Íñigo Errejón he is described in his book as a sometimes “neurotic” character. The spells in which he sits down to read or write in a somewhat feverish way are frequent. With everything (Planet, 2021) gives a good account of his favorite stubbornness: one of them is “national identity”.
In that sense, he confesses his adolescent complex with the Spanish flag due to a libertarian militancy and recounts a process of transformation that, through trips to Latin America, pushes him to a belief: “There is no left without a country or a country without a flag.” In other words: discover that Podemos can only govern, “change things”, if it is truly transversal and inclusive.
Errejón’s version draws Pablo Iglesias and his “cut” –Irene Montero, Rafa Mayoral and Juanma del Olmo– as politicians born of the old communism who reject the Spanish flag for being “a betrayal of the republican memory”. He does it with concrete examples: that if you don’t put the flag there, that if you take that away from me, that if you put the other thing on me … At the end of the road, Errejón declares that this resignation led to the “return” of the “reactionaries.”
Theoretically, sometimes embracing the abstract language of its mythical “radiating nuclei”, Errejón introduces: “National identity is crucial for the construction of a town, so that concrete demands are inscribed in an idea of community without which they succeed as in the vacuum”. Translation: if your movement is on the flag, it will never be a majority.
Errejón’s parents were “Maoists” – just like Federico Jimenez Losantos– although they later turned green. A whole life the father was beaten telling the son to turn green … and he did not do it until twenty years later.
“I came from positions for which national events are almost an obstacle to the past (…) We went directly from the neighborhood to the planet,” says the founder of Podemos. It is a relevant confession: he and his friends felt a root for what could be, for example, Lavapiés, but his idea of community did not extend to the country.
When they removed the flag
And that has a direct impact on one of the first acts of what is going to be Podemos, held at the Pablo Olavide University in Seville. See: “When we finished, a young girl approached us. She told us that she had liked everything except one thing. When we arrived, as it was the main hall, we had withdrawn the flag of Spain. She had arrived earlier and had seen us. we did it a bit out of inertia (…) She experienced it as something strange and a little offensive. When he told me, I realized he was right. “
Errejón learns, then, that everything about the Second Republic, the Civil War and the dictatorship that had been shaping a rejection of the flag in certain sectors … was past. Pure past. Everyone has celebrated the World Cup with the flag. “There is no left without a country.”
Errejón is disappointed when visiting Bolivia and Argentina, where the new left, as is also the case in France, do not dislike the national banner: “I want to have a relationship with my country like the one that, let’s say, the Argentines have: the homeland as a community of solidarity, as a space of fraternity with the neighbor “.
But what is Errejón’s national project? In the book, he stands as the author of the word that brought so much controversy: the “plurinationality”. He believes that the “agreed” consultations are the way to resolve the territorial issue.
Errejón, same as Aznar, speaks Catalan in privacy. He learned it with a girlfriend he had in Gerona –Girona–. “I leave my travels through Catalonia and the Basque Country with the feeling that where there are strong national identities there is survival and reproductive capacity of a political community,” he writes.
He begins to dream of a Podemos that runs away from the left-right axis and settles in the up-down coordinates. This will make it easier for the organization to leave behind that complex of the left with memory and national symbols.
At first –Errejón celebrates–, they succeed. He gives as an example the 15-M, where the demonstrations do not smell like mothballs and have little to do with communism and anarchism. Íñigo thinks of himself as a lay missionary who tries to “reconcile the people with the nation.”
But the famous “march of change” arrives: “I proposed that we carry the flag of Spain, that we claim that flag and, above all, take charge of it. For them – it refers to Iglesias and his” court “- That we took over the official flag was a kind of betrayal of the republican memory. “
It is just afterwards when he concludes: “The reactionary pendulum could return due to our unfinished task in the founding of a national-popular identity. A people in formation needs a flag and there is one that out there is already normalizing and cannot be given away. Good. , I can be hoarse to say that I can not “.
The story ends as we know: with Errejón and his men purged. But before that, an iconic image. When everything is very black, Íñigo has to open the campaign with Alberto Garzon in Malaga: “An inclement sun and the square full of republican, red and Cuban flags. No personal problem and I also know that the comrades fly them with the best intention. But that is not what it is. We are not that. Or we were not. “.
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Reference-www.elespanol.com