The image has been curious. In less than five square meters, almost clustered, were Vice President Yolanda Díaz; the former minister and now PSOE candidate for the presidency of the Junta, María Jesús Montero; her former cabinet colleague Elma Saiz, the Por Andalucía candidate and IU leader, Antonio Maíllo; the general secretary of the PCE Enrique Santiago… All, and more figures of different ranks from the left, with a similar gesture of tilting the ear to sharpen the hearing and thus listen to what the Andalusian and Spanish leaders of UGT and CC OO were saying, the latter Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo, who offered respective interventions before the media — with very improvable sound — this morning around 11:30 at the start of the May Day demonstration in Málaga. The occasion served to see together and with batteries deployed against the PP a good part of the left that in the May 17 elections aspires, with the polls against them, to evict Juan Manuel Moreno from San Telmo.
After the speeches of Álvarez and Sordo ended, the leaders of the former Sumar space, now in reconfiguration, went up to the platform to speak. Yolanda Díaz was the first, who claimed the Government’s work in the labor field and asked the right what position it would take regarding the reinforcement of the time registration, the Intern Statute, and the Occupational Risk Prevention Law.
Next to her nodded Antonio Maíllo, whom Díaz cited as an authority on the housing problem in Andalusia, and particularly in Málaga, while accusing “the right” of going against workers’ rights, including the right to housing. Díaz expressly attacked Moreno, the president of the Junta and PP candidate, whom she accused of “incompetence” in the breast cancer screening crisis due to failures she attributed to the “privatization” of healthcare. “Long live free Andalusia!” she closed before joining the human flood of the demonstration, which set off from Manuel Agustín Heredia avenue to the Plaza de la Constitución, where the demonstration ended with interventions by Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez.
Antonio Maíllo, candidate of Por Andalucía, the coalition that brings together IU, Podemos, Movimiento Sumar, and other leftist, Andalusian nationalist, and ecological forces, was much more direct in the attack against the president of the Junta, whom he accused of “governing only for his own, for the one percent extractivist,” while forgetting the remaining 99%. Maíllo, who throughout this legislature has protagonized episodes of tension with Díaz derived from problems within Sumar, praised the labor reform and the minimum wage increases approved with the Minister of Labor as the main responsible. It was a day to emphasize what unites. Maíllo had an event at the end of the demonstration with militants, supporters, and neighbors in the Parque de las Moreras.
Then it was the PSOE’s turn. María Jesús Montero demanded that the “very good economic moment” in Spain be transferred to the pocket of the “working class” and that housing — present in all speeches — not be “a luxury good.” For this, she asked for support at the polls on May 17 to stop the right. In response to a journalist’s question, who fulfilled the difficult task of conveying it in a format that did not facilitate it, Montero spoke about the Koldo case trial, accusing the PP of instrumentalizing it to cover up the Kitchen scandal. The Minister of Inclusion, Elma Saiz, claimed that with the “progressive coalition government” Spain has surpassed 22 million workers for the first time. Montero will share a rally this afternoon in Cártama with Pedro Sánchez and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
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Of the left candidates, only José Ignacio García, from Adelante Andalucía, was absent from the demonstration in Málaga, a formation that prefers to clearly distance itself from the PSOE and Por Andalucía, and which is in fact very critical of the central government. After opening the campaign in Málaga this Thursday, García is in Jaén, the same city chosen for May Day by Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, a party with which the left nationalist formation always seeks direct confrontation. Adelante was represented at the demonstration by its candidacy in Málaga, party sources say.
Both CC OO and UGT have insisted that holding the main May Day demonstration in Málaga, and not in Madrid as usual, is not a decision related to the Andalusian elections on May 17, but rather obeys the status of the Costa del Sol capital as a “paradigm” of the housing access crisis, very prominent in this year’s event. However, the demonstration does not stop sounding, starting with the content of its call manifesto, like a shout directed against right-wing policies, which impacts the PP, precisely on the day the campaign starts. The left has not missed the political significance of the event, which has thrown itself into the call made under the slogan Rights, not trenches. Wages, housing, and democracy.
Since coming to power, Moreno has taken care to maintain his relations with CC OO and UGT. In the memory of all who follow Andalusian politics is the active role of social mobilizers against the PP that both unions played between Mariano Rajoy’s victory in the November 2011 elections and the Andalusian regional elections in March 2012. Although many polls gave Javier Arenas an absolute majority, the PP candidate ultimately fell short, and the PSOE, with José Antonio Griñán, was able to renew the government by allying with Diego Valderas’s IU. When analyzing the factors that made it possible, many included the noisy union reaction to the central government’s first cuts and the warning that if the PP reached the Junta, it would not delay doing the same with Andalusian public services.
The demonstration started with those precedents weighing in the atmosphere. Although the context is different: now the polls also consider an absolute majority for Moreno a feasible option, but if he does not achieve it, he would have Vox to support him.
