The label Podemos can’t escape
Since its formation in January 2014 through regional and municipal elections at the end of May 2015, Spain's new political party Podemos (We Can) has crashed the political scene in a manner that has no precedent since the fall of the Franco dictatorship and the 1976 to 1982 "Transition" period to a two-party system dominated by the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and center-right Popular Party (PP).
The rise of Podemos took place in the aftermath of the 2008-09 economic crisis, when the unemployment rate hit an all-time high in Spain of almost 27 percent in the first quarter of 2013. In addition, movements against evictions, the Mareas (Tides), Marches for Dignity and the millions of people--known as the "Indignados"--who occupied public spaces across the country in May 2011, all fueled Podemos' growth, which now stands at 375,000 members.
In this August 9 article published by La Marea, a magazine and website that runs as a workers' coop in Madrid, details how, despite Podemos' shift to the right on political policies and party leader Pablo Iglesias and his team's best efforts to avoid any language traditionally associated with the radical left, the media and corporations in Spain have gone on the offensive and successfully painted the party as being on the far left, in the eyes of a majority of Spaniards. This article was translated by Darrin Hoop from an excerpt of the original that appeared on the left-wing website KaosenlaRed.
THE LATEST poll from CIS (Center for Sociological Research) shows that 52 percent of Spaniards consider Podemos a party of the extreme left.
Podemos is failing in one of its core ideas: to distance itself from the left. Since its birth, this brainchild of Pablo Iglesias has struggled to not be identified as a left-wing party, but rather as a party of the people, a broad entity that accepts voters of any political persuasion and isn't rejected by any political ideology. Pablo Iglesias has always considered the left a dangerous place in Spanish politics because it is impossible to win elections there.
According to the latest CIS poll, he hasn't succeeded in this mission. The 52 percent of Spaniards who believe Podemos is a far-left party is the largest percentage since October 2014, when Podemos began to appear in CIS polls in questions about people's ideological positions.
All party members and spokespersons have tried to hew to a message of being in the center, moderate and lacking ideology, in an attempt to attract fearful voters who would reject a more left-wing appeal. Since the European elections in May 2014, in which Podemos won five seats, party leaders have moderated their methods and message to make them completely acceptable to today's social-democratic ideas, not those of the 1980s, but those that Pablo Iglesias has strived for from the beginning. The minimum program that Podemos presented in the European elections has been watered down to the point of being unrecognizable.
Paradoxically, this drift towards the ideological center--and not to the center of the political debate--hasn't been perceived in this way by the people. In the last few months, the percentage of those placing Podemos on the extreme left has increased significantly in each public poll. In October 2014, 39.2 percent of Spaniards situated the purple party [purple is main color of Podemos] as tilting to the far left. In January 2015, that number reached 42.6 percent, and it increased to 48.3 percent by the April 2015 poll. With the most recent poll, that's an increase of 13 percentage points since October 2014, despite the determined efforts of all Podemos members to avoid it.
IN LAYING out Podemos' political positioning and the moderation of its message, Pablo Iglesias described the part of the political spectrum that Podemos should adopt. Along these lines, he has interpreted the central, defining question of the day ("la centralidad del tablero") and the ideological center as being two different things. For the Podemos leader, the central message of today should be the end of austerity:
To be ideologically hegemonic and to establish the terms of the debate for the country that all of the other candidates will have to respond to is what all political forces that want to win elections aspire to do. However, this key message doesn't have to coincide with what in the past has been called the "ideological center," and that can only be explained in a context in which conservatives and social democrats stake out their positions. Today, on the contrary, the key message is what ZP [José Luís Rodríquez Zapatero, the leader of PSOE and ex-prime minister of Spain for two terms, from 2004 to the end of 2011] highlighted: a redistributive economic project against the dogmatism of austerity.
This principle against austerity found support among wide sectors of the population that, fed up with years of hardship and cuts, saw Podemos as voicing their desires. However, after the European elections the scare campaign against the party and the appearance of other actors, like Ciudadanos [a corporate-backed, center-right party] have pushed Podemos toward the part of the political spectrum that Pablo Iglesias had wanted to avoid at all costs. In a May article in the Spanish daily newspaper Público, Podemos' leader warned of the danger of identifying "centrality" with other ways of seeing politics:
What is most remarkable is, in the last few months, there's a new perspective within political sectors that are sympathetic to Podemos, who start with a certain inferiority complex with respect to Ciudadanos. For these sectors, it appears that "centrality" is identified with positions that are more media-friendly and "respectable," so as not to frighten economic elites or more conservative sections of the population who are uncomfortable with change. This notion of "centrality" is dangerously close to the idea of the "ideological center." The danger of this morphing of concepts isn't in a negative assessment of the ideological space of "neither left, nor right," but rather in the observation that on this playing field, Podemos has everything to lose.
THIS ANALYSIS by Iglesias is contradicted by the facts. Since the great electoral results of the European parliamentary elections, Podemos has renounced a multitude of measures it had supported, precisely in search of an image of respectability that won't scare the elites.
In November 2014, the party of Iglesias presented its draft economic program. In this document, it made important modifications to those measures that had raised suspicion with elite and influential sectors. Podemos dropped nationalization of strategic economic sectors, a demand that had played a major role in its program for the European elections. It moved away from its demand for a retirement age of 60, and the party traded in a program guaranteeing a Universal Basic Income for a Guaranteed Minimum Income subsidy, like those that already exist in all of the CCAAs [Spain's autonomous communities).
On top of all this, the November document eliminated the key demand in the struggle against austerity, with which the party aimed to set the terms of debate: an audit of the state debt in order to declare it illegitimate.
This turn toward social democracy at the end of 2014 happened before Ciudadanos had even appeared as an option in the opinion polls. This meant that Podemos was the only viable option for voters looking to reinvigorate the Spanish state's politics, but who didn't want to see themselves as identifying with the far left or interested in displacing the Socialists.
However, in the spring of 2015, a Metroscopia poll for El País changed the political landscape. The daily's public opinion survey suddenly showed the Cs [Ciudadanos] for the first time as a political force to be reckoned with in the Spanish electoral arena, with 8 percent of the vote. Starting with this finding in El País, the party of Albert Rivera [leader of Ciudadanos and a member of the parliament in Catalonia] began to hold an important space in the public agenda, leading to growth it consolidated in the Andalusian elections.
Thus, it is competing for the political center with Podemos, while using rhetoric that is more moderate, friendly and acceptable to the mass media. This has inevitably resulted in placing the party of Pablo Iglesias on the far left, despite the attempts of its leaders to flee from it.
The total capitulation of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to the European Union after the referendum and the signing of the subsequent pro-austerity agreement also hasn't helped Podemos to establish itself as the center of political debate in Spain. Igelsias' defense of Tsipras' signing of the new Memorandum hampers his ability to present himself as a reliable opponent of austerity. In addition, his wholehearted support of Tsipras has allowed Podemos' opponents to associate Greece's problems with a politics of fear, which is now beginning to bite.
The CIS poll on how Spaniards perceive Podemos, published in early August, is worse for the leadership of Podemos than the drop in voter support by a single point. The political landscape that the party of Pablo Iglesias faces in the electoral homestretch [before general elections scheduled for later this year] is the most worrisome and least favorable for the leadership of Podemos to date.
Fear works better when the right-wing media has managed to convince voters that what has been presented as an alternative is a dangerous choice for the extreme left. It seems as if the right has achieved this goal.
Translation by Darrin Hoop
