Spain's potential leftist kingmaker courts voters with shorter workweek pledge

By Belén Carreño, Elena Rodriguez

MADRID (Reuters) -Spain's deputy premier Yolanda Diaz makes no secret of her potential kingmaker role for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in a snap general election next month after she unified most of the hard left under the banner of her new party, Sumar.

"We are the key to the existence of a progressive government," Diaz told Reuters en route to a meeting with potential voters in a working-class Madrid suburb where she vowed to reduce the workweek without pay cuts, to much applause.

Diaz - who was a senior member of the leftist junior party in Sanchez's outgoing Socialist-led coalition - spoke with vigour and enthusiasm to the gathering and later kissed and hugged the mostly elderly supporters who came to greet her despite a scorching afternoon sun.

But with just weeks to go before the July 23 election, Diaz and Sanchez still face an uphill struggle to convince enough voters to keep their coalition of centre-left Socialists and the hard left in power.

Although opinion polls have for months named Diaz as Spain's top-rated politician, and Sumar (Unity) has been slowly but steadily gaining ground, it still polls at just over 13%, slightly behind the far-right Vox.

Vox is similarly seen as a kingmaker to the front-runners - the conservative People's Party (PP), now polling at over 30% - while support for Sanchez's Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) has dipped below 30%.

Problems with pandemic management and high inflation from the Ukraine war further weakened Sanchez's already shaky government, which lacks a parliamentary majority and had to strike ad hoc deals with various parties.

To close the gap with PP, Diaz banks on her credentials as a labour minister and deputy premier who substantially raised the minimum monthly pay to 1,259 euros ($1,378) and reversed core elements of an unpopular labour reform passed by a previous government, promising Spaniards fewer working hours for the same wages.

The immediate objective would be to lop off 2.5 hours a week in 2024 from 40 now, and then gradually cut the working week to 32 hours, she said.

That, she argues, is "perfectly achievable" by engaging in so-called "everyday politics" that reconnects citizens with public life, allowing them to better influence political decisions and question the status quo.

"Sumar is a quiet force that talks about people's lives ..., committed to solving problems," summarised Diaz, who presided over tumultuous negotiations to amalgamate various hard-left, left-leaning and green regionalist brands.

Other planks of her "micro-politics" platform include mortgage subsidies, additional state funds for medical expenses, more urban green areas and air conditioning for schools in poorer neighbourhoods, which she said suffer disproportionately as climate change makes heat waves more frequent.

POPE'S BLESSING

Once a Communist, Diaz now shies away from labelling herself as such or appealing solely to left-wing voters, although she rarely misses an opportunity to criticise capitalism.

"We need better wages, especially in a country where the causes of inflation are tremendous corporate margins," she said.

In her personalised office, where she keeps a large collection of favourite LP records from Shostakovich to The Smiths to Billie Eilish, there is a poster of Pope Francis waving a hand and the tongue-in-cheek words "International Communism wishes you happy holidays" printed in the background.

Diaz defines herself as an atheist but says that meeting the Pope, who frequently criticises unbridled capitalism, "was the most important encounter" of her life and the two stay in touch as they "have so much in common".

"My labour reform is blessed by the Pope," she said, citing unprecedented support it received from the Spanish Catholic Church a few days after her meeting.

Sumar is a grouping of 15 left-wing parties that now includes Podemos, a party born out of the anti-austerity Indignados movement in 2011 that has been the Socialists' often thorny junior coalition partner since early 2020.

Spain's electoral fragmentation, which began in 2011 and led to a series of repeat elections, makes it practically impossible for a single party to gain a governing majority as had long been the case between Spain's return to democracy in the late 1970s and 2016, when governments were either led by the PSOE or PP.

Podemos had dismal results in regional elections on May 28 which, coupled with PSOE losing several key regional votes, spurred Sanchez to call an early national election for July 23.

Two days later, Diaz registered Sumar, which first surfaced as a loose movement to unite the left in 2022, as a potential kingmaker bloc to run in the election.

(Reporting by Belén Carreño and Elena Rodríguez in Madrid; editing by Andrei Khalip and Mark Heinrich)