• ‘Críticos’ movement forms national committee to demand party conference
• Rank-and-file dissidents say they’ll rally against Díaz in Sevilla on Dec 15th
Dissident rank-and-file members of the Socialist party (PSOE) are organizing to combat the national party leadership candidacy of Andalucian president Susana Díaz, having grouped themselves into 30 platforms across nine of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions and naming a 25-year party veteran and UGT labor lawyer from Díaz’s own region of Andalucía, Nieves Hernández, as the movement’s national coordinator.
As former Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez prepares to visit Asturias on Saturday in another event designed to rally critics of the interim caretaker administration governing the PSOE since a leadership coup spurred on by Díaz and abetted by old-guard party leaders ousted him in October, the dissidents within the PSOE have concentrated hundreds of local and regional plataformas críticas into a national coordinating council, with representatives from the regions of Andalucía, Galicia, Castilla La-Mancha, Valencia, Cataluña, Extremadura, Asturias, Madrid and Castilla-León.
The críticos movement is calling for the immediate convening of a national Socialist party conference to elect the new party leadership, while the caretaker administration has said it wants to wait to until May or June to hold the conference — a move the dissidents see as designed to give Díaz a chance to roll out her own campaign in opposition to Sánchez and other candidates. Díaz is expected to launch her candidacy with the support of former Spanish president and PSOE general secretary José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at a mega-rally set for Dec. 16th in the Andalucian capital, Sevilla.
Not content to sit on their hands and wait for events to unfold, the PSOE rank-and-file criticos say they will hold a counter-rally with party activists from across Spain on Dec. 15th in Sevilla, to make a show of the movement’s rejection of her candidacy in Díaz’s own political stronghold of Andalucia and to demand that the PSOE interim leadership to convene the party conference immediately.
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