Spanish state: Bulk of Forward Andalusia MPs expelled from their caucus — just desserts for turncoats or pre-emptive purge? 

By Dick Nichols 

January 3, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — On the morning of October 27, Maribel Mora, representative on the Parliament of Andalusia’s speakership board of radical left coalition Forward Andalusia, got a nasty surprise: minutes before the board was due to meet in the capital Sevilla, Inmaculada Nieto, spokesperson for the coalition’s parliamentary caucus, rang Mora to say that she would be asking the board to expel eight MPs from their 17-member group for being “defectors”. If most MPs from the other parties on the board voted for expulsion, the eight Forward Andalusia representatives would be reclassified as “unassigned”. 

Forward Andalusia is an electoral coalition. Its founding affiliates were the United Left Andalusia (IU Andalusia) and Podemos Andalusia: they were soon joined by the two smaller left-nationalist (andalucista) parties Andalusist Left and Andalusian Spring[1]. Anticapitalists, which had been the major tendency in Podemos Andalusia from its foundation in 2014, became the coalition’s fifth affiliate in May after it finally left Podemos in March. That move followed the decision of Unidas Podemos (basically Podemos plus IU at the level of most of the Spanish state), to take part in the Spanish government as junior partner to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). Anticapitalists had always opposed entering a PSOE government as what it called a “sidecar”. 

In the caucus, formed after the December 2, 2018 elections for the Andalusian “autonomous community”[2] six MPs were from IU or aligned with it (including Nieto): the other 11 were either members of or, like Mora, close to Anticapitalists. Following the agreement regulating the group’s functioning, Podemos Andalusia as majority provided the caucus leader (Teresa Rodríguez) while IU as minority provided the spokesperson (Nieto). 

In the round of regional elections that took place between December 18, 2018 and May 26, 2019 Forward Andalusia won the highest vote (16.2%) of all the various “forces of change” (alliances involving Podemos, IU and in some places left-nationalist and left-regionalist groupings). Yet now, after nearly two years of uncontested occupation of their seats, the eight Forward Andalusia MPs charged with “defection” (including leader Rodríguez) were being branded as usurpers who were holding onto their positions without the consent of Podemos Andalusia. This was despite their having won Podemos primaries to be part of the Forward Andalusia ticket in the election and never having broken caucus discipline. 

Nieto’s letter to the board, quoted in the October 28 edition of web-based daily El Salto, said: “It is a consensus position among democratic political forces that defection is a pathology[3] that perverts the mandate of the people and defrauds the citizenry. To provide a response to this undesirable phenomenon the regulation of the Parliament of Andalusia created the category of unassigned MP.” 

Mora said she had received a communication from the Podemos Andalusia secretary of organisation, Jesús de Manuel, notifying that the eight MPs were no longer members of Podemos Andalusia and were thus “in a state of defection”. If the board now voted to support expulsion they would, as unassigned MPs, lose speaking time, rights to participation in parliamentary committees and access to the funding provided by the Spanish state to recognised parliamentary groups (€1.666 million for 2020 in the case of Forward Andalusia). 

With this move de Manuel, who was elected as part of the new Podemos Andalusia leadership in June, passed over the agreement reached between Rodríguez and Podemos general secretary Pablo Iglesias at the time of Anticapitalists’ departure from Podemos. Under that “amicable divorce settlement”, done as a joint video statement by the two leaders, Anticapitalists agreed not to stand a leadership ticket in the forthcoming Podemos Andalusia congress but its members elected as part of the Forward Andalusia ticket would continue to hold their representative positions. 

In response to Nieto’s bombshell, Mora wrote to the board that the petition “does not have the support of the parliamentary group, does not reflect any agreement taken through formal and democratic channels, but is a personal, unilateral action without any legal backing” (cited in the October 28 edition of online daily Público.) 

The road to Forward Andalusia 

Why did matters reach this point of split only two years after Rodríguez and Antonio Maíllo, IU’s coordinator for Andalusia from 2013 to 2019, came together to launch a united left challenge to the 36-year-long regime of the tired and corrupt[4] PSOE of Andalusia (PSOE-A)? 

The glue that held the Forward Andalusia project together had two main ingredients: the prospect of increasing the 21.7% vote that Podemos and IU won running separately in the 2015 Andalusian elections, and the understanding that the PSOE-A was “not an agent for change with the intention of taking on the structural transformations this country and Andalusia need”. These words of Maíllo in June 2019, reflecting on the experience of the 2012-2015 PSOE-IU Andalusian government, represented a change from the traditional orientation of IU and of its main affiliate, the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). This had been to pressure the PSOE into forming coalition governments that would be more progressive than if the PSOE governed alone. 

Given this shared understanding, the new Podemos-IU bond in Andalusia could withstand ongoing tension on other issues. These were, principally, whether Andalusia should be regarded as a distinct national entity requiring its own political representation within the institutions of the Spanish state (like Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia) and, relatedly, whether federal or confederal ties should hold between Andalusia and the other nations and regions in the state. It could also withstand the tensions within Podemos between its Andalusian organisation espousing regional autonomy and the centralist Madrid apparatus, controlled by Iglesias and his supporters. Under this arrangement, tickets for Spanish elections are preselected on a basis that includes Andalusia with the rest of the state (minus Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia), with the result that Podemos MPs elected for the region align with the party’s state leadership. 

The PSOE-A’s refusal to deal with IU Andalusia ended when the right-wing People’s Party (PP) came in first in the 2012 Andalusian poll: co-government with the left coalition was now the only way Andalusia’s main establishment party could maintain its rule. This gave birth to the fraught experience of the 2012-2015 PSOE-IU coalition administration: it was ended by PSOE premier Susana Diaz when she called elections a year early, sacking her IU ministers in the process. With the exception of an anti-eviction law that was later overturned in the courts, that government did not introduce reforms of any great importance, but it did implement cutbacks under the pressure of the austerity policies of the Spanish government of PP prime minister Mariano Rajoy. 

In the 2015 election, the PSOE-A held on to its 47 seats in the 109-seat Andalusian parliament, the PP lost 17 of its 50 seats, while IU’s tally more than halved, from 12 to 5. A repetition of PSOE-IU “co-government” was now impossible, even if the two sides had wanted it. The big winners were the newcomers born of mass disillusionment with “old politics”, the radical Podemos Andalusia with 15 seats and Citizens (the “Podemos of the right”) with 9. With Podemos Andalusia, led by Teresa Rodríguez, presenting what for Susana Díaz were impossible demands for supporting the PSOE’s investiture as a minority government, the outgoing premier did a deal to her right, with Citizens. 

These difficult experiences for IU Andalusia, combined with an internal financial crisis, led Maíllo to consider how unity to the left of the PSOE-A might be achieved with Podemos. He faced some scepticism within the IU Andalusia ranks: “In Andalusia, these are the same-as-ever Trotskyists, those who call us traitors for governing with the PSOE, or just for governing”, was the opinion of one older Communist Party of Andalusia (PCA) leader, quoted in the June 27 edition of the web-based daily el diario. Nonetheless, Maíllo, also from the PCA, convinced an IU Andalusia membership partly demoralised by being overtaken by Podemos Andalusia, that an electoral alliance of all forces to the left of the PSOE, including andalucista and ecological currents, would give the left its best chance of challenging PSOE hegemony.

The IU Andalusia coordinator would also have been encouraged by the victory of Pedro Sánchez over Andalusian PSOE leader Susana Díaz in the May 2017 PSOE leadership primaries, a win for the party rank-and-file disgusted with the PSOE apparatus’s sacking of Sánchez for his refusal as PSOE leader to allow a Rajoy PP government to form after the 2016 Spanish general election. Some of the 31.7% of PSOE-A members who voted against Díaz in that primary would surely be potential supporters of a united ticket to the party’s left. 

Secretary general Ernesto Alba put the PCA’s position towards the PSOE-A at this time in a July 31, 2018 interview with Andalusian web-based daily La Voz del Sur: 

On the side of Podemos Andalusia, the ground for unity in a new “Andalusian political entity” was cleared by the overwhelming victory of Rodríguez in the July 2018 primaries to preselect the movement’s lead candidate for the December 2, 2018 Andalusian elections. An unrelenting champion of Podemos Andalusia’s right to autonomy from the central Podemos apparatus in Madrid (including the right to preselect its candidates for Spanish elections), Rodríguez won 75% of the vote of 11,000 members against Isabel Franco, the Podemos MP for Huelva in the Spanish congress and candidate supported by Iglesias. With this win, Podemos Andalusia had the strength to resist a rearguard action from the Iglesias leadership to have “Forward Andalusia” as only a slogan of the campaign in the Andalusian poll. 

The Forward Andalusia election campaign was the most enthusiastic of that contest, with overflow meetings in 14 cities and towns across the two weeks of official campaigning. However, the actual result for Forward Andalusia (5.5% less than for IU and Podemos in 2015) was a disappointment, especially after some last-minute polling showed the left coalition neck-and-neck with the PP for second place. It led to the first-time investiture in Andalusia of a PP-Citizens government dependent on the far-right Vox. This result sharply shifted the political ground: the defeat of the PSOE had come at the hands not of forces to its left but of those who had campaigned on the “threat” to Andalusia from Catalan separatism, migrants and refugees. 

The main factor determining the result was the abstention of up to half a million traditional PSOE voters: because they did not shift across to Forward Andalusia the vote for the conventionally defined right (Citizens, PP and Vox) exceeded that for the conventionally defined left (PSOE and Forward Andalusia) for the first time since the end of the Franco dictatorship. 

The 2019 municipal and general elections: tensions emerge 

Despite this disappointment and criticism from the IU Andalusia current opposed to coalition with Podemos, Maíllo made a positive reading of Forward Andalusia’s campaign and potential in a December 21, 2018 interview with La Voz del Sur. He stressed that disillusioned PSOE voters could not be won across in one election campaign, that the 17% vote was a solid basis for expanding beyond the best result that IU had achieved running alone, and that Forward Andalusia was not just an electoral formula: 

To the question whether IU or Podemos voters had been more responsible for the failure of the Forward Andalusia vote to exceed that for the two organisations running separately in 2015, Maíllo replied: 

The May 2019 municipal elections confirmed the value of Forward Andalusia as an expression of left and popular unity. In an election where local branches, mainly of IU but sometimes of Podemos Andalusia, could choose to stand separately, the united ticket scored better in seven of Andalusia’s eight provinces, the exception being Granada, where IU tickets won 5.28% of the province-wide vote compared to 3.72% for Forward Andalusia. In the provinces where Forward Andalusia stood as a united presence, in most centres it came in as third force behind the PSOE and PP. This was the case in the provinces of Cádiz (with IU sixth), Málaga (IU fifth), Sevilla (IU fifth) and Huelva (IU fifteenth). 

With general elections set for November 10, 2019, would Forward Andalusia also be the united ticket of all left forces in Andalusia, as proposed by Podemos Andalusia? José Ignacio García and Ángela Aguilera, joint spokespersons for Forward Andalusia put the case in favour in an article in El País (September 19, 2019): 

Iglesias’s reply to the proposal (in a September 24 interview on Público TV) was that Unidas Podemos would be standing in all parts of the Spanish state where it had been present to date, but if Forward Andalusia wanted to be another split like former Podemos leader Iñigo Errejón’s More Country (Mas País) that was up to it: “Everyone is grown-up enough to make their own decisions.” He also rejected Rodríguez’s call for all left forces — Podemos, IU, Mas País and others — to stand under a Forward Andalusia umbrella. Podemos Andalusia resigned itself to this decision and came behind the Unidas Podemos campaign for the November 10, 2019 general election. 

Compared to the previous general election (held in April), the Unidas Podemos vote in Andalusia fell from 14.25% to 13.06% (99,000 votes) but its seat tally fell from nine to six, mainly due to the Mas País draining off 55,000 votes. The lost seats were in Andalusia’s western-most provinces of Málaga, Cádiz and Huelva. 

After these poor results, Iglesias redoubled the effort to achieve junior partnership in a PSOE-led Spanish government, an invitation that the PSOE now had to accept because its preferred partner, the neoliberal and catalanophobic Citizens, had seen its seat tally collapse from 57 to 10 while the far right Vox’s had more than doubled, from 24 to 52. The possibility of Podemos and IU entering government in the Spanish state now exacerbated the tensions in Forward Andalusia because of Podemos Andalusia’s longstanding opposition to governing as a subordinate to the PSOE. It supported the “Portuguese tactic” followed by the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party in relation to the Socialist Party of Portugal — of investing it as a government, supporting it against the parties of the right, voting for any positive legislation it might propose, but permanently pressuring it from outside to introduce more progressive policies. 

The Iglesias Podemos leadership asked in an online plebiscite for members to support the in-principle agreement for a PSOE-UP coalition government but offered no alternative course except rejection. As a result, 96.44% of those voting in Andalusia supported the position put forward from Podemos in Madrid, with 22,426 voting. This was 18,200 less than those who voted in the last Podemos poll in Andalusia for which there were public statistics, the 2016 primaries for Podemos’s Second Citizen Assembly (congress), which was won by Teresa Rodríguez with 44% membership participation. The result suggested prima facie that many of those opposed to co-government with the PSOE had not bothered to vote. 

Which Forward Andalusia? 

Previous to the 2019 Spanish poll, Podemos Andalusia and IU Andalusia had registered Forward Andalusia as a party with the Spanish interior ministry, to give the Andalusian left unity project “certainty in law” and to forestall any attempts at stealing a name which had already acquired much visibility and power of attraction: Errejón was mentioned as a potential suspect with an interest in using it. The legal representative of the registered party was an Anticapitalists member, with IU providing a witness. A year later, at a December 19, 2019 meeting of Forward Andalusia’s steering committee after the Spanish general election, IU Andalusia asked Rodríguez to withdraw this registration. The reply of the Podemos Andalusia leader was that discussion of the organisation’s political tasks should precede any such decision. 

In early January 2020, the Podemos Andalusia leadership presented a document called “Being a Full Moon” [to impel the tides of social protest and resistance] to a Sevilla political conference organised as a first step towards the party’s next citizens’ assembly, set for March 2020. This text criticised discipline imposed from central Podemos in Madrid, made a detailed defence of the “Portuguese tactic” based on the Andalusian experience and asserted the perspective of consolidating Forward Andalusia as an autonomous andalucista force able to attract and organise people who were not members of its founding organisations. It concluded: 

This vision for Forward Andalusia clashed with that of IU’s and the Iglesias leadership of Podemos: while IU saw the coalition as a social as well as an electoral bloc, it resisted its transformation into a force that might rival Unidas Podemos electorally and, naturally enough, IU itself as the most implanted left organisation in the region. However, while Podemos Andalusia was still subordinate to Podemos at the level of the Spanish state, these concerns of IU’s were effectively attended to by the Iglesias Podemos leadership.

At this point in the looming conflict, IU Andalusia’s new coordinator Toni Valero was reported in the January 11 edition of el diario as saying that what was important was to save the brand name Forward Andalusia from falling victim to the tensions in Podemos. Valero had replaced Maíllo, who had been suffering from cancer, in June 2019. 

This situation of nervous coexistence of potentially antagonistic strategic lines changed with the February 12 announcement of the “amicable divorce” between Rodríguez and Iglesias. This was triggered by the January 18 decision of the central Podemos leadership to bring forward the Spain-wide Third Citizens’ Assembly (congress) of Podemos and thus force the postponement of the organisation’s regional assemblies, including Andalusia’s. Valero stated in response that IU Andalusia was not bound by the Rodríguez-Iglesias accord: the agreement to form Forward Andalusia was with Podemos Andalusia “independent of who its leaders might be”. IU Andalusia’s position was that Anticapitalists’ proposed affiliation to Forward Andalusia, which became an issue after the tendency voted in late March to leave Podemos, and which was formally sought on May 11, should be postponed until the election of a new Podemos Andalusia leadership. Nonetheless, in the words of Valero, reported in the May 14 el diario, “obviously there will be no problem”.

According to this report, the affiliation of Anticapitalists was done via the Telegram group of the Forward Andalusia steering committee during Spain’s COVID-19 lockdown, with IU voting against and Podemos Andalusia, under the interim control of Rodríguez, and the two andalucista affiliates voting in favour. IU complained that there had been no meeting to discuss the issue. Nonetheless, IU Andalusia was to effectively acquiesce in having Anticapitalists admitted as a fifth affiliate of Forward Andalusia by taking part in meetings in which its representative was present. 

On May 21, the majority on the steering committee — Anticapitalists and the two andalucista organisations — adopted a statement with the same basic position as “Being a Full Moon”: 

The statement included the perspective that Forward Andalusia would be present in all future elections in its own name. It also urged individuals to sign up as members. According to IU sources, cited in the May 24 edition of La Voz del Sur, for the first time in the history of Forward Andalusia this decision was not taken by consensus: 

Anticapitalists, Andalucista Left and Andalusian Spring voted in favour of the statement, Podemos Andalusia, represented pro tempore by its outgoing Anticapitalists leadership, abstained and IU was absent. This vote would focus attention on the fact that all decisions in Forward Andalusia had previously been taken by consensus and that no agreed mechanism for decision-making in its absence had been agreed. 

By June, IU Andalusia was beginning to contrast the alliance between Podemos and IU at the level of the Spanish state to the evolution of Forward Andalusia. Valero told the media on June 9 that he was looking forward to working with Martina Velarde, the pro-Iglesias lead candidate in the coming elections for the new leadership of Podemos Andalusia.

In late June, the first meeting of the incoming Podemos Andalusia executive voted to remain affiliated to Forward Andalusia, ending the period of ambiguity that had lasted during the Podemos Andalusia internal election because of Martina Velarde’s refusal to take a stance on the issue. 

Beginning of the end game 

The opening of the end game towards split in Forward Andalusia came on June 25 with a public ultimatum by IU to Anticapitalists: either they removed the name Forward Andalusia from the Spanish interior ministry’s list of registered parties or IU would launch a “legal and political” battle for control of the coalition. Calling for an emergency meeting of Forward Andalusia affiliates, Valero said that acquiescence by Rodríguez in this demand, ending what he called “democratic anomalies”, was “the last chance to avoid a split”. According to the June 26 el diario, the IU leadership’s viewpoint was that: 

But had Anticapitalists and the andalucista parties “stolen our party” or had IU and the new Podemos Andalusia leadership changed their position on governmental alliance with PSOE-A now that Unidas Podemos was governing with the PSOE in Madrid? That was the nub of the issue. With Rodríguez calling on IU not to air the differences in the coalition publicly, the battlelines in the impending propaganda war over responsibility for a split that seemed increasingly probable also became clear: for IU and the new Podemos leadership, Anticapitalists were usurpers of a shared project, for Anticapitalists and the nationalist parties, IU and Podemos had abandoned the founding commitment of Forward Andalusia to an autonomous Andalusian project independent of PP and PSOE. 

A battle over Forward Andalusia’s assets now loomed on two fronts, in the courts over legal ownership of the name and in the Andalusian parliament over right of access to the funding of the Forward Andalusia caucus. On June 29, Valero and Velarde together called on Rodríguez to agree that decisions of strategy and political line in Forward Andalusia, for example candidacies, tickets and pre- and post-electoral alliances, “be submitted to the rank-and-file and not decided on in a Telegram group”. Congress MP María Márquez, the new Podemos Andalusia spokesperson, said: “We owe it to the membership. We’ve always taken the important decisions via membership consultation. We don’t have a conflict, Teresa Rodríguez, who has decided to do things in a different way, definitely does.” 

Rodríguez told radio Cadena Ser on July 7 that she would be striving to maintain the five affiliates of Forward Andalusia united without abandoning the idea of “a clearly Andalusist force with representation and its own voice in Madrid so as to have a space for direct negotiation for an autonomous community that needs it in a special way.” 

By late July, anticipating a split at the level of Andalusia, the coalition’s group in the town council of Jérez (Cádiz province) agreed an “amicable separation”, with the local IU organisation resuming its discipline over the vote of the IU representative in the group. According to councillor Ángel Cardiel, who left Podemos with Anticapitalists but was not a member: 

However, an Andalusia-wide repetition of this approach was not possible. The five Forward Andalusia affiliates met for seven hours on July 23, but without success. It was their first physical meeting after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first with representation from the new Podemos Andalusia leadership. IU repeated its demand that Rodríguez cancel Forward Andalusia’s official registration as a party, while Rodríguez insisted on the need for Podemos and IU to recognise the “imperative necessity” for the Andalusian left to have its own voice in Spanish politics: this was even more important for the Forward Andalusia leader than differences over tactics towards the PSOE. She denied that Anticapitalists had “kidnapped” Forward Andalusia: the coalition now had three more affiliates than when Podemos Andalusia and IU Andalusia had first signed the agreement founding the coalition. 

A further meeting on August 11 also ended in failure, with Rodríguez stating that IU had refused to enter into any debate of political issues while Forward Andalusia remained on the list of registered parties. At the same time, Javier Moreno, the IU Andalusia head of communication claimed that Anticapitalists had “usurped in undemocratic fashion first the brand name and now the social networks”. An IU communiqué on the same day said: 

The response from Anticapitalists and the two other andalucista affiliates came immediately in the form of a communiqué in the name of Forward Andalusia: 

IU replied, justifying the withdrawal of funds in these terms: 

On August 12, Rodríguez, Pilar González (Andalusian Spring) and Pilar Távora (Andalusist Left) sought to explain the political core of the conflict in this video, appealing to Podemos Andalusia and IU Andalusia not to break the unity of Forward Andalusia.

On August 28, the parliamentary caucus majority withdrew IU’s access to the caucus’s bank account and opened a second account into which they asked the parliament to pay the caucus´s allowance. The majority did not inform the minority of this action. 

On September 12, after the Spanish summer break, Valero gave an extensive interview to the Madrid daily El Mundo in which he repeated the charge that “Anticapitalists set traps so as to get hold of Forward Andalusia”. He added:

Valero denied that IU wanted the registration of Forward Andalusia withdrawn but that “it should belong to everyone” and asserted that the accusations of withdrawals of money were “out of place, very ugly and rather thoughtless”. Asked as to whether IU Andalusia was closer to the PSOE than a year ago, Valero replied: 

On September 20, IU released a statement signed by about 800 elected representatives from IU, Podemos and Forward Andalusia who: 

The propaganda struggle: Maíllo and Rodríguez 

The struggle over the narrative about responsibility for a split that now looked inevitable became more intense on September 29 when Maíllo, whose formerly good relationship with Rodríguez had helped Forward Andalusia consolidate, emerged from political silence with an article in el diario called “Some notes on Forward Andalusia”. In it he said that the polemic over building an “Andalusian political entity” was false: 

On October 1, Rodríguez replied with “Notes on Antonio Maíllo’s Notes”, taking up the issues in dispute: 

What should a ‘Andalusian political entity’’ be? 

Governing with the PSOE? 

Membership plebiscite supporting government with the PSOE?

Result of governing with the PSOE? 

Not fighting the right? 

The status of Anticapitalists after leaving Podemos Andalusia? 

On October 1, IU Andalusia and Podemos Andalusia rejected a proposal from the three other Forward Andalusia affiliates to maintain the “legal unity” of the parliamentary group under the name of Forward Andalusia-Unidas Podemos, but with each side pursuing its own positions within it where they diverged. Valero denounced this offer as “embarrassing”, considering that it amounted to de facto expulsion from Forward Andalusia. The split within Forward Andalusia was now only a matter of time, with neither side objecting when the September edition of the Andalusian government’s opinion poll listed them separately (with Unidas Podemos winning 10-13 seats and Forward Andalusia one seat if an Andalusian election were held at that moment). 

MPs expelled… 

When the vote of the Andalusian parliament’s speakership board vote was taken on October 28, the IU minority within Forward Andalusia got support from the two PSOE representatives, the two representatives of the ruling PP and the representative of the far-right, xenophobic Vox. The two representatives of the neoliberal Citizens, one of them the board’s chairperson, abstained. (Citizens is the junior partner in the Andalusian administration.) The board did not consider a written submission from Maribel Mora, contesting the legitimacy of Nieto’s request. Before this expulsion, the majority in the Forward Andalusia caucus suspended Nieto as spokesperson. 

Interviewed on the Spanish national broadcaster RTVE on October 29, Rodriguez, who was on maternity leave when the expulsion took place, stated that the vote had been “pre-cooked”:

Valero, scorning what he called Rodríguez’s “deplorable ethical behaviour”, replied on the same day: 

Velarde claimed: 

Forward Andalusia’s non-voting representative Mora and the two other Podemos MPs (both members of Anticapitalists) who were not expelled from the caucus demanded a reversal of the decision.

The board’s vote was also taken against the advice of the parliament’s chief legal officer, who maintained that the targeted MPs should be allowed to present their case and that documentation had to be provided supporting the claims in Nieto’s letter.

Social network reactions 

When news of the expulsions became public, the reaction on the social media was mainly one of shock and confusion: how could a minority in the Forward Andalusia caucus block with right-wing parties to expel the majority, and how could that majority include the caucus leader while she was on maternity leave? 

On October 29, Rodríguez gave her explanation to La Sexta TV channel: 

On October 30, UP supporters of the expulsion counterattacked. Interviewed on public TV, Irene Montoro, the UP minister for equality, said that “I’m afraid that the two sides, not only from the UP side, have not found a possibility of de-escalating this conflict.” When asked as to the appropriateness of Rodríguez being expelled while on maternity leave, she answered that she too had had two pregnancies but that “politics does not stop”.

Rodríguez replied: “I thought that ‘sisterhood’ was a red line, an unquestionable consensus among those of us who call ourselves feminist, a gender solidarity going beyond our political positions, but no.” Montero’s argument that “politics does not stop” was the equivalent of an employer telling a worker that “the factory does not stop because you’re pregnant. You’re fired!”

Montero retorted: “Teresa, they haven’t sacked you. You continue to be an MP and to get your politician’s wage even though you’ve left the party that lifted you into the institutions. Comparing yourself to a sacked casual woman worker is shameful.”

Rodríguez replied: “I didn’t compare myself to a casual woman worker, I said that the argument is the same. I receive my teacher’s wage, the rest I donate. Everyone knows that I’m not in politics for the money because I for one have a job to go back to and politics didn´t change my suburb for me” (a reference to Montero and her companion Iglesias moving from the poor and run-down inner-city Madrid neighbourhood of Lavapiés to the more comfortable outer suburb Galapagar). 

For the right wing, this “feminist cat fight” was too tempting to ignore and, given its priority of bringing down the PSOE-UP government, an opportunity to attack Montero and feign sympathy for Rodríguez. According to Citizens´ leader Inés Arrimadas:

Rodríguez declined the “support” of hard right PP youth leader and MP Bea Fanjul: 

Rodríguez also came under ideological fire on October 30, when Enrique Santiago, Communist Party general secretary and UP congress MP, accused her of having a “very limited and very mediocre political perspective”. He also said that Rodríguez’s agreement with Iglesias only amounted to an understanding not to “kick up a fuss”. 

Advising that the door was still open for Anticapitalists to return to UP, Santiago nonetheless warned: 

For Santiago such projects would be “easy for the oligarchs to tame”. The day after, Valero added the comment that Anticapitalists were guilty of “uncompromising maximalism that leads nowhere and nullifies the other side”, adding “that’s what happened and that’s what has finished.” 

Rodríguez’s reply to Santiago was a short tweet: 

Opposition minorities forces past and present in both Podemos and IU also had their say over the expulsions. For José Antonio García Rubio, who will stand against IU federal coordinator and minister for consumer affairs Alberto Garzón in the coming IU congress, “this is just one more indication that Unidas Podemos is more a force for dispersion than a factor for popular unity.” For Podemos co-founder Carolina Bescansa, “I read the news about the expulsion of Teresa Rodríguez and I simply can’t believe it’s true. One day someone is going to have to be held accountable to the five million people who once voted for Podemos and the hundreds of thousands who came around the Circles [branches].” For Ramón Espinar, the former Iglesias supporter who was the once Podemos general secretary in the Madrid region, “Let no-one grow who might overshadow me [Iglesias]. What a pain to think what it all might have been.” 

MPs reinstated… 

The expelled MPs immediately appealed the board’s decision, stating that it represented a “serious and irreparable violation of the rights we have as MPs, as recognised in the Constitution, the Statute of [Andalusian] Autonomy and the Regulations.” If the board persisted in its stance, “the paradox will come about of us enjoying immunity for the public opinions we express outside the Chamber while being persecuted inside Parliament.” 

The board retreated on November 5, on the recommendation of the chief legal officer, leaving its expulsion decision “without effect” and reinstating the expelled MPs. Nieto was given 48 hours to provide documentation confirming that they had resigned from the Forward Andalusia parliamentary group as a consequence of resigning from Podemos Andalusia. The legal service was to prepare a report evaluating whether the evidence provided was enough to justify their expulsion. The vote on suspending the expulsion decision passed 4-3, with Citizens and the PP in favour but with the PSOE and Vox maintaining their support for the board’s original decision. 

The pressure was now on Podemos Andalusia to provide the evidence of the MPs having resigned from the organisation. Also at issue was whether resignation, if proven, automatically entailed resignation from the Forward Andalusia group.

Rodríguez had told the Antena 3 program Espejo Público on November 2 that she had not resigned from Podemos — the agreement with Iglesias had only been not to stand a ticket in the forthcoming congress — but that she had been expelled just after the October 28 meeting of the speakership board: “I said that I would not stand for the leadership of Podemos Andalusia but would continue as a member of Podemos and offering to help the incoming leadership, but the expulsion came afterwards and ad hoc so as to justify the story of defection.” 

Nieto put IU’s position in a November 9 interview in el diario. Claiming that “what has happened in Forward Andalusia is not persecution or phobia, but defection”, she offered the following answers to the questions being asked about the legitimacy of the expulsions. 

Why are the expelled MPs defectors? 

There were MPs affected who didn’t resign from Podemos but were removed from the membership list after the presentation of Nieto’s document seeking their expulsion from the Forward Andalusia caucus. 

The chief legal officer advised the speakership board of the document’s lack of legitimacy. 

Why did Nieto not consult the Forward Andalusia parliamentary group beforehand? 

Did the PP, Citizens and Vox know about the document before its presentation? 

Was Podemos’s branding of only eight of the 11 Podemos MPs as “defectors” arbitrary? 

In what state does what was called the “new Andalusian political entity” now find itself? 

Also on November 9, Podemos Andalusia organisational secretary Jesús de Manuel told the Granada-based web daily Ideal.es: 

With this comment de Manuel, who found resignation statements for five of the eight MPs and removed the other three from the membership list, explained why the charge of defection had been launched when it was: the fear of IU and Podemos that the caucus majority was moving to secure control of Forward Andalusia’s resources in a situation of inevitable split.

De Manuel also ventured onto the ground of the underlying political debate, describing Anticapitalists’ orientation towards the PSOE as “pre-political”: 

Jesús de Manuel presented the actions of IU and Podemos Andalusia as essential to the health of politics in the Spanish state generally: 

The war over resources 

The bitterness of the developing split was intensified by the war over resources — chiefly the Spanish state subsidy to parliamentary caucuses. In a November 15 interview with el diario Rodríguez conceded that restricting the “amicable divorce settlement” with Iglesias to a video without documented terms of settlement was “a big mistake on my part”. It guaranteed that the intended civilised separation would be overwhelmed by a fight over money and parliamentary rights. 

There were no problems in dividing up the funding between the Forward Andalusia affiliates while Anticapitalists remained in the leadership of Podemos Andalusia. Problems began with the election in June of the new leadership of Velarde: was Podemos Andalusia to receive any portion of this funding or was it all to go, as Anticapitalists argued was implied by the Iglesias-Rodríguez agreement, to those who had stood in the December 2018 elections? IU’s position was that Rodríguez should propose a new formula for dividing up the funding with the new Podemos Andalusia leadership, while Velarde said that Podemos Andalusia should receive all the funds involved because Anticapitalists was not part of Forward Andalusia at the time of the 2018 elections. For “central Podemos leadership sources” cited by the November 7 el diario, the agreement between Rodríguez and Iglesias only involved recognition that the Anticapitalists members elected as Forward Andalusia MPs would continue in that role. 

On October 28, IU denounced that Rodríguez had removed the right of their financial administrator to access the Forward Andalusia account and had opened a new account into which the Andalusian parliament was asked to deposit the next quarterly instalment in the state subsidy to the caucus. For Anticapitalists, this change had been backed by the majority of the caucus and done to prevent Podemos Andalusia, via IU, obtaining “wrongful” access to these resources. That action was the trigger for launching the charge of defection: at the same time IU claimed that it had not received the monies due to it under the original agreement for dividing the state subsidy. 

On November 6, after her reinstatement by the speakership board, Rodríguez defied anyone who thought that the group’s funds had been misused to take the issue to the courts, asserting that IU had “received every last euro that they are entitled to receive and are going to have difficulty maintaining their argument because they will go on receiving it.” 

On December 4, Rodríguez sought damages of €60,000 from Dina Bousselham, the editor of the web-based daily La Última Hora. The website had published an article on October 30 titled “The reasons for the expulsion of Teresa Rodríguez: she kept €109,000 of IU’s and Podemos Andalusia’s monies”. The article repeated IU claims that Rodríguez had “left IU workers of the parliamentary group unpaid” and charged Rodríguez with a double standard for not criticising Errejón when he “secretly set up another party during Pablo Iglesias’s paternity leave.”

Rodríguez’s damages claim stated: 

Asserting that Bousselham was “not carrying out the work of providing information but providing a service to one of the parts in the political conflict in Forward Andalusia”, the claim outlined Bousselham’s career as an adviser to Iglesias when he was a Member of the European Parliament, candidate in Madrid regional elections for Podemos and a member of the management committee nominated to run Podemos in the Community of Madrid after the resignation in January 2019 of Ramón Espinar. 

Parties right and left to the rescue 

The eagerly awaited parliamentary legal service report, which was delivered on November 11, refuted the IU-Podemos case for expulsion. It first noted that the parliament’s regulations were silent about the grounds for expulsion from a caucus. It also stated that “resignation from a party does not automatically imply resignation from a parliamentary group”: expulsion in such a case could violate the constitutional rights of MPs, as established in a Constitutional Court case regarding the parliament of Navarra. In addition, there was nothing in the parliamentary regulation giving the group spokesperson the power to propose the expulsion of its MPs, nor was the speakership board obliged to process such a request. In the absence of any such rules, it was up to the internal regulations of the group, not the parliament, to decide on the issues at stake.

It became clear at this moment that the scandal “down south” in Sevilla had also been getting close attention at the centre of Spanish politics in Madrid. The same day as the legal service’s opinion was tabled in Sevilla, half of the parties in the 22-member Monitoring Commission of the Anti-Defection Pact of Spanish registered political parties released Addendum III, an “agreement for institutional stability” ostensibly aimed at updating this pact. The commission had not met for 10 years and had been under pressure to do so from Citizens, which had suffered a number of desertions to the PP. According to a November 16 statement by the 11 MPs making up the majority of Forward Andalusia MPs, on July 29, Pilar González, in representation of the coalition in the Spanish Senate, had been excluded from the deliberations of the Monitoring Commission on the urging of the representative of Unidas Podemos. 

Addendum III, supported at the time of release by the PSOE, PP, UP, Citizens, IU, the Basque Nationalist Party, Galician Nationalist Bloc and four other smaller forces, proposed that elected representatives who leave parties that gave them access to broader electoral coalitions be considered as defectors and that it be up to the parties themselves to decide whether MPs have committed defection. Previously this criterion only applied at the municipal level. 

The “agreement for institutional stability” was made-to-measure for the situation in Forward Andalusia and, for the first time ever, was made public before all signatories to the Anti-Defection Pact had made up their mind about it: they were given a further ten days to decide. On November 15, the federal leadership of IU called on its regional organisations to press the other political forces in their jurisdictions to sign up to the addendum. 

The agreement’s relevant sections, including its amended definition of “defection”, read: 

Addendum III drew considerable negative comment. For Koldo Martínez, senator for Navarra for centre-left nationalist party Geroa Bai, the addendum created a “Stalinist” definition of “defector”, imposing total loyalty to party chiefs. Had it applied, for example, when 15 MPs of the Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC) voted against the PSOE’s line of allowing the 2016 investiture of Mariano Rajoy through abstention, they could have been branded as “defectors” and expelled. 

Similarly, had Addendum III then been in place in October 2019, Unidas Podemos labour minister and MP Yolanda Díaz, who resigned from IU at that time because she disagreed with Garzon’s proposal to allow a PSOE minority government to form on the basis of an agreed platform but without Unidas Podemos ministers, could have been declared a “defector” and sacked at the behest of IU. 

In a comment (“Imploding parties”) in the November 23 issue of web-based daily InfoLibre, political scientist Cristina Monge said: 

Monge summarised the meaning of Addendum III as “disagreement gets classified as treason”. It is an axe held over the neck of public representatives to dissuade them from contemplating a vote against the party line when this contradicts the platform on which they were elected. 

…and expelled again 

The advice of parliamentary legal services is not binding on speakership boards, but it takes some nerve to go against it. Addendum III was in part a shot of rum designed to instil courage into Andalusian board members who might have worried that expelling the eight MPs from their caucus on grounds not specified in the parliamentary regulation could be unconstitutional and they might be exposing themselves to possible charges of perverting the course of justice. 

Citizens, citing the agreement, announced on November 17, the day before the board was due to finally take its decision, that its two representatives would now vote for the expulsion of the eight MPs, even though the parliamentary regulation remained unchanged. The instruction came from leader Inés Arrimadas after Citizens, a victim of turncoats defecting to the PP, had pushed hard for the new definition of defection. Before this about face, Juan Marín, Citizens’ leader in Andalusia and deputy premier, had told conservative web-based daily OKDiario that “neither Teresa Rodríguez nor any other member of Forward Andalusia are defectors”. Citizens’ media release on the issue read in part: 

Citizens’ change of position from abstention to support meant that the ruling PP could now pretend to be concerned about due process and constitutionality without putting the eight MPs’ expulsions at risk. When the board voted on November 18, the representatives of the PSOE, Citizens and Vox supported expulsion while the PP abstained and feigned concern about the treatment of Rodríguez during her maternity leave. The affected MPs immediately announced that they would appeal the decision of what they called “a banana parliament” to the Constitutional Court. 

For IU and Podemos, the vote “restored democratic normality” (Velarde) and guaranteed “the preservation of popular sovereignty” (Valero). But for Mora, “they have stolen the seats of these comrades using political criteria and skipping all legal and juridical considerations. This is going to be a stain and a disgrace in the history of our parliamentarianism.” 

For José María González (“Kichi”), mayor of Cádiz and partner of Rodríguez: 

The week leading up to the final vote also saw a curious episode when the web-based daily Andalucía Información published a report on November 16 from “sources close to IU” that four days before Nieto presented her statement demanding the expulsion of the eight MPs PCA general secretary Ernesto Alba and Sergio Mesa, PCE general secretary Ernesto Santiago’s head of cabinet, had met with Vox’s representative on the Andalusian parliament’s speakership board, Manuel Gavira Florentino. 

The goal of the alleged meeting was to guarantee Vox’s vote for expulsion: the inducement for the far-right xenophobes would be that application of the amended Anti-Defection Pact would be a sobering reminder to its own dissenters not to defect, as had Francisco Serrano, a former Vox MP in the Andalusian parliament. 

Alba and Mesa immediately denied the report, with the PCA leader stating that he had been in quarantine in Malaga because of a COVID-19 infection, while Mesa stated that on the day in question he was in Madrid. Podemos Andalusia also denied it while IU Andalusia threatened legal action against the website. 

Meanwhile Rodríguez had tweeted: 

Rodríguez also told 7TV that Vox was aware of information about Podemos Andalusia that could only have come from internal sources. In response, IU Andalusia posted a meme with Rodríguez’s photo and the word FAKE. At the same time, Anticapitalists’ leader Brais Fernández said that a document purportedly from the organisation and posted on social networks by IU was a fake. The truth about these events cannot be established at the present time. 

Justifications

In a November 16 article on the el diario web site (“Reasons for the split in Forward Andalusia”), Jesús de Manuel sought to explain why the action to expel the eight MPs, painful politically and personally, was nonetheless inevitable and had to take place when it did, and why the real victims of the conflict were not Rodríguez and her followers, but Podemos Andalusia. 

De Manuel paints Rodríguez’s and Anticapitalists’s alleged capture of Podemos Andalusia as a rarely successful example of this “classic of organisations of Trotskyist inspiration, like Anticapitalists”, and then stresses how overwhelming the support in Podemos Andalusia was for Podemos entering government with the PSOE and how small the support for the Anticapitalists position on this issue was among councilors elected on Podemos and Forward Andalusia tickets in the 2019 local government elections. As a result, the 11 MPs who hold that position “have abandoned the party because their political position didn’t even represent 4% of the members of Podemos Andalusia on an issue that is crucial for Anticapitalists, as they have taken it upon themselves to insistently assert”.

Nonetheless, Anticapitalists from their tiny minority position had tried to maintain monopoly control over Podemos Andalusia’s share of the resources available via the Forward Andalusia parliamentary caucus, wrote De Manuel: 

For the reader who might still feel uncomfortable about the timing of Podemos-IU operation (during Rodríguez’s maternity leave), de Manuel gave this explanation: 

Valero spelled out IU Andalusia’s version of events in a December 19 meeting of the organisation’s Coordinating Committee. It was essentially the same as de Manuel’s and can be viewed here (starting at 21 minute 20 seconds into the video). 

Conclusion 

De Manuel’s argument pivots on one event: the overwhelming majority of Podemos Andalusia members who expressed support for the proposal to enter the PSOE government of the Spanish state — that is the event that confers political legitimacy on the IU-Podemos request for the expulsions and illegitimacy on the actions of the Anticapitalists MPs and their sympathisers. 

However, the argument is flawed from the outset. The program on which the Forward Andalusia MPs were elected was their agreed platform of proposals for Andalusia, for which 580,000 Andalusians voted: no-one, certainly not IU, has suggested that any of the charged MPs “defected” from that program, the only platform to which Forward Andalusia MPs were bound. Indeed, as far as Andalusian politics was concerned the caucus operated normally right up until the expulsions. In the words of Rodríguez: “No-one called us defectors until yesterday”. 

The argument also assumes that the plebiscite that got a 96.4% vote in favour of entering a PSOE government of the Spanish state — actually irrelevant to the charge of defection — was a fair and accurate measure of the opinion of Podemos Andalusia members, despite the apparent contradiction that the Rodríguez leadership of Podemos Andalusia always won large majority support for its positions against those of Iglesias when these diverged.

However, it is impossible to say what real sentiment was (or would have been after genuine debate of the issue), because Podemos online plebiscites under the leadership of Iglesias have always been structured as a rubber stamp vote for or against what his leadership wants adopted, without any alternative being presented let alone properly discussed. The democratic legitimacy of any “plebiscite” conducted by the central Podemos leadership under such conditions is completely suspect. 

A similar caveat applies to the statement of the “overwhelming majority” of local councilors organised to support IU’s declaration: this was not a considered vote on the political issues in dispute after a proper discussion by the membership of the affiliate organisations, but a salvo in the propaganda war preparing the expulsion of the Forward Andalusia caucus majority. 

Jesús de Manuel’s presentation of Anticapitalists as “entrists” in Podemos Andalusia is curious, inviting the question as to when “entrism” (leading to “defection”) began to be implemented. Not from the 2014 founding of Podemos Andalusia, because Rodríguez right from the start never disguised her membership of Anticapitalists; nor during the 2015-19 session of the Andalusian parliament, when de Manuel sat with her as part of the Podemos Andalusia parliamentary group and would surely have denounced any “entrist” operation on the part of a fellow MP; nor during the first year of the present parliamentary session when, despite rising tension, no-one accused Anticapitalists of “entrism”. Given that Anticapitalists as a tiny minority has only been “violating the will of the majority” since the plebiscite on Podemos participation in the Spanish PSOE government, the only conclusion possible is that Anticapitalists began practicing “entrism” in Podemos … just as they were deciding to leave Podemos. 

Until evidence to the contrary comes to light it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Forward Andalusia caucus majority has been the target of a coordinated Podemos-IU-PCE operation to rob it of its political identity and marginalise it institutionally. With Unidas Podemos in government in the Spanish state, its greatest concern is that of facing a left opposition with social and institutional weight. The Forward Andalusia majority, with its message of an autonomous left Andalusian voice at all levels of politics in the Spanish state, its resistance to governing as a “sidecar” to the PSOE and its irritating opposition to parliamentary perks and privileges, could only be felt as a threat.

The IU Andalusia and Podemos Andalusia coalition’s approach from the beginning was to avoid any real discussion of its emerging political differences among the memberships of the Forward Andalusia affiliates. Having made the political decision in favour of reopening the door to a PSOE-UP alliance in Andalusia, it kept the dispute on the grounds of process and procedure with a view to either forcing withdrawal of Forward Andalusia’s registration as a party or, in case of failure, finding the procedural path to ridding the Forward Andalusia parliamentary caucus of its majority. The operation looks to have been set in motion by July 29 at the latest, date of the reconvening of the Monitoring Commission of the Anti-Defection Pact. 

This reading alone explains the following features of the actions and justifications of IU and Podemos: 

• The rush to produce Amendment III of the Anti-Defection Pact before all signatories had decided their opinion, an operation tailored to fit the circumstances in Andalusia and leaving the definition of “defection” in the hands of the parties themselves, in possible violation of the constitutional rights of the expelled MPs. 

• The fact that de Manuel makes no mention of the February “amicable divorce settlement” between Rodríguez and Iglesias. Referring to it would only (1) either remind people that it was being broken or (2) if interpreted as only covering elected positions but not finances, potentially ignite a media dispute between Iglesias and Rodríguez as to what was really agreed. Iglesias’s silence throughout the whole business, including his refusal to answer phone calls from Rodríguez, can only mean that he has, at the very least, been acquiescing in what IU and Podemos Andalusia have been doing. This behaviour looks like one more case of the chief saying “do what you have to do but don’t involve me in it”. 
• Given the gravity of the charge of “defection” (“hijacking the popular will”), why did Podemos Andalusia, operating through de Manuel as organisational secretary, decide that three “hijackers” were to remain unclassified as “defectors” and allowed to remain in the Forward Andalusia caucus? This odd exemption, which Nieto declined to explain in her November 9 el diario interview, can only have been determined by the desire to mask the blatancy of an operation in which a minority, without consulting the caucus leader, moved for the expulsion of the majority, including the caucus leader. 
• IU Andalusia and Podemos Andalusia’s refusal to countenance a compromise arrangement that would have kept both sides of the dispute in the same caucus, but free to issue their own statements on points of difference. This proposal would have left existing financing arrangements unchanged and freed IU MPs to express their own positions. How, then, to avoid the conclusion that the goal being pursued was not an arrangement that would guarantee both sides the same rights and resources but liquidation of the institutional position of the majority? 
• De Manuel’s silence on the majority’s reasons for setting up the second account. In his interviews with various media and his el diario article de Manuel makes the discovery by IU in late October of the second caucus account the trigger for the appeal to the speakership board to reclassify the MPs. Any mention of the majority’s reason for setting up the account — that IU had already emptied two provincial accounts and had the power to do the same with the caucus account — would have spoiled the narrative of IU and Podemos having no choice but to act at that moment. 
• The refusal to engage with the real political positions of the majority, and instead caricature them. The most extreme example was Enrique Santiago’s reading of the andalucista positions of Forward Andalusia as parochial and easily controlled by the oligarchies, despite having been defended by the PCA itself before its reversion to seeking governmental alliance with the PSOE. In a November 11 article in the web-based journal El Salto, Extremaduran Anticapitalist members Francis Reina Corbacho and Julian Coppens replied to Santiago: 

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, all the IU-Podemos propaganda aimed at persuading left and democratically minded people in the Spanish state that the Forward Andalusia parliamentary caucus majority are “defectors” can be treated as one more case of thieves yelling at the top of their voices “stop, thief!”

It is a case that holds irrespective of any mistakes — admitted or possible — on the part of Anticapitalists. The most serious of these, due to ingenuous trust in the word of Iglesias, was the failure to get a “divorce settlement” in writing: this opened the door to the war over resources. The indefiniteness of the agreement also facilitated the IU-Podemos narrative about a minority of defectors hijacking the inheritance of everybody and the recasting of the Anti-Defection Pact as a made-to-measure weapon against the caucus majority.

Tactical issues such as whether Rodríguez and her team might have been on stronger ground with the Podemos Andalusia members had they stayed at the helm of the organisation, contested the legitimacy of Iglesias’s “plebiscites”, and only broken with Podemos after a serious fight over the organisation’s course and culture, are important but not relevant to the fundamental issue in the conflict. 

That can be simply put: who are the real defectors? Those who have continued to fight for the program and approach on which they were elected? Or those who, as admitted by Garzón and Velarde, are open to re-editing in Andalusia the PSOE-UP pact in Madrid, refuse debate over any alternatives and block with the right to marginalise left resistance to their about-face? 

After the initial October 28 expulsions of the core of the Forward Andalusia caucus that were finally confirmed on November 18, Unidas Podemos spokesperson Rafa Mayoral spoke of the business as a “page turned”, a regrettable necessity now best put behind the left given the pressing tasks of the pandemic and the economic crisis. On December 27, in an interview in el diario Podemos ideologue and Iglesias ally Juan Carlos Monedero presented what had happened as a dispute between IU and Anticapitalists in which the central Podemos leadership had had no part: 

Why, then, hasn’t Iglesias said anything during the whole episode? According to Monedero’s theorem the Spanish second deputy prime minister’s silence would seem to have been due to his concern or hesitation about depriving Rodríguez of her “narrative” as a victim. 

Anyone seriously interested in unearthing the truth about the affair will have to choose between that hypothesis and its opposite: that Iglesias arranged to be looking away while others, including his followers in Podemos Andalusia, did the agreed dirty deed of liquidating the Forward Andalusia caucus majority 

[Dick Nichols is Green Left’s European correspondent. An initial version of this article has appeared on the web site of Green Left. Thanks go to Julian Coppens for invaluable help.] 

Notes

[1] Andalusist Left (Izquierda Andalucista) and Andalusian Spring (Primavera Andaluza) both emerged from the former principal party of Andalucian nationalism, the Andalusist Party (PA, Partido Andalucista), which dissolved in 2015 after failing to win any seat in the 109-seat Parliament of Andalusia. A formation that covered nearly all trends within Andalusism, the PA at its high points won five seats in the 350-seat Spanish congress (in 1979) and 10 seats in the Parliament of Andalusia (1990). Andalusism’s main intellectual inspiration is Blas Infante (1885-1936), killed by the Francoists at the outset of the Civil War (1936-39). Infante’s main work is La Ideal Andaluz. A useful bibliography (in Spanish) on Andalusism is available here. 

[2] Unit of regional government. Equivalent to a state in Australia and the US or province in Canada and South Africa. 

[3] Since the end of the Franco dictatorship, “defection” (transfugismo) has been a feature of Spanish electoral politics. The most notorious case took place after the PSOE won the May 25, 2003 elections for the Community of Madrid. In the vote for the speaker of the parliament and the investiture vote for PSOE Madrid leader Rafael Simancas, two PSOE MPs, Eduardo Tamayo and María Teresa Sáez, factional opponents of Simancas, abstained. As a result, the PP won the speakership, the PSOE lost the investiture and the election had to be repeated in October, when it was won by the PP. It has long been suspected, but never definitively proven, that the vote of Tamayo and Saéz was bought by Madrid real estate speculators operating through the PP. The event is known in Spain as the tamayazo. 

[4] The patronage system run by PSOE administrations in Andalusia was based on misappropriation of funding received under the Employment Regulation Procedure, (Expediente de Regulación de Empleo, ERE in its Spanish initials). An ERE is a court application made by a company in economic difficulties for permission to reduce or dismiss its workforce. When an ERE is granted, the workers affected are sometimes entitled to receive a payment from the regional government where the affected company operates. In the case of Andalusia, a November 19, 2019 sentence of the National High Court’s Seville branch found that the previous PSOE government had run a “system of fraud” in which a €680 million slush fund, supposedly for workers displaced under EREs, had also been devoted to paying people who had never worked for companies affected by EREs. The eventual destination of these funds was the PSOE’s clientelist network. The court sentenced former Andalusian premier José Antonio Griñán to six years jail for embezzlement and perverting the course of justice and banned him from holding public office for 15 years. Four former PSOE ministers in Andalusia also received prison terms (from six years to seven years and 11 months) while former Andalusian premier Manuel Chaves, other ministers and senior government officials were banned from holding public office for terms ranging up to nine years. The verdict is being appealed to the Spanish Supreme Court. For further background in English on what has been called “EREgate” see here, here and here. 

[5] On December 4, 1977, between one-and-a-half and two million Andalusians took part in mass protests demanding that the region be granted a Statute of Autonomy. On February 28, 1980, a referendum proposal on whether to begin the process of developing a Statute of Autonomy under article 151 of the Spanish constitution was supported by 87% of those voting (participation 64.2%). February 28 is now the Day of Andalusia.