At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old
lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at
the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid
by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a
scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple.
His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be
challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought,
was not just something to be studied.
It was something you either did,
or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and –
as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick
to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a
doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was
clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered,
globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant
ideology.
Iglesias and the students, ex-students and faculty academics worked
hard to spread their ideas. They produced political television shows and
collaborated with their Latin American heroes – left-leaning populist
leaders such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador or Evo Morales of Bolivia. But
when they launched their own political party on 17 January 2014 and gave
it the name
Podemos
(“We Can”), many dismissed it.
With no money, no structure and few
concrete policies, it looked like just one of several angry,
anti-austerity parties destined to fade away within months.
A year later, on 31 January 2015, Iglesias strode across a stage in
Madrid’s emblematic central square, the Puerta del Sol. It was filled
with 150,000 people, squeezed in so tightly that it was impossible to
move.
He addressed the crowd with the impassioned rhetoric for which
opponents have branded him a dangerous leftwing populist. He railed
against the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” who had humiliated
them all.
He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble
madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”.
Spain
was in the grip of historic, convulsive change. The serried crowd were
heirs to the common folk who – armed with knives, flowerpots and stones –
had rebelled against Napoleonic troops in nearby streets two centuries
earlier. “We can dream, we can win!” he shouted.
Polls suggest that he is right. Since 1982, Spain has been governed
by only two parties. Yet El País newspaper now places Podemos at 22%,
ahead of both the ruling conservative Partido Popular (PP) and its
leftwing opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).
If Podemos
can grow further, Iglesias could become prime minister after elections
that are expected in November. This would be an almost unheard-of
achievement for such a young party.
Many in the Puerta del Sol longed to see that day. “Yes we can! Yes
we can!” they chanted. Other onlookers shivered, recalling Iglesias’s
praise for Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez and fearing an
eruption of Latin American-style populism in a country gripped by debt,
austerity and unemployment.
But without Podemos, supporters feared,
Spain faced the prospect of becoming like
Greece, with its disintegrating welfare state, crumbling middle class and rampant inequality.
Read
more: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics
changed European politics | Giles Tremlett | World news | The Guardian
