Yolanda Díaz Is the New Face of the Spanish Left

But against that kind of opposition, Martínez has seen firsthand how Díaz’s labor reforms have transformed lives. Spain’s labor crisis in the 1970s and ’80s resulted in high unemployment and high inflation, and governments since that time have used precarious, temporary labor contracts to get young people into work with fewer rights and protections. According to Martínez, until the coalition government changed the law in 2021, almost a third of all workers’ contracts were part-time, and those workers would be the first to get fired when the economic winds changed. With Díaz’s reforms, he says, that number has fallen below 10 percent in the private sector, at the same time that employment has grown across the country. “All this is causing the inequality gap to narrow,” Martínez says.

The Spanish success story is notable compared to what has happened in Italy under the “post-fascist” Giorgia Meloni, where, according to Paolo Gerbaudo, a senior researcher on the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, most stimulus funds went to companies, which in turn used them for share buybacks and bonuses. Italy’s growth has been slow, while Spain’s investments in high-speed rail and renewable energy, along with those labor policies, brought its economy to the top of The Economist’s charts, surpassing the eurozone’s supposed power­houses, France and Germany.

While it’s not directly under her purview, Díaz also played a role in the Spanish government’s success at mitigating inflation, while the rest of Europe and the US struggled. After the government capped the prices of essential goods and imposed a (temporary) tax on wealth over €3 million, Díaz stepped into the fray, pushing for big supermarkets to offer an affordable basket of goods to consumers. The economist Isabella Weber has noted that the Spanish government also moved “to monitor corporate profits and introduced windfall profit taxes on energy companies and banks.” Those policies, she wrote, not only brought inflation down in Spain before the rest of the eurozone; they also helped the coalition government stave off the right, with Vox losing 19 of its 52 seats in Congress. To Díaz, all this serves to disprove the neoliberal thesis that lowering standards for workers is the only way to spur investment.

“It is not an improvement for just our country,” she says. “It is an example for the whole world.”

With all of these successes, it’s almost a surprise that the government is not more popular. But scandals have rocked the PSOE, and battles within the left, and between the parties of the coalition, have eroded some of those high approval ratings. In 2021, Díaz was the most popular politician in the country, but Sumar struggled at last summer’s European elections, winning only three seats. In response to those results, Díaz stepped back from her position as coordinator of Sumar, though she maintained her post in government.

“With the radical left in Europe, we often end up in this position where they cannot form a government except with the center-left, while the center-left has other options,” Gerbaudo points out. The center-left parties tend to toss marginal parties a bone or two—for instance, leadership roles in ministries that it doesn’t consider terribly powerful. Díaz’s tenure at the labor ministry is different in this respect: She has actual power, and she’s used it. And her hope is that Sumar will build on her successes and put more people like her in office. It is not enough, Díaz emphasizes, to be a “dam of containment to the extreme right.” She wants Sumar to become part of an international movement by offering policy examples of what a state can do on behalf of its people rather than “a few minor oligarchs.”

Though Díaz did declare herself a candidate for the top job in the last election, Gerbaudo believes that most people—including Sánchez—still seemed to assume that she was running to remain the junior partner in a coalition. That perception both benefited her—the PSOE focused its fire on the right rather than on its left—and likely hurt her, or at least Sumar, which was seen in the press more as a vehicle for corralling a fractious left than a party truly contending for power.

Díaz, Sanchis says, was able to bring together a coalition in part because she maintained good relationships with smaller regional left parties across the country. But she was also trying to build a new left institution after the crack-up of Podemos in 2019. What remained of Podemos agreed to join the Sumar alliance in the last elections—a bit of a flip, as Díaz had represented the smaller faction within the Unidos Podemos slate in the previous government—but then almost immediately broke away once the government was formed.

While the PSOE held on and Sumar managed to remain the junior partner in the coalition, its margin has been too slender to do much. Meanwhile, the courts—which, Gerbaudo notes, are the most conservative wing of government in Spain, the one reformed the least after Franco’s death—have been fertile ground for “lawfare” against the PSOE and the prime minister. Several scandals, more or less confected, involve both Sánchez’s family and members of his party. Sumar had its own crisis when Íñigo Errejón—a cofounder of Podemos who left to start his own party, Más País, which joined the Sumar alliance—was accused of sexual assault. Díaz stripped him of his leadership role but was criticized for not acting sooner.

And so the PSOE-Sumar coalition continues, although Sánchez is facing calls for his resignation after an investigation in June found that the third-highest-ranking member of the PSOE was involved in taking kickbacks related to public works projects. Díaz called for a “reset” and for the government to return to its focus on passing legislation that helps working people, but the scandals leave her in a difficult position. Vox’s leaders are salivating at the chance to portray the left as corrupt; Sumar must find a way to distance itself from its coalition partners’ scandals while continuing to take credit for the government’s successes. If Sánchez falls, will he take Sumar with him?

As the debate over the workweek bill continues in parliament, Díaz has tried to get the smaller parties that support the coalition government on board. As Martínez of the service workers’ union explains, right-wing nationalist parties are part of the coalition, but because of their ties to business in the Catalan and Basque regions, they have resisted the policy. Díaz’s previous reforms helped her bring employers to the table, but the shorter workweek proposal has been put forward without significant support from business. According to Sanchis, proposals for subsidies or tax breaks for smaller businesses are being discussed in order to help get more of them on board, as Díaz once again tries to reach a compromise.

The idea of reducing working hours has broad popularity in Spain, Sanchis notes. He estimates that around 12 million people would benefit from the reform, and even the right-wing parties are hesitant to oppose it outright: “Public opinion polls, you take a look at them, 80 percent or more people are in favor of this measure.” Even the Popular Party’s leader has made rhetorical gestures toward a four-day workweek, though in a way that pits that policy against Díaz’s proposal.

“Both the Socialist party and Sumar know that they have to work hard on this work-time reduction proposal, because if it fails, it will be the final signal that the government is scrambling,” Sanchis says.

If that happens, the far right—in Spain, represented by Vox—is poised at the ready. It has not given up its quest for power, and there can be, even in Spain, an aura of inevitability about the rightward swing. “It is very striking,” Martínez says, “that the polls say the following: The majority of Spaniards want a progressive government, but they believe that it is not possible. That the ultra-right is going to win, as is happening in the United States, as is happening in Italy.” The far right takes up a lot of space on social media, where it focuses, he says, on three arguments: Democracy is a corrupt system where politicians buy off the people with goodies; the public pension system is a pyramid scheme; and taxes are theft.

This is the tension for the left in office: fighting for every incremental reform in order to prove to voters that they will materially benefit, while attempting to offer up a broader vision that transcends parliamentary maneuvering, and working to define itself against both the center-left and the far right. Díaz’s career at this moment is both a useful model to aspire to and a possible cautionary tale.

On the second day of the International Labor Congress, Díaz took the stage once again to close the event and invited participants to join her there to sign a Global Charter of Labor Rights, a document that pledges support for an agenda in marked contrast to the one that Trump has unleashed. Dressed in white once again, Díaz spoke of her proposal for the shortened workweek—in terms of both its material effects and its symbolic dimensions.

“Let’s start by reclaiming time,” Díaz said. “Time is the raw material from which our lives are made, and there is no hope possible without time to set it in motion. That half-hour a day over the current workday is a small step full of hope. It’s time to think, to rest, to care, for leisure, for culture, to be more free.” An alliance between unions, workers, and “the democratic force of progressive organizations,” she said, “can move what seemed immovable.”

But that half-hour a day also remains remarkably contentious. At press time, a vote on the bill had been postponed for further negotiations with the pro-business parties in the coalition, who are seeking to water it down. Meanwhile, unions, including CCOO, have called for mobilization in support of the bill. The result of the eventual vote will have wide-reaching implications for the direction of Sumar and the Spanish left in general—not to mention for Díaz’s own standing in government. In the meantime, she’ll be doing what she’s done since she was a labor lawyer: sitting at a table and trying to make a deal.