That the confluence of parties to the left of the PSOE has taken a beating after the municipal, island and regional elections of May 28 is no surprise. Nor is it that this blow is staged in the rupture of Podemos and Lanzarote En Pie on the island. The progressive formation has only obtained ten councilors throughout the Archipelago, one of them in Lanzarote. Lanzarote En Pie no representation. The results have not been better at the national level, where the presence of the left was crumbling as the ballots were counted.
Some are beginning to predict the Citizens effect in the purple formation, but from the militancy it is experienced as a return to square one: the street, although the disappointment cannot be disguised. "We are going to continue working and we are going to continue building an alternative in which we continue to believe," says Yurena Corujo, the Lanzarote native member of the Autonomous Executive of the party.
"From outside the institutions, politics can also be done, influence can be exerted and opinion can be generated, achieve progress and results. We are going to prepare for 2027," he says.
After taking a few days to deliberate and meet in an Island Assembly to determine how they will continue walking and how to respond to this crisis, the candidate of Unidas Sí Podemos to San Bartolomé in the elections of May 28 does not hesitate to admit the obvious: "The results are bad. It has not allowed us to have almost any representation, only one councilor, the colleague Nicolás Saavedra in Tías."
Tías became the only conejero municipality in which the coalition led by Podemos was able to maintain the councilor it already obtained in the 2019 elections and where a progressive government can be re-edited together with the PSOE thanks to these results. With 323 votes, 5.5% of the ballots, Unidas Sí Podemos became the fourth force in the municipality, behind the socialists, popular and nationalists and above Vox. As a fact, in the municipality of Tías other candidacies to the left of the PSOE such as Drago Verdes Canarias or Lanzarote En Pie were not presented.
However, the left-wing political formations have disappeared or have not achieved representation in the other six municipalities of the island, in the Cabildo de Lanzarote and in the Government of the Canary Islands.
The division of the left, again
The line that separated Unidas Sí Podemos from the representation and launched the party to extinction was a few hundred votes in many cases. Yurena Corujo is clear that part of the problem has been in the division of the left, which has been a setback for the purple formation. While Leticia Padilla, from Lanzarote En Pie, sees the union as a way to stay in power.
"We did not want to have next to us people who two months after the elections as happened in 2019 decide that the most important thing before the electoral promises and before a real coalition agreement and a real union of the left prefer to fight to maintain their acronyms," Leticia Padilla reproaches the formation of Ione Belarra.
The distancing between formations that had come together or whose leaders had been part of the confluence made it impossible for them to repeat the combination and led to the creation of new political parties with similar ideology: Lanzarote En Pie or Drago Verdes Canarias are an example of this.
"Lanzarote needs an insular party, a local left-wing party, that works with clear social policies and that does not receive orders from any political party at the state level. We are committed to going it alone and we are going to continue to assume the risk we take," insists Padilla.
"With Lanzarote En Pie we had a deep disagreement a couple of years ago that has not been able to reconnect. It is a very personal matter. You will never see bad words from Podemos or someone who represents Podemos towards Lanzarote En Pie or any party in our space because we know that we are doomed to understand each other sooner or later," Corujo contradicts.
From confluence to disagreement
Lanzarote En Pie Sí Podemos was born as a confluence of left-wing parties, participated with Podemos and became part of the island's institutions from the opposition. After a conflict with the progressive formation, they broke ties and announced the creation of the project as a local and left-wing political party.
"It was not our moment, it may be that Lanzarote En Pie as a party has lacked time to consolidate. We only turned one year old on June 10," attests Leticia Padilla, who obtained the position of councilor in the Arrecife City Council in the 2019 elections for Lanzarote en Pie-Sí Podemos and who has now been left without representation.
The left of the island, like the Canarian and national left, did not know how to agree to reduce the differences and walk together. "There are more similarities than differences," resolves the councilman of Tías Nicolás Saavedra this Monday before the microphones of Radio Lanzarote.
Meanwhile, Podemos assures to have tried the unity in the island: "We believe that the political disagreements are more than surmountable and we are obliged to do it if we want to continue working for an island model," adds Yurena Corujo on the similarities in the proposals of the parties with which she shares the left.
"I think we share a large percentage of measures and proposals and we are going to be on that path always. We think that there were no irreconcilable differences," says Yurena Corujo.
Leticia Padilla does not think the same: "Those who have left this space were Podemos and Equo. In this case they are the ones who did not reach an agreement to present themselves in 2023. We announced more than a year ago that we were going to present ourselves alone, that we were going to bet on our project and so we did. We are not to blame for the decision of the left, on the contrary, we maintained them as a coalition space from 2019 to the elections of 2023," defended Padilla.
Regardless of who abandoned whom, what is clear is that the political strategy has not been able to connect with the population. For example, in the capital of Lanzarote, Unidas Sí Podemos (4.18%), Lanzarote En Pie (3.56%) and Drago Verdes Canarias (1.5%) received 1,676 votes. In the 2019 elections, the purple formation was in coalition with Verdes Equo, now with the project of former Podemos deputy Alberto Rodríguez and with the germ of what is now Lanzarote En Pie and obtained 1,700 votes and three councilors.
"I think it is obvious that the division on the left is always penalized and I think that more unity failed. We, for our part, were seated from the beginning until the end of the process, the formations that were at this table got up. We take our share of responsibility," reflected Yurena Corujo.
In Tinajo and Haría, Podemos Equo did not obtain any representation in the elections of 2015, 2019 and neither in those of 2023. However, in Yaiza, Lanzarote en Pie Si Podemos obtained in 2019 a councilor, with 301 votes. In the last elections, Unidas Sí Podemos and Lanzarote En Pie, which presented separate candidacies, reached 276 votes and none obtained representation.
Meanwhile, in San Bartolomé Unidas Sí Podemos only obtained 304 votes and Lanzarote En Pie, 165, none obtained representation. In addition, Podemos lost the only councilor he had obtained in the previous elections.
In Teguise, the party led by Alberto Rodríguez, Lanzarote En Pie and Unidas Sí Podemos obtained 541 votes. In the 2019 elections, Podemos Equo obtained 530 ballots and a councilor.
On the other hand, from Podemos Lanzarote, they attribute the bad results obtained also to the "media intoxication" that was generated around the progressive Government, between the PSOE and Unidas Sí Podemos. "In the end, a Spain that did not exist was drawn, of rapists who were on the street and a totally illegal panorama, but very conducive to the interests of the right," Yurena Corujo highlighted regarding the debate on the Only Yes is Yes Law.
The political formation predicts that "more than the way of governing, what we have not been able to see is that just governing well does not win elections." It also reflects that it is necessary to "manage well, obviously, but also know how to communicate well what you do and create a favorable climate for people to choose you as a reliable political option and I think we fail there and we fail because in the end we are a small party, with very limited resources because we cannot have an army of contractors or companies that do studies for us and facilitate all that work."
"We all saw it coming and none of us wanted to fully assume it, I think the general feeling was a bit of pessimism," confesses the progressive. To the ghosts that fought within the space of the left was added the power of the mass media. "The neighbors told us that they are afraid to leave the house because they are going to occupy the house. That dystopian Spain that created the right," confesses Corujo.
