Podemos falls short of heaven but leaves its mark on Spain

Less than a year ago, the leader of Spain’s leftwing insurgent party announced its ambition “to storm the heavens”. The wind was then at the back of Pablo Iglesias, who co-founded the upstart Podemos party with fellow university professors in January 2014.

In European elections in May last year, the party racked up 1.2m votes, capitalising on widespread anger at job losses, austerity measures, corruption and inequality. According to the polls, the pony-tailed Mr Iglesias seemed set to annihilate the country’s once formidable Socialist party and perhaps even snatch power from the ruling conservative Popular party. Mr Iglesias’s celestial slogan — lifted from Karl Marx’s writings on the 1871 Paris Commune — encapsulated not just Podemos’s take-no-prisoners approach to politics but also its hubris.

To understand Podemos one has to recall that it never aspired to become just another party. Mr Iglesias always wanted to leave the comfort zone of Europe’s far left and a discourse typically dominated by ideology rather than policy, and win the hearts of a majority of Spaniards so as to overturn what he described as the “1978 regime”— the liberal democratic system that put an end to the Franco period.

But Podemos’ standing in the polls has all but halved from its peak, to not much more than 15 per cent. The party performed disappointingly in regional and municipal elections this year. Having lost the fuel to storm the heavens, Podemos now seems heading back to earth, its support dimmed by the Spanish economic recovery, an attempted comeback by the Socialists and the emergence of another new party, Ciudadanos, a serious challenger in representing anger at corruption and the parties of the establishment. At present it seems that every passing day makes Podemos’ struggle a little more uphill.

The halt to the party’s blitzkrieg, however, does not spell the end of the war. Polls anticipate that neither the Popular party nor the Socialists are likely to have a comfortable majority after general elections at the end of the year. Whatever the final outcome, both Podemos and Ciudadanos will be important in the aftermath, given their ability either to sustain minority governments or block their access to power. Post-election politics is likely to resemble a war of attrition, so it makes sense to dig deep trenches and prepare for a tumultuous legislature, even for a snap 2016 election, if instability is not contained.

The window of opportunity to overthrow the 1978 regime is now closed but there remains ample political space to exploit the weakness of the country’s old left. Spain is just one of many European countries where social democratic parties have agonised, suffered and split over their failure to connect with the people in the post-crisis years. The electoral miseries of Germany’s Social Democrats, the Socialist party in France, the Labour party in Britain and Pasok in Greece attest as much.

Frustration with such parties has fuelled the rise of figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, the hard left politician tipped to become Labour’s next leader, and of parties such as Podemos and Greece’s Syriza. And even if Podemos and Syriza are seeing their popularity slide as the normal rules of politics resume, they are in no danger of leaving the scene. Leftwing voters will still look for parties that seem to share their thirst for equality and social justice.

The irony is that the insurgents’ current role will effectively sabotage the chances of power of the left as a whole. With Podemos on the scene, the Socialists’ hopes for stable government are much reduced. Both insurgent and classic social democratic parties remain trapped in the muddy waters of liberal democracy as their struggles for authenticity weaken their chances of power. The heavens remain unstormed but Podemos has changed the political weather.

The writer is head of the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations