• 330 party leaders nationwide sign petition over voting at February congress
• Íñigo Errejón takes first public stance against Iglesias in run-up to conference
More than 300 leaders of Spain’s anti-austerity party Podemos have been joined by several thousand party activists in signing an online petition against a proposal by party leader Pablo Iglesias to modify voting procedures at the upcoming February party conference that Iglesias critics say would rig the vote on the party’s direction and unfairly stack the odds in favor of Iglesias push to move the party further leftwards at the upcoming conference.
The petition, titled Recuperar la Ilusión (‘Recover Hope’), was launched Friday and signed immediately by 300 local, regional and national party leaders, most notably including the party’s number-two national leader, Íñigo Errejón — marking the first time the party’s Secretary for Policy, Strategy and Campaigning has directly opposed Iglesias in the run-up to the party conference.
Iglesias announced his preferred early-February dates for the party conference last Monday, while calling for a change in the voting procedures that would modify Podemos norms of voting on party platform points prior to a separate leadership conference. Iglesias, who is personally popular among many of Podemos’ activists and is standing again for the party’s top leadership post, wants voting on the party platform linked to the vote for leadership candidates and has called for an online referendum to decide the issue, in order to bypass a vote by the Podemos national Citizens Council set for this coming Saturday.
► Read More in Spanish at El Mundo, Público and El País …
