Party for breakfast, party for lunch, party for dinner. Adriana Lastra (Ribadesella, March 30, 1979) has always raised the same flag: the PSOE, modulated to the measure of Pedro Sánchez, above everything else. A banner that has been dropped today alluding to personal reasons, useful to cover up the underground war for power that has been waged three-way for months between Ferraz, Moncloa and Carrera de San Jerónimo.
Lastra has lived for and from the party, mainly since Sánchez came to power, for whom he has always been a faithful supporter to the point that some in the PSOE came to distrust his defense, sometimes unthinking and bordering on sectarianism, of any movement of the president. A stubbornness that, on occasions, led him to cross uncomfortable limits for a good part of socialism.
Since the age of 18, when he joined the Socialist Youth, Lastra’s life has always been within the PSOE ring. In little more than a year she became general secretary of the Youth of her hometown and, since then, first in Asturias and then at the national level, she has chained organic and representative positions without solution of continuity.
In 2007 she was elected deputy in the General Board of the Principality of Asturias for the eastern constituency. She revalidated her seat in 2011 and also in the early elections of 2012, until, in 2015, she led the Asturian list of the PSOE to the Congress of Deputies. She also won the seat on this occasion and a year later, in the 2016 elections, she revalidated it.
It was then, when Lastra and Pedro Sánchez strengthened their ties and united their destinies… until today. The current President of the Government, then Secretary General of the PSOE, had obtained in the elections the worst historical result of socialism but he was determined not to facilitate the formation of a government, wielding his famous “no is no” before Mariano Rajoy. Sánchez was ousted by the socialists themselves on October 1, 2016 and Lastra also fell with him.
The disaster, the humiliation, the spite and the rebellion united them even more. Adriana soon revealed herself to be one of Sánchez’s staunchest supporters in his irrepressible aspiration to return to reign over the PSOE… and beyond. If Sánchez became the Cid Campeador of the grassroots, Lastra became his Joan of Arc. Both fireproof and, according to their detractors, blind with revenge, determined to win the final battle when they were left for dead.
The former deputy general secretary of the PSOE has been ridiculed on many occasions for her lack of higher education and for always having been a party product with no known work experience, but as such, together with Sánchez, she always shone. She is hardworking, outspoken and obsessed with closing spaces to the political adversary. No concessions, no half measures. A sweet face behind which she hid a fierce character.
Pedro Sánchez, the resistant one, achieved his goal and recovered the scepter from Ferraz in 2017, always supported by Lastra. Her fidelity was rewarded and the reborn secretary general chose her as her lieutenant, appointing her deputy secretary general. In 2018, after the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy and the arrival of Pedro Sánchez at La Moncloa, Adriana Lastra was appointed as socialist spokesperson in Congress, a position tailored to the scourge of the PP that Pedro Sánchez pretended to be.
Now, ten months after Lastra was replaced as the parliamentary spokesperson by Héctor Gómez from Tenerife and when Sánchez’s star in the Government begins to fade, the feisty Asturian, dominatrix of Sanchista socialism and whip of the right takes a step back. Her resignation is rather withdrawn and many of her detractors want to guess in it a foretaste of the future that awaits her mentor.
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