Just 15 months after it was founded, Podemos now leads the polls in Spain. Can this grassroots party win power – or is its bubble about to burst?
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.
If the party's leaders have to renounce some of their ideas to broaden their appeal, they will do so. The aim is to win
Spain’s far-right pundits had embraced TV, and Iglesias believed it was time for the left to do something similar
Ratings surged as Iglesias, equipped with endless facts and simple messages, wiped the floor with fellow debaters
Iglesias said politics was like sex: you start off doing it badly, but learn with experience
Related: Viva Podemos: the left shows it can adapt and thrive in a crisis | Owen Jones
The party’s use of transparency websites, voting tools and online debate is already cutting-edge
Iglesias is aware of the paradox of a party with anti-capitalist roots bidding to administer a market-based economy
Related: Why Ernesto Laclau is the intellectual figurehead for Syriza and Podemos | Dan Hancox
One journalist wrote that Iglesias is selling a religious tale similar to that of Jesus expelling the money-changers
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