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pablo iglesias
With New Vision for Europe, Rising Podemos Threatens to Upend Establishment
Ahead of Sunday elections, Spain's anti-austerity movement successfully shattered the era of two-party dominance
Jun 22, 2016
Spain's Podemos party, which rose to prominence on a defiant anti-austerity platform in recent years, 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. In comparison, 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 on 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, creating 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 catalog-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.
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For Spain's Podemos, People Take Priority Over Politics
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias wants to push "social emergency" law when parliament reconvenes January 13
Dec 28, 2015
The leader of Spain's left-wing Podemos party on Monday said his priority when parliament reconvenes in early January will be to help the poor--not to hash out internal power struggles among political parties.
This month's Spanish elections, in which anti-austerity Podemos picked up a surprisingly high 69 seats, "blew apart the cozy arrangement that has existed in Spain since the return to democracy in the late 1970s, which has allowed the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and the leftist Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) to swap power on regular occasions," Alistair Dawber wrote for The Independent on Friday.
"Thanks to [Podemos leader Pablo] Iglesias, neither party can now govern alone," Dawber explained. "If the two traditional parties can reach an agreement - and that is by no means likely - Podemos will emerge as the main opposition group in Spain. If a grand coalition does not work, there is a good chance Podemos and Iglesias will enter government as part of a leftist alliance. Either way, the man has already won and has changed Spain for good."
After meeting with acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Monday, Iglesias appears ready to shake things up even further.
According to Agence France-Presse, Iglesias "refused to talk of forming alliances" after the meeting.
"Instead," AFP reports, "he said the priority for Podemos when parliament reconvenes on January 13 will be to help the poor by proposing a 'social emergency' law that prevents families from being evicted for not paying their mortgage or ensures pensioners can buy their medicine."
Iglesias accused the Socialists--who say they will form an alliance with Podemos only if the party abandons its support for an independence referendum in the wealthy northeastern region of Catalonia--"of being more preoccupied with internal power struggles than with the interests of voters," AFP adds.
He also blasted Socialist party leader Pedro Sanchez, whom he noted "needed 20 minutes to say 'no' to Rajoy. I needed two."
According to The Spain Report, which covers Spanish news in English:
He repeatedly positioned Podemos in contrast to the Popular Party and PSOE as establishment parties: "This is not about talking about power but about the problems of Spain", and added [the center-right, business-friendly] Ciudadanos to the group.
"There is an immovable block of three that repeats old arguments and ignores inequality and corruption."
"We don't share any ideas of what Spain is", said Mr. Iglesias, adding that his conversation with Pedro Sanchez had been "very disappointing".
Weeks of uncertainty lay ahead. The BBC explains, "Next month, King Felipe VI will seek to nominate a party leader for government, but that leader must then win a vote of confidence in parliament. If there is deadlock two months after that, the king will call for a fresh election."
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On Verge of Victory, Europe's Ascendant Left Declares 'Subservience is Over'
Joining together ahead of Greek elections, leaders of Syriza and Podemos signal their unified fight against austerity will extend beyond national borders
Jan 23, 2015
"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?"
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