Can Podemos Win in Spain?
If the current poll numbers hold, Spain's next prime minister will be
Pablo Iglesias, a pony-tailed 36-year-old political scientist who cut
his teeth in the Communist Youth and the anti-globalization movement—but
whose party, Podemos, wants "to change the rules of the political
game," Iglesias told
the journalist Jacobo Rivero. Left and right, he
added, are metaphors that are no longer "useful in political terms":
"the fundamental divide now [is] between oligarchy and democracy,
between a social majority and a privileged minority." Or, as Podemos
likes to put it, between
la gente and
la casta, the people and the caste.
Podemos was founded only a year ago and, in May, it stunned Spain's
political establishment by winning five seats in the European Parliament
(1.25 million votes, nearly 8 percent). In many respects, the
party—whose name translates as "We can"—is the Spanish sibling of
Greece's Syriza. Central to its still-evolving platform is a broad set
of economic-stimulus measures that buck the European obsession with
austerity as the only way out of the continent's economic crisis. Among
other things, Podemos proposes a restructuring of the national debt, a
"deprivatization" of essential services such as healthcare and energy,
and a form of universal basic income that would provide a road back into
Spain's anemic economy for the millions of unemployed—officially nearly
24 percent of the workforce, and as high as 54 percent among those 18
to 25. The party also wants to reform the country's Constitution, which
cemented Spain's democratic transition in the late 1970s as a compromise
between the Franco regime and the opposition. For Podemos, the
Constitution has become a "padlock": the cornerstone of the failed
"regime of '78" that, starting in the 1980s, was built on a bipartisan
consensus between the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) and the
right-wing Popular Party (PP), breeding corruption while stifling
democracy.
As it happens, Iglesias was born in October 1978—the
same month the Constitution was approved in Parliament. And this is not
the only irony of fate. Podemos may soon drive the final nail in the
coffin of the Socialist Party, after whose nineteenth-century founder
Iglesias was named. According to a postelection analysis on ElDiario.es,
"What appears to be true is that wherever support for the PSOE
deteriorates fastest is where people have voted most for Podemos."
