The Diplomat
The most left-wing sector of the coalition government in Spain was divided in its presence at yesterday’s demonstration against the NATO summit in Madrid. While a large number of Izquierda Unida leaders attended the march, Podemos leaders avoided their presence.
Called by the state platform ‘NATO No’ and other groups, as the culmination of the alternative counter-summit for peace, the demonstration brought together some 2,200 people, according to the government delegation in Madrid, and more than 30,000, according to the organisers. The march started in Atocha and after crossing the Paseo del Prado, Cibeles and Gran Vía, ended in the Plaza de España, where a manifesto was read out by the organising organisations, in which, among other things, they called for the dissolution of the Alliance.
The march was supported by IU and was attended by the State Secretary for the 2030 Agenda and Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain, Enrique Santiago, the federal spokesperson of IU, Sira Rego, the MEP of this formation, Manu Pineda, and the deputies in Congress Miguel Angel Bustamante and Roser Maestro, along with other positions of the federal Executive as Carlos Sánchez Mato and leaders of the various regional federations.
However, the group kept in the background and ceded the leading role to the organisations and collectives that make up the platform, with the main banner ‘No to war, no to NATO and for peace’.
In a statement last Friday, in the face of criticism from Cs, PP and Vox for their presence in this mobilisation, Santiago defended that “nobody should be surprised” that the PCE supports the NATO counter-summit, given that his party supports the dissolution of military alliances in favour of peace.
In the case of Podemos, which has spoken out against NATO on several occasions, no leading figures or representatives of its executive attended the march, in line with the purple party’s stated intention of keeping a low profile for this mobilisation. As expected, no minister from the confederal space attended.
Supervised by a large police presence and without incident during the march, slogans such as ‘No to militarist budgets. We are not paying for your wars’ and ‘Bases (military) out’. NATO No, bases out, the war is always lost by the people’, which was carried by representatives of the PCE, or ‘No to the gates, let’s take care of the planet’.
Slogans were also heard among the participants, who at various points in the demonstration chanted ‘Down with militarism, NATO is going to fall’, ‘NATO no, bases out’, ‘NATO guilty, NATO military’ or ‘Solidarity with Dombás’. No to war’ or ‘Peace now’. In addition, there were some posters against the position of the Executive before the Atlantic Alliance Summit, such as ‘Government complicit’ or shouts like ‘Imperialist vassal’.
The spokesperson for IU, Sira Rego, told journalists that their participation in this demonstration does not generate any conflict within the coalition with the PSOE, since they are “different” political forces that have been able to agree on a programme of social government, but it is normal for them to have “discrepancies or nuances” on some issues.
For example, she emphasised that his party was formed in the midst of the demonstrations against Spain’s entry into NATO, and since then IU has maintained its “pacifist and anti-militarist DNA”.
For his part, Miguel Urbán stated that the NATO summit is “bad news” for Spain and added that the alliance has gone from being “brain-dead”, as the French president Enmanuele Macron said, and is now “living its best moment” thanks to the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The collective manifesto calls for the dissolution of NATO and the promotion of a new demilitarised security system, a call for the renunciation of violence as a means of conflict resolution, the rejection of raising military spending by 2% of GDP, the reconversion of the entire military industry and the redirection of arms spending to strengthen public policies on health, education, housing, care and equality.
