By Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
December 5, 2014. It is the Friday night before the announcement of the results of the online election for the Citizens Council of – according to recent polls – Spain’s most popular party. A dozen members of the leading core of Podemos offer a simple dinner to members and MEPs of leftist parties who came from other parts of Europe for the event. However, looking at it from a distance and with no sound, one would think that this is a graduation celebration including the parents of the students. Indeed, Manuel, Tanya, Carmen, Dennis, members of the leading core of Podemos, have just graduated from university. Their eyes radiate a glow undefiled by pragmatism and cynicism. The youthfulness of Podemos is soothing.
Carmen (23), a political science student in Madrid, tells me that now that her professor became MEP she will work for her and thus will not have time to deliver her Master’s thesis on social policies in Morales’ Bolivia. Similar stories are spinning in my head all day long, until Pablo Iglesias welcomes me with his signature hug. I did not miss the opportunity to ask him about my observations. Konstantinka Kuneva, the woman who has soul for eyes and who was welcomed with a standing ovation in the event, had already described the way that Iglesias hugs his comrades as “genuine as the few in the world.” I am in Madrid with Konstantinka, looking into Podemos’ use of digital and techno-political tools of direct democracy in an effort to develop similar ones for Konstantinka’s work as an MEP within and outside the European Parliament. The ingenuity of Podemos is inspiring.
Podemos have “many souls,” Iglesias tells me, hence confirming my recent ethnographic observations which I share here with caution: scholarly and political engagement through a public university, intimate links with radical politics in Latin America, participation in the horizontal struggles for the defense of the commons in Spain, charismatic use of the mass media and the television, and the emergence of the movement of the squares in 2011 are equivalent parts of the kaleidoscopic political soul of Podemos. The versatility of Podemos is worth exploring further.
The first “soul” is the public university, and in particular the Department of Political Science of the historically anti-Franco Computense University in Madrid. The four most popular candidates for the Citizens Council teach political science in that very department: Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón, Carolina Bescansa and Juan Carlos Monedero. Dozens of newer strains of Podemos, including the already familiar to us Carmen, have studied or are still studying at the same department. In the public Computense, academic teachers set up a hub for political research ten years ago, thought and finally action, free from the needs and the control of the super-rich, who are focused on Spain’s private universities. It was in the public university of Madrid and by university teachers who are paid starvation wages where the new political subject in the country was born.
The second “soul” is Latin America and especially the momentous developments in the continent of the Bolivarian revolution during the last 10-15 years, which many Podemos members have thoroughly studied. Besides, Juan Carlos Monedero, one of their main political brains, was closely advising Hugo Chavez for nine years before he left disappointed by the turn of Venezuelans towards unbridled consumerism (personal communication). Apart from specific personal and political relations that no one can possibly know how deep they run (this is by the way the main accusation by their opponents and at the same time the hidden hope of many of their supporters), the political vision of Podemos is heavily inspired both by the theory of “populist reason” developed by the recently deceased Argentinian thinker Ernesto Laclau, as well as by the action of the Latin-American social movements which shook off the hegemony of the US and the IMF on the continent.
The third soul are the popular struggles for the defense of the commons in Spain, especially through popular committees for the right to housing and against evictions such as the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca. Many current members of Podemos were politicized for the first time in this movement and through other small initiatives in defense of the common goods, which gradually formed a broad alliance against the usurpation of public wealth from banks and capitalists. This alliance may prove key to solving the biggest enigma in the Spanish left today, which is none other than the famous Catalan issue. The presence of Ada Colau, the Catalan leader of the movement against evictions and newly founded radical party “Guanyem Barcelona” (We will win Barcelona), at the founding congress of Podemos gives hope for a pan-Castellan alliance.
The fourth soul is the strategic use of mass media by gifted speakers who engage the outlets to their advantage. It might be that the university and the struggles for the commons built solidarity ties among segments of radical Spain, but only when Iglesias and others starred the internet TV shows La Tuerka and Fort Apache could they reach broader audiences in the country and in the diaspora. Generally, Podemos are not only fearless of TV but they have succeeded in putting it to work for them, knowing that even when big news corporations hate what they say they are nevertheless obliged to invite them in their shows because they will score high attendance. At the… graduation dinner, Denis Thomas Maguire, half Scottish and half Spanish, and elected member of the Committee for the democratic guarantees would tell me that Podemos have learned to play with the TV like cat and mouse, confident that the presence in a TV show is more effective than thousands of leaflets circulated in the streets.
Finally, the most passionate of all souls of Podemos is undoubtedly the massive occupation movement of the country’s squares in 2011, also known as the indignados movement. The indignados brought together for the first time many disparate parts of unemployed yet creative youth and others who have not yet been active in political collectives but were still voting one of the two major political parties of the establishment, the Popular party and the Socialists. The movements gave the possibility to wide parts of the population to break from this tradition and imagine themselves as part of a radical and effective political movement that denies representation and demands “democracia real” alluding thus to direct democracy and popular control of government.
However, if the Spanish plazas gave birth to political demands, their precarious character could not produce political bonding; they might have increased the organic confidence of the movement but they could not have organized paths of permanent politics. The crucial step in the conversion of a primarily protest movement in permanent political structure was the birth of the “circulos”, a nation-wide network of open assemblies, organized at both local and subject-related levels, and based on physical or online participation in direct-democratic processes of discussion and decision.
The emergence of the public university as the locus of a new political subject, the ongoing exporting of the Bolivarian revolution to Europe via Spain, the diverse struggles for the commons as common denominator for radical politics, the charismatic and strategic use of the mass media for propaganda purposes and the conversion of a popular protest movement into a network of direct democratic structures are the main lessons from this rather irate ethnographic analysis of Podemos’ “many souls”. To be sure, some of these souls can be found elsewhere too, but in Spain their co-existence seems unique both in the actual results it produces and in the hope for the future it disseminates. Needless to say, this should not discourage visionaries out there from engaging in a more intensive and inventive … soul-searching.
A Greek version of the story was also published in 'Enthemata', a Sunday supplement of Avgi newspaper.