Podemos’ openness to the fast-breaking sociopolitical changes taking place in Spain was particularly tested in the period leading to the local elections in 2015. Podemos’ decision to run for the May local and December national elections was taken in its “foundational assembly” at Vistalegre in October 2014. The new party anticipated that they already had the necessary infrastructure, counting on 800 “circles”/assemblies spread out over the country. What was to be tested was the coherence and consistency of Podemos’ organizational and normative principles, the continuity in the undertaken people’s empowerment process, and its rapport with other left-wing parties.
The Citizens’ Congress at the Palacio Vistalegre: Podemos’ internal consultation and decision-making processes for the local elections and its influence on the political arena
Between 15 September and 15 November 2014 Podemos conducts a Citizens’ Congress at the Palacio Vistalegre Arena in Madrid and online using information/communication technologies (ICTs). The Congress brings together representatives in person and online from grassroots assemblies (the “circles”) that had blossomed since the 2008 financial crisis and the 15 May 2011 occupations.
To be tested are the new party’s organizational and normative principles, and the continuity in the process already undertaken toward people’s empowerment. A contest emerges.
The contest is between two contending platforms:
• Sumando Podemos (Summing Up We Can), led by recently elected Members of the European Parliament Teresa Rodríguez, Pablo Echenique, and Lola Sánchez, argue for a collective leadership of three general secretaries, and a Citizens’ Council elected with a percentage of seats based on a form of random lottery. Further, they seek to guard against the oligarchic tendencies and power trips internal to party organization that Robert Michels warned against just over a century ago.
• On the other pole is Claro Que Podemos (CQP – Of Course We Can) led by Pablo Iglesias, Iñigo Errejón, Juan Carlos Monedero, and Carolina Bescansa. CQP argues for a single general secretary with a supporting team elected “as a whole,” along with a Citizens’ Council composed of 87 members. Of these 87, 17 would be the leaders of the autonomous communities’ platforms and regional leaderships, with the rest to be elected by an open list system only corrected to accomplish gender quotas. The Citizens’ Council would address issues of primaries or electoral coalitions with an external political force, which would subsequently need to be ratified by the “circles.” Finally, there is proposed a Coordination Council composed of 10 to 15 people proposed by the General Secretary of the Party, whose policies are ratified by the Citizens’ Council and not the circles “as a whole.”
• Claro Que Podemos wins with 80.9%, compared to Sumando Podemos with 12.3%.
• Iglesias is elected General Secretary amidst criticism for his “vertical” (traditional hierarchical) approach rather than the Indignados movement stress on horizontal democracy. There are also mumblings that Podemos is moving toward an “electoral war machine” model.
Podemos’ new leadership in consultation with the 800 “circles” decides to stand directly in the May 2015 regional elections and to support, in cities or municipalities, local grassroots candidates from the emerging new Popular Unity platforms, such as Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid), Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), and Atlantic Tides in Galicia. The Popular Unity candidates are to be branded with “Claro Que Podemos” approval.
The party leadership delegates the development of a draft economic program to the economists Vicenç Navarro and Juan Torres López along with the leader of the refounded communist party Izquierda Unida (IU), Alberto Garzón. The program turns out to be a Left Keynesian tract on underconsumption theory, debt restructuring, and meshing social justice with economic efficiencies.
Podemos calls for a March of Change on 31 January 2015, trying to capitalize on momentum from its November polls as Spain’s leading party at 28%. Some criticize the march as a distasteful exercise of populist personalismos more than an expansion of grassroots politics “from below.” Charges of cult of personality grow. Pressure is growing on Podemos to sustain a hybrid party model in tandem with a popular social movement, and not to appeal to some common denominator.
As we move toward the spring 2015 elections, Podemos’ polls start to sag, nearing trend falls toward 18%. After its meteoric rise, Podemos loses steam as “The Alternative.” Rumblings grow about the need for a more “social” than political focus. Beyond either electoral victories or manifestations of protest, there is more and more talk of transformation of the social order, an end to the era of the post-Franco Transition, a movement toward a Third Republic, toward a new concept of the social: a concept of the social beyond the functional model of organic solidarity developed by Emile Durkheim and used by socialist and communist parties in the twentieth century.
By April, the media are celebrating the surging Podemos of the Right, the Ciudadanos Party in Catalonia – its profile is anti-Catalan independence, free market/libertarian liberalism with an anti-union and anti-immigrant edge – led by Alberto Rivera. Ciudadanos (the Citizens Party) has gone nationwide with business support worried about the weakening of Prime Minister Rajoy’s ruling Popular Party. Rivera even appears nude on television spots in his emphasis on the need for transparency. April polls claim Ciudadanos at 15%, but in the municipal and regional elections of 24 May, that party polls 6%.
The local elections in 2015: the arrival of the “change” and novel political coalitions and strategies
The municipal and regional elections held on 24 May 2015 resulted in left-wing coalitions controlling the 27 most important Spanish municipalities – among them, the three largest cities Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia – comprising 10.6 million inhabitants.
The polls confirm the increasing social discontent and citizens’ craving and will for change. There is a deepening social distrust toward the government and in a wider sense the political system and parties. With the strong eruption of Podemos in the Spanish political arena and with the prospect of a thoroughly new political setting, the local elections represented a good prelude to the 20 December general elections.
The conservatives’ novel electoral strategies to remain in power
The Rajoy Government faced the dilemma of how to preserve its power and structural reforms in the long run, as unpopular policies and measures undermined its social support due to poor results in improving the population’s living conditions. Social inequalities continued to widen. During the pre-electoral periods, traditional parties – most unabashedly and notoriously the conservatives in power – had drawn upon novel and polemic political strategies with little precedents in the Spanish democracy.
Among the most remarkable were: (1) what was termed as a “democratic regeneration,” an initiative to change electoral laws for local elections: where candidates achieving 40% of votes could become the city or town mayors, preventing minority parties from doing pacts to govern; (2) the ley mordaza (gag law); and (3) what can be labeled as “social washing.” Additionally, there were initiatives framed with the prospect of the 20-D general elections on the horizon: (4) the internationalizing of the context and consequences of the political campaign; and (5) the PP conservatives maneuvering for a possible pact with the PSOE socialists in an attempt to assure control over the national government and institutions – or with others such as the new center-right party Ciudadanos.
The most paradoxical of strategies are those devised with an eye toward the electoral results regarding secessionisms – here, the ones historically present in Catalonia and the Basque Country. These seek to gain control of hundreds or thousands of local institutions. These are left-wing and social democratic separatist alternatives with increasing social support, displacing the conservative secessionism traditionally more influential in the sociopolitical arena due to the current socio-economic and institutional crisis. What re-emerges on the Right is propaganda about threats to the so-called “unity of the Spanish nation,” as opposed to the theme of a building a Plurinational Spain, or a United Kingdom of the Spanish Peoples.
First, the “democratic regeneration” finally was not to be carried out by the PP for the local elections in 2015. What was afoot was the strategy of alliances decided by parties, and not voters, once the electoral period was over. The plan triggers numerous suspicions, as it reveals the Rajoy Government’s strategy to keep or increase its governing capacity by whatever means possible over the territory, and its intention to hamper other alternatives to govern.
Second, the government’s approval of the Public Safety Act – also known as ley mordaza (gag law) – triggered intense demonstrations in the streets (December 2014) and complaints from organizations such as the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights. This Public Safety Act limits the fundamental rights of citizens’ demonstration or freedom of speech with sanctions without juridical mediation: for example, a penalty of 600 to 30,000 euros for trying to prevent an eviction, not identifying oneself to a police officer, disobeying a police officer, or broadcasting images taken from demonstrations. It also affects immigrants and their probable expulsion from the country (“hot returns”), obstructing and pulling the plug on their right to asylum. For many, the gag law resembles the Franco dictatorship’s Public Order Act of 1959.
Third, the social washing mentioned earlier in this book parallels the practice of “green washing,” i.e. marketing campaigns from the most polluting companies to show an environmentalist image. Social washing denotes the attempt of traditional parties to align themselves rhetorically with citizens’ growing concern toward “the social” by exhibiting a false image of being “socially concerned,” while all the while unpopular austerity measures are implemented. For example, through the sudden announcement of measures targeting the improvement of labor conditions for civil servants, or reiterating the state’s support to the unemployed or others. It is all a superficial image of showing social concern, in contrast to making any real depth structure changes.
Fourth, the internationalization of the political campaign aims to explicitly show citizens the support from other European political leaders – e.g. the European conservatives David Cameron or Angela Merkel – for the current government and the ongoing austerity reforms, or against secessionism in Catalonia.
Fifth, and never before witnessed in the recent Spanish democratic period, PP conservatives plot for a possible pact with the socialists (traditional political opponents) or the emergent center-right party Ciudadanos, targeting a “joint front” to counterbalance the emergent left-wing parties or coalitions which they form. This is expressed as citizen duty to build a national unity government as a “matter of State” in pre-electoral communications.
More social washing as response: Podemos and its influence in other parties’ internal organization and communication patterns
In many ways, Podemos’ influence in the political arena can equally be noticed by other parties emulating some of the new party’s novel ways of self-organization and approaches to citizen-based horizontality, public debates, and consensus. For example, for the first time all affiliates from the socialist Partido Socialista and the communist Izquierda Unida vote for their respective Secretary-General (or main leader). And at the local level some leaders from the conservative Partido Popular do explicitly agree with this possibility. The socialists’ new leader Pedro Sánchez starts open assemblies in different towns and cities to discuss and gather ideas from citizens to set his electoral program, gives priority to the recruitment of new affiliates or social leaders to head local candidatures, and breaks with the communication strategy patterns in his party, participating in primetime entertainment TV programs (something unusual among Spanish politicians).
The new Indignados mayors: Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) and Ahora Madrid (Madrid Right Now) – the response but not necessarily the answer
Come Saturday 13 June, Popular Unity mayors are installed in Madrid (Manuela Carmena), Barcelona (Ada Colau), Zaragoza (Pedro Santisteve), A Coruña (Xulio Ferreiro), Santiago de Compostela (Martiño Noriega), Cádiz (José María González), Badalona (Dolors Sabater), and Pamplona (Joseba Asiron). In addition, Valencia is governed by a coalition of Compromís, Podemos, and PSOE, with a PSOE provincial president, Ximo Puig, and Compromís mayor Joan Ribó. See Picture 3.
PICTURE 3
Newly elected mayors in the May 2015 elections – May 2015 Courtesy: Ahora Madrid
After years of warily looking upward at the verticality of institutions, thousands of people throng the streets near their town halls to celebrate, woken up from the “social washing” cant of the widely discredited elite. Neither the Ahora Madrid elected mayor in Madrid, Manuela Carmena, nor the elected mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau (Guanyem Barcelona/Barcelona en Comú), is dependent on Podemos. Each comes to power in a coalition with PSOE. An emerging popular majority is no longer resigned, and is increasingly referred to as “Popular Unity” governments.
There is a merging into a single political force crystallized in the initiative Ganemos (Let’s Win) and Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common). This is a project led by Ada Colau, the head of Guanyem Barcelona and the guiding activist in the social campaign against evictions. Colau announces she is endeavoring to coordinate a “great political majority”: arguing this as a historic responsibility where all the forces in the field are “condemned to understand each other.” See Pictures 4 and 5.
PICTURE 4
Plaça Catalunya – Colau’s Barcelona en Comú speech for the May 2015 general election results – May 2015 Courtesy: Barcelona en Comú
With the claim “the right to decide everything,” the success of these initiatives highly depends on the collective capacity to conciliate (without voiding) the diversity of ideological and political sensibilities. This amounts to the ways and means of understanding sociopolitical life and identities within a common project and horizon. As such, this is a shift from the ideological fragmentation and contestation to the function of leadership in governance.
PICTURE 5
Manuela Carmena’s celebration of the May 2015 local elections results. Courtesy: Ahora Madrid
