At a time when Podemos and Sumar do not agree on the political project or their objectives, it seems like a bold maneuver to regain lost leadership over the other parties. A takeover disguised as primaries.
When the former Podemos leader defended this thesis, the purple party was obsessed with recruiting IU and Comunes to destroy Yolanda Díaz by isolating her and leaving her without partners. The purples knew that IU aspired to remove her as candidate and threatened to demand primaries. In those days, the headlines were that Podemos was sending Yolanda Díaz and her party and Más Madrid to integrate into the PSOE electoral lists, with great conflict, while extending a hand to IU and Comunes to form a candidacy that recovered the Unidas Podemos project.
The announcement of the renewal of the alliance that today is Sumar in February 2026 abruptly ended those ambitions, and now Podemos is aware that IU, Movimiento Sumar, Más Madrid, and Comunes are an indivisible package that must be accepted or rejected as a whole.
Iglesias assumes it is better to compete than to negotiate
Now that Irene Montero has insisted again on open primaries, which are understood to be open to anyone voting, Iglesias has hammered on the thesis he explored in 2025. “The political differences between the political forces that formed Unidas Podemos and the distrust among them, after the constant attempts by the Sumar parties to destroy Podemos, make a sort of seat-sharing agreement between political forces as proposed by the parties remaining in Sumar unfeasible. There is neither political complicity nor trust among them,” he recently wrote on X.
That is, Iglesias assumes the framework that there will be no negotiation between parties that can work and that the way to resolve it is by competing. For its part, the left-wing alliance prioritizes agreements between parties over the formula, because what is being built is more than a coalition.
When Podemos led the left-wing bloc, there were never open primaries with IU to choose the candidate nor to make the lists in Unidos Podemos (2016) nor in Unidas Podemos (2019). Sumar (2023) did not hold them either. It is true that those coalitions were structured around very defined personalities: Iglesias and Díaz. If there is something the current Sumar members have repeated ad nauseam, it is that one of the mistakes to avoid is precisely that. They want to bury the formula of building projects around “hyper-leaderships.”
