This year marks a decade since the creation of Podemos, the party that emerged three years after the 15M movement challenged austerity in the squares of Spain’s major cities. In its early days, anything seemed possible. Podemos was soon leading national polls on over 20 percent support, suggesting that it could overtake the Socialist Party (PSOE) and create an earthquake in the party system that had endured since the Transition to democracy in the late 1970s.
But a lot has changed, and today Podemos’s representation in the Spanish Congress has slumped to only four MPs. At its peak, it had seventy-one. In June’s elections to the European Parliament, Podemos and its offshoot, Sumar, ran separately and obtained just 3.3 and 4.7 percent respectively.
Podemos burst onto the scene ten years ago by adopting a populist strategy inspired by the work of political theorist Ernesto Laclau. It departed from the traditional logics, discourses, and symbolism of the Left, and instead of framing itself in opposition to the Right, it sought to appeal to the “people” as opposed to the “caste.” But even the first tapering-off of its election results saw its strategy split into two opposed factions.
The first faction, led by Pablo Iglesias and known as Pablismo, increasingly advocated a return to an openly leftist identity. Podemos’s second-in-command, Íñigo Errejón, instead gathered those who wanted to maintain the populist road map: building broad majorities around a deliberately ambiguous discourse, sufficiently wide-ranging to include different and politically unengaged sectors of the population. Errejonismo eventually left the party to form its own outfit, Más País, which is now part of Sumar.
Podemos’s star shone brightly — but all…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Raúl Rojas-Andrés
