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Spain's Podemos party, which in recent years rose to prominence on a defiant anti-austerity platform, has overtaken one of the nation's two leading political powerhouses and is threatening to unseat the conservative establishment in Sunday's general election.
Polls on Monday suggest that the populist party successfully has shattered the era of two-party dominance, besting the Socialist Party (PSOE) 25 to 21.2 percent, while the ruling conservative Popular Party (PP) still leads with 30.7 percent.
"We are very close to defeating the Popular Party in the elections," Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias declared. "We are very close. And they are very worried about it for what it means."
Indeed, Spain's conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy expressed as much during a campaign stop Monday, telling supporters, "Radicalism and extremism can only be stopped by a coalition of people behind the Popular Party." To block the rise of Podemos, Rajoy called on "all moderate, sensible and balanced voters to unite" by casting their vote Sunday.
The latest poll by research website Electograph reflects a four percent increase in support for the outsider movement since December's election, during which Podemos secured 69 parliament seats. That upset effectively fractured the majority, forcing the king of Spain to dissolve parliament and hold another vote.
While the various parties have been jockeying to form coalitions, Podemos "has boosted its support by striking a deal with the United Left, once part of the Communist party," Euronewsexplains, forming the ascendant Unidos Podemos coalition.
"What is uncertain amid the maneuvering is the shape of a future government," Euronews continues. "What seems highly likely is that Spain's traditional two-party system looks set to be blown apart."
The elections will come amid a turbulent week in Europe, following the upcoming UK vote on the so-called "Brexit" referendum. As the Guardian's Owen Jones wrote on Tuesday, the two votes "highlight the competing visions of Europe's future."
Declaring this week a "defining moment" in postwar Europe, Jones continues:
Across Europe, the visions represented by the rightwing Brexiters in Britain and Podemos in Spain are locked in combat. If Britain leaves the EU as the result of a leave campaign whose core message is hostility to immigration, that will be a shot in the arm to already ascendant anti-immigration movements across Europe. The question isn't whether France's far-right leader Marine Le Pen will celebrate Brexit, but how expensive will be the champagne she chooses to toast it with. The odds of the EU disintegrating amid anti-immigrant and anti-refugee acrimony will increase. If Unidos Podemos do well in Spain on Sunday--and even forms a coalition government with the Socialists--then that will be a significant boost to movements arguing for a Europe of public investment and workers' rights.
"Are we to have a disintegrating Europe characterized by widespread, destructive, anti-immigrant resentment, corporate dominance and shredded social protection, or a democratic Europe run in the interests of the majority?" he concludes. "The people of Britain and Spain can light the way."
Earlier this month, Podemos published a catalogue-styled manifesto detailing its key political stances, such as plans to reduce unemployment and increase taxes on the wealthy, against a backdrop of Ikea-like images.
"History is knocking at our door," declared Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftwing coalition party of Syriza in Greece, during a speech addressed to thousands of supporters in Athens on Thursday night as he stood next to his foreign compatriot Pablo Iglesias of the Spanish Podemos Party.
"The wind of democratic change is blowing in Europe."
--Pablo Iglesias, Podemos
Syriza and Podemos have become the mouthpiece of the anti-austerity movement in southern Europe while Tsipras and Iglesias have emerged as key political leaders who emerged from the grassroots, street-level protest movements which rose in opposition to the severe economic policies imposed by elite forces following the financial crisis that began in 2008. In relatively short time, both Syriza and Podemos went from being non-existent political entities to standing on the doorstep of taking power.
With national elections in Greece just days away, and Syriza's polling numbers only improving, Alexis Tsipras announced that his party is prepared to "overthrow" the status quo and vowed to implement swift changes to undo the austerity policies--imposed at the behest of foreign creditors and attached to a bailout package offered by the European Central Bank and the IMF--that have left the Greek economy in tatters. Standing before the large crowd, Tsipras announced that by Monday, "[Greece's] national humiliation will be over. We will finish with orders from abroad."
Syriza's answer to austerity, he continued, would be this: "The bailout is over. Blackmail is over. Subservience is over."
According to reporting by the Irish Times, Tsipras "received one of his biggest cheers of the night when he said that he will press for the repayment of a forced war loan from Greece to Germany during the second World War.
Taking the podium to address the thousands gathered, Iglesias indicated the fate of the Greek and Spanish people--both crushed by unemployment and the gutting of the public sector--were intimately tied. But, Iglesias declared, "The wind of democratic change is blowing in Europe." Less than one year since its inception, Podemos is now polling ahead of Spain's ruling party. Though national elections in Spain could happen later this year, they have not yet been scheduled.
A sampling of voices taken from the crowd in Athens reveal that those supporting what Podemos and Syriza represent are ecstatic for the hope the parties are now offering.
"I am voting for Tsipras because even my parents, after 40 years of work, don't have money to pay for heating," Maria Labridou, a 55-year-old teacher at the rally, toldReuters. "He is our only hope, the only way out."
Speaking with the Irish Times, a retiree named Babis, said, "We want change not only in Greece, but across Europe. The change will start from here, and then go through Spain, Portugal and Ireland. There has to be social justice."
A continental view was not absent among the politicians on the stage either as Leonard Cohen's famous protest song, 'First We Take Manhattan,' played from the loudspeakers and Iglesias at one point declared, "Then we take Berlin!"
Ahead of the Greek election on Sunday, the latest polling in the country shows Syriza has built on its previous lead over the ruling New Democracy party, now led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.
As Helena Smith reports for the Guardian on Friday:
Barely four weeks after the failure of parliament to elect a president, triggering the ballot, Greece's fate now lies in the hands of 9.8 million voters. All the polls show, with growing conviction, that victory will go to Syriza. A poll released by GPO for Mega TV late on Thursday gave the far leftists a six-percentage-point lead over Samaras's center-right New Democracy, the dominant force in a coalition government that has held power since June 2012. A week earlier, GPO had the lead at four percentage points. [...]
Analysts maintain that Syriza's ability to attain an outright majority will be difficult. With pressure mounting from the EU and IMF to "respect" the commitments made as the price of aid, speculation has been rife that the party might prefer to enter a coalition government that would enable it to forge ahead with the structural reforms and budget cuts demanded in exchange for the biggest financial assistance program in global history.
But Tsipras put paid to that. The leftists, who have never held office in the near 200 years of the Modern Greek state - and who, after a bloody civil war, were hounded and imprisoned for decades - wanted to win an absolute majority that would allow them to govern unimpeded, he insisted.
"We are asking for a clear mandate, crystal clear, undiluted, indisputable," he told the crowd. "The time of the left has come."
Dr Eleni Panagiotarea, a research fellow at Greece's leading thinktank Eliamep, said Syriza was on a roll.
"It's now all about making a clean break with the past. The party has picked up on the fatigue that people feel with the country. It has become a voice for the disgruntled middle class, unemployed, socially vulnerable, all those who want change."
Though Prime Minister Samaras has tried to counter the rise of Syriza by telling Greek voters that its leftwing policies will lead the nation to ruin, experts and economists argue that it has been the austerity policies imposed across Europe, though most severely imposed in nations like Greece and Spain, that have been the clearest culprits of economic ruin.
As Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy research, wrote earlier this week:
Greece continues to face a dismal future under the current European program, with more than 18 percent unemployment even in 2017. This is according to IMF projections, which have been consistently over-optimistic in the past. Mass unemployment will also be the norm for the eurozone, with more than 10 percent unemployment in 2017, even if it the eurozone authorities' program is "successful." Not to mention all the other sacrifices in living standards, including cuts in health care spending, public pensions, minimum wages and government services.
This prolonged punishment and regressive social engineering from the European authorities is only possible because the electorate has had little or no influence over the most important economic policy-making. The Greeks are trying to win some of that back; hence the intimidation from on high.
And Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in a recent column, called the commitment to austerity by European elites--namely the IMF, the ECB, the European Commission, and the powerful German government--a very cruel form of "economic madness" that betrays sound reasoning.
Stiglitz wrote, "If Europe does not change its ways - if it does not reform the Eurozone and repeal austerity - a popular backlash will become inevitable." Whatever happens in the Greek elections, he concluded, "this economic madness cannot continue forever. Democracy will not permit it. But how much more pain will Europe have to endure before reason is restored?"
The prominent French economist Thomas Piketty says the rise of new the anti-austerity political parties in southern Europe, including Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, are just what the European economy needs in order to push back against the tide of regressive economic policies that have punished the continent's most vulnerable people at the behest of the wealthy and powerful.
In an hour-long interview set to air later this month with Pablo Iglesias, the de facto leader of Podemos, Piketty argues that the increasing popularity and political power of the leftwing populist parties--which have built their base of support around a rejection of austerity measures--is "good news for Europe."
Piketty, author of last year's bestselling book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," argues Europe's fixation with austerity since 2008 has been a "failure" for the economy and said those challenging such policies are doing a great and important service.
In a boon to Podemos, Piketty has agreed to act as an economic advisor to the party, which Iglesias said was "an honor" and would surely benefit their overall economic thinking.
Speaking of Syriza in Greece, Piketty said that though portions of their economic plan remain murky, "You have to offer them support because they want to build a democratic Europe, which is what we all need."
Summarizing portions of the interview, the Guardianreports:
Piketty described austerity policies as "a failure" and supported the Podemos agenda of a basic income for those most affected by the crisis as well as restructuring debt, a policy that has been heavily criticised by Spain's hitherto dominant parties, the Socialists and the Partido Popular.
He pointed out that at the end of the second world war France and Germany's debt was 200% of GDP, "when there was no such thing as public debt". "It's incredible," Piketty said. "It's an act of historical amnesia to tell southern European countries that they have to pay all their debt, down to the last cent, with zero inflation."
The economist believes that European countries have tried to get rid of their deficits too quickly. The result is that "their citizens have suffered the consequences in the shape of austerity policies. It's good to reduce deficits, but at a rate that's commensurate with growth and economic recovery, but here growth has been killed off."
Last week Piketty poured cold water on the Spanish government's claims that the crisis was over and insisted the eurozone still faced the risk of stagnation, weak growth and negative inflation.
Recent polls in Greece and Spain have shown both Podemos and Syriza maintaining high-levels of support. Greeks are going to the polls on January 25 to vote for a new parliament. Spanish general elections are not yet set, but could happen before end of the year.