When Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias arrived in the public arena in 2014, he was a new kind of politician. A stern, moralising university professor with a ponytail, he hectored the country’s elites and high-earners, portraying them as members of a parasitic “caste” while winning the support of millions of outraged Spaniards.
Yet four years later Iglesias is facing accusations from within his own ranks that he has succumbed to the trappings of success, and become exactly the kind of politician that he has so frequently excoriated.
In recent days Podemos affiliates have been taking part in an online referendum on whether to remove Iglesias and his partner, Irene Montero, who is the party’s parliamentary spokeswoman, from their posts.
The motive for the vote is the couple’s decision to buy a €660,000 home outside Madrid, and the doubts this has raised about their loyalty to their leftist principles.
The couple are expecting twins this autumn, and have said they want to raise their children in quiet surroundings, away from the noise and lack of privacy of Madrid.
“We know that we will be criticised whatever we do,” the couple said in a statement after news emerged that they were planning to buy the property in the well-heeled suburb of Galapagar. In the same communiqué Iglesias and Montero explained in detail how they would pay for the house with monthly mortgage instalments of €1,600.
Economic austerity
In less than five years since being founded, Podemos has become the third biggest party in Spain’s parliament, with a leftist platform that has fiercely attacked both the conservative government’s economic austerity and the corruption tainting the country’s political class.
There is no suggestion that Iglesias and Montero have done anything illegal. Instead criticism has focused exclusively on their alleged hypocrisy and willingness to sacrifice Podemos’s ideals for their own personal comfort. Much of it has come from within the party.
Carlos Couso, a senior Podemos politician in the Navarre region, warned that the purchase “suggests a certain petit bourgeois mentality which doesn’t fit with the founding principles” of the party.
José María “Kichi” González, Podemos’s mayor of Cádiz, has been equally outspoken. He pointed to his own decision to keep living in a poor district of the city, saying that “it’s all about not living like the elites, because we are here to get rid of them…it’s all about resembling the people who voted for us and to whom we remain faithful”.
Iglesias has not been helped by attacks he has made in the past on the perceived excesses of rival politicians.
“Would you hand the economic policy of the country to someone who spends €600,000 on a luxury attic?” he tweeted in 2012, after economy minister Luis de Guindos had just bought such a property.
In recent days he has frequently been reminded of this comment and others espousing his sense of belonging to the working-class Madrid district of Vallecas.
Leadership challenge
Despite its success Podemos has often been vulnerable to infighting. Last month Carolina Bescansa, a co-founder of the party, was embarrassed after a document she had drawn up outlining a planned leadership challenge against Iglesias came to light.
The debate surrounding the Galapagar house has exposed more rifts, with another co-founder of the party, Miguel Urbán, warning that the referendum risked descending into a “soap opera”.
The controversy surrounding the private life of Iglesias and Montero intensified when a right-wing newspaper published not only details and pictures of their house and its plush swimming pool, but also photos of their unborn children from an ultrasound scan.
All of this has been an unwelcome distraction for Podemos during a period of political turmoil. On Friday the Socialist Party announced its intention to hold a no-confidence vote against prime minister Mariano Rajoy after a torrent of corruption scandals had shaken his governing Popular Party. Podemos plans to support the Socialists’ bid to unseat Rajoy even though many expect the prime minister to ride the storm.
Similarly, Iglesias and Montero will probably survive their own confidence vote, whose result is due Monday. Nonetheless, in the long term the new property might end up costing them not just a hefty mortgage but also something else which they had carefully nurtured until now: their credibility as political outsiders.
