Bittersweet birthday for Spain’s Podemos

At the height of its popularity, in 2015, Podemos gathered tens of thousands of people in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square. The party’s pony-tailed 36-year-old leader, Pablo Iglesias, addressed them with a fiery speech in which he railed against economic austerity and invoked Spain’s most celebrated literary hero.

“We are not a brand, we are a country of ordinary people,” he said. “We dream like Don Quixote, but we take our dreams very seriously.”

Podemos (or “We Can”), was leading opinion polls when Iglesias addressed his followers, just a year after the party’s creation, in January 2014. But as its 10th anniversary has been marked this week, those dreams he spoke of have been severely tested. Podemos’s status as an electoral power is diminished, Iglesias and many of his colleagues have left active politics and the party’s spats with its left-wing rivals often overshadow its policy agenda.

But despite its decline, few would dispute the fact that Podemos has had an enormous, irreversible impact on Spanish politics.

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The indignados (or “outraged”) movement of 2011 convinced Iglesias and a group of fellow left-leaning university academics that a new party was viable. During it, young Spaniards protested across the country to demand increased housing rights, job opportunities and an end to a bi-party system dominated by the centre-left Socialists and the conservative Popular Party (PP).

Initially eschewing the left-right paradigm in favour of one defending “those down below”, Podemos identified its adversary as the political and economic “caste” who controlled Spanish public life, from its bankers and business bosses to its governors. That strategy reflected the inspiration Podemos drew from the hard-left Bolivarian governments of Latin America, such as those of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

A simmering anger among many voters on the left and right, turbocharged by a torrent of corruption scandals in the PP government and the lingering effects of austerity, sent Podemos’s support soaring.

“They had a political intelligence which knew how to address Spaniards, how to communicate with them and how to read the social climate of that moment,” says José Pablo Ferrandiz, head of public opinion at Ipsos Spain.

Local elections in 2015 saw Podemos and its regional coalitions take control of a number of cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. In the general election that year it came third and was close to overtaking the Socialists.

However, internal conflict, a long-standing trope of the Spanish left, was never far away. A very public ideological dispute was played out by Iglesias, espousing a combative, overtly leftist line, and party number two, Ínigo Errejón, who was seen as more moderate. A third, hard-line faction of self-proclaimed anti-capitalists only complicated the dynamic further.

“Podemos will always be in crisis,” noted the journalist and commentator Enric Juliana in 2017. “But it could be more flexible if its three groups managed to free themselves from the psychological torment of the Spanish left, which is always haunted by the past.”

Iglesias’s victory in that particular battle reinforced his leadership but confined Podemos to a position on the far left that limited its electoral appeal, even though it was now wielding real power.

“When they got into institutions they were caught between whether to play an institutional role as a party or to keep up the tension on the streets,” says Ferrandiz. “And that is confusing for a lot of voters.”

Meanwhile, when Iglesias and his partner, fellow Podemos politician Irene Montero, bought a €600,000 home outside Madrid, many of their more traditionally aligned supporters felt betrayed and that the couple had joined the very “caste” against which they once railed.

By 2019, Podemos had lost half of its parliamentary representation. However, Spain’s fragmented politics led to the party forming a coalition government as junior partner to the Socialists of Pedro Sánchez.

Many Spaniards are glad to see Podemos struggling. Yet it can point to concrete achievements

Podemos played a crucial role in ensuring the government implemented its furlough scheme when Covid hit. However, as Spanish politics became increasingly polarised during the pandemic, the party and its leader were the government’s lightning rod. He and Montero had to abandon a summer holiday in northern Spain after being harassed and abused on the street, and extremists protested outside their home for weeks.

Meanwhile, details have emerged of a deep-state campaign, involving politicians and police officers, that aimed to smear the party.

By last year’s local and general elections, Podemos looked close to being a spent force. Now with just five MPs, it has been locked in a spat with a newer left-wing rival, Sumar, making it at times look petty and vindictive.

Many Spaniards are glad to see Podemos struggling. Yet it can point to concrete achievements: it successfully forced other parties to follow its lead in holding leadership primaries and practising transparency, while its focus on gender equality, housing and social justice in general has thrust those issues to the centre of Spanish public debate.

“The most important lesson of the last 10 years of Podemos is that they have shown that the country can change,” says Isabel Serrano, the party’s spokeswoman.

In June’s EU elections, Podemos could be fighting for its survival, but whatever happens it already has an undeniable legacy.

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