We have studied the Indignados as a new form of mediating politics with a distinct framework of knowledge, set on developing new critical spaces and leveraging institutional presence. In so doing, we have encountered a persistent motif in post-Franco Spain – transitions anchored in pacts, of two sorts. There are traditional elite negotiated political pacts. Then, there are social pacts to scale up local initiatives. The social pacts are practical accomplishments in self-organizing governance by social partners engaging each other on a more urban or regional level. They are trusting relationships that can be understood as a supportive habitus of commitments to mutual learning. Embodied in tides of social insertion, they mark a transition to a more complex democracy in Spain, wherein legitimation claims augur and assert what is defined as “common” in the self-reference of the Transition State. This involves extra-parliamentary sustainable community movement organizations (SCMOs) with the potential of being scaled up as social economic councils to coordinate national policy-making.
The Spanish peoples moved on to a second general election on 26 June (26-J), after a failed period of political pacting. With the Podemos alliance’s 69 deputies to Congress and the support of smaller Popular Unity, Catalan, and Basque parties, it might have been possible for PSOE to cobble together a small but workable progressive minority government. The Sánchez-led PSOE wanted to govern with Podemos alliance support, but not to include its leaders in government with any ministerial posts.
As April approached – and with his second attempt at investiture foiled, if not bungled – Sánchez even sought to stir up internal tensions within Podemos. Sánchez hinted that Iglesias’ number two, Iñigo Errejón, was partial to supporting a coalition with a Sánchez-led government, as was Manuela Carmena. He inferred that Pablo Echenique was leapfrogged over Errejón to number two – purportedly to re-energize the grassroots circulos (assemblies) – as a tilt to Podemos hardliners like Juan Carlos Monedero and Teresa Rodríguez.
Sánchez does not want to implement a large part of the Podemos alliance platform. This is not just due to his resistance to greater autonomy to the regions, especially the Basques and the Catalans. PSOE leadership linkages to Spain’s corporate elites weigh heavily in discouraging Podemos’ entry into government. Further, Sánchez tied his own hands in seeking investiture as Prime Minister by forming a coalition with Ciudadanos, a neoliberal-oriented partner whom the Podemos alliance would never support. The Podemos leader exclaimed: “You cannot look Left for a social agreement and to the Right for an economic agreement.”
Iglesias’ frailty is his occasional arrogance, off-putting enough to be scorned by Colau, Carmena, and Mónica Oltra – the Compromís vice-president of the Valencian regional government (Generalitat Valenciana). Throughout April, Iglesias constantly championed the model of the “Pact to the Valencians” – “to the Valencians” was a constant refrain. In one meeting with Sánchez, the press counted Iglesias’ usage of the term 30 times as the Podemos leader hailed the promise of Confluence. Sánchez referred to the Valencian Covenant Model more as “ideological miscegenation.” In the first week, Oltra and Valencia President Xima Puig (of the PSOE) sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid to accentuate the Valencian Left Model. By 26 April, Iglesias sighed that he could not get Sánchez to accept un Gobierno a la Valenciana.
Ironically, Iglesias had not originally supported the proposed Valencian Covenant wherein Podemos joined with Compromís and PSOE to form a government for Valencia with Puig as President and Oltra as Vice President, with the more moderate conciliatory brokering of Valencia Podemos leader Antonio Montiel. Legend has it that the climactic moment came when Oltra whispered to Puig, “Trust me.” The five-point Covenant is also known as the tripartite Pacte Botánic (Acuerdo del Botánic) signed in Valencia’s Botanical Gardens on 11 June 2015. The five principles include: democratic regeneration; rescue of citizens evicted or in need of debt relief; recovery of public control of utilities; a changed model for production; and a new model for funding regional autonomous communities.
By 2 May, the last day to constitute a government, Sánchez informs King Felipe VI that he cannot. The next day the king announces a general election on 26 June. A week later on 9 May, Iglesias and Alberto Garzón, leader of Izquierda Unida (IU) and Unidad Popular (UP), announce a Joint List electoral alliance to leverage a system heavily oriented toward representing the provinces to their mutual advantage. The electoral alliance is called Unidos Podemos (United We Can). This could mean increasing their total vote up to 24 or 25% – with a third of the votes of those aged 18 to 55. This would mean surpassing PSOE as the leading party of the Left (popularly labeled el sorpasso). Unidos Podemos is targeting 80 to 84 seats so as to seek a workable progressive government. For some (including Gaspard Llamazares of Izquierda Unida), Iglesias is portrayed as a Machiavellian bent on pushing out PSOE and extinguishing IU, while waiting to topple a Popular Party/Ciudadanos government in the next general election.
The Joint List was to work on a 6:1 ratio; IU/UP gets every sixth position on the proportional representation electoral list. Alberto Garzón yields the top spots to Iglesias, Echenique, and Errejón. Again in the alliance are Colau’s En Comú Podem in Catalonia, Oltra’s Compromís – Podemos-EUPV a la Valenciana, En Marea compuesto por Podemos in Galicia, Equo, Left Batzarre-Assembly Navarra, the Asturian Left, the Segoviemos, Democracia Participativa, Building Left/Socialist Alternative…among others in the soup of acronyms. By the close of May, Ahora Madrid announces it will work for the Unidos Podemos Joint List, abandoning its impartiality in the 20 December election campaign – while respecting Madrid Mayor Carmena’s decision to stay out of any campaigning.
Polls showed that Unidos Podemos could win anywhere from 84 to 95 seats. Exit polls confirmed this as the vote count started that Sunday evening of 26-J. Even one hour into the count, analysts and pundits were talking 90 or more seats. But within a few hours, disappointment ensued that started to turn into agony.
Rajoy’s PP was increasing his share of the vote by 4% and adding 14 seats. PP’s total vote: 7,906,185 (137 seats). Sorpasso was not achieved, even though PSOE was having its worst showing since the Transition State was constituted: 22.7% of the vote (down to 5,424,709), and a fall of five seats in the Congress to 85. Ciudadanos lost 1% (but had a total of 3,123,769), falling to 13% overall and losing eight seats to PP. Unidos Podemos as a strategy seemed to have failed, even backfired, as together, Podemos and Izquierda Unida lost 1.1 million votes, yet together they held on to the 71 deputy seats they had won in the 20 December general election. The Unidos Podemos Confluence reached 5,049,734 and came out as follows:
| Party | Votes | Seats |
|---|---|---|
| Podemos-IU-Equo | 3,201,170 | 45 seats (+1) |
| En Comú Podem | 848,526 | 12 seats (no change) |
| Compromís-Podemos-EUPV | 655,895 | 9 seats (no change) |
| In Tide (En Marea-Podemos-Anova-EU) | 344,143 | 5 seats (-1) |
Catalonian Republican Left (ERC-CatSi) at 629,294 held on to nine seats, while Catalonian conservative CDC at 481,839 held on to eight seats. Basque Nationalist EAJ-PNV at 286,215 held firm, but fell from six to five seats. EH Bildu as the other Basque Party held on to their two seats. The Canary Island Nationalists held on to their one seat. The 26 Nationalist deputies potentially hold the balance of power, as there is loathing about yet a third general election by December. Interestingly, Unidos Podemos scores well in these regions: Basque Country at 29.05%; Navarra at 28.33%; Balear Islands at 25.38%; Valencia at 25.37%; Catalonia at 24.51%; and notably in Asturias at 23.78%; Galicia at 22.18%; Madrid at 21.23%; Canary Islands at 20.24%.
• Rajoy could form a minority government with PSOE abstention or even a Grand Coalition on the model of Merkel’s CDU/CSU and Gabriel’s SPD in Germany: either of these moves could lead to further deterioration of PSOE and are moves Sánchez rejects.
• Rajoy could cobble together 176 deputies in a government with Ciudadanos and some conservative Nationalists, but Albert Rivera says only on condition that Rajoy is no longer Prime Minister.
• Sánchez can finally put together his coalition with the help of the Catalonian vote, as Iglesias conceded to this idea late that Sunday night. But after a week, Sánchez had not returned Iglesias’ call, and rubbished the Podemos leader that Sunday night for being arrogant and not negotiating in good faith ever to form a government in March and April.
• While Podemos held to some minimalist hope for a role in government, by the end of a week they declared they were prepared to serve as an opposition party and prepare for government in the near future.
The issue confronting PSOE is how to confront the urban transformation: the interweaving of urban spaces and interurban networks that marks the renewed democratic transition. The cities are the launching pads of the Indignados and their remaking of social space. Podemos and its Confluence partners are very much the political party of this eruption and transformation. Izquierda Unida focuses more on a post-neoliberal political economy: opening up the fiscal space that has been choked off by austerity policies; nudging Podemos back toward debt relief and something like the basic income guarantee; putting into effect community jobs/public works programs; and getting beyond an impaired Eurozone structure. These political economy policies have been detailed by Eduardo Garzón, the chief economist for Unidad Popular and Alberto’s brother.
The aftershocks of this second and more extensive democratization movement in Spain are affecting both PP and PSOE internally. Within each party, there are calls for a more popular way of choosing the next leader. The eruption and transformation from the cities has resulted from the realization that neither states nor markets have been successful in systemically delivering public goods like housing and jobs, or common goods like health and environmental sustainability. Central government will increasingly need to look to approaches of a more bottom-up and decentered character to satisfy developmental needs, to the new interurban local spaces into which investment is channeled. The Transition State form will need to be adapted so as to deal with the fact that there are a multiplicity of political authorities at different levels and in different registers. The state form will have to be adapted to complement the development of solidarity economies. The parties of the Left will have to learn to work together as a “responsible Left” in a spirit of Confluence in grinding out a mutually debated and constituted self-referential sense of “the common” without thought of extinguishing or blocking one another.
The rise of Podemos has been so fast – two years – that its assumed momentum became infectious, even leading pollsters to overestimate their strength. Again to quote Errejón, Podemos has been so on the run-up that they have scarcely tied their shoelaces. Still, their two-year surge has both channeled Indignados into a stable national electoral force as the third party with 21–24% of the vote, breathing down the neck of PSOE. Their surge may have crested for a while, yet they have not lost seats in 26-J. They remain a presence, a habitus for creative social insertion.
Podemos was born to give political expression as an anti-establishment movement Left party of the new generation, as well as a force to movement beyond the 1978 Transition State form. It is also a breakthrough to a twenty-first-century politics beyond Spanish traditions of patron-client practices. Along the way, though, the new party – as Mayors Colau and Carmena infer – has neglected its connection to the tides of social insertion and the associated sustainable community movement organizations of a sharing economy. The 1.1 million drop in vote is tied to what Carolina Bescansa detects is a demobilization: probably many young voters frustrated with Iglesias’ parliamentary antics and scheming; also many IU voters who resist their party being swallowed up by Podemos. A million votes were lost to traditional parties. Why? How?
Brexit – Friday 24 June 2016
Two days before 26-J, the Spanish stock exchange (IBEX) crashed, as the aftershocks of the British referendum vote to leave the European Union had traumatic aftershocks throughout global financial markets. Rajoy immediately went on the airwaves to urge calm and point to the stability and recovery his austerity policies had led to – reducing unemployment by 5% and making Spain one of the fastest-growing economies in the Eurozone. No mention that his Interior Minister was indicted days before, and that his Treasurer was in jail. Rajoy immediately planted the seeds of fear: of the danger of the populism that led to Brexit; of how populism causes instability and uncertainty; of how referenda such as those demanded by autonomous regions – as new states – were dangerous.
Iglesias attempts to give a patriotic speech in response. The Saturday before election-day Sunday is a “day of reflection” where campaigning is banned. It was now also a day of heightened anxiety and uncertainty just before voting. Unidos Podemos’ message of change was also seen as a source of fear. The memory of the unstable Popular Front of the Second Republic was being evoked.
In the enthusiasm for Podemos’ surge, some key matters were being neglected. There is the perception that Iglesias was trying to sabotage Sánchez’s good faith effort to create a post 20-D government. This is coupled with Iglesias’ disagreement with Errejón about this, leading to the purge of Errejón ally Sergio Pascual – as secretary of territorial organization. His replacement by Sumando Podemos ultra Echenique had a strong scent of Leninist tactics. This in a country where memories of the role of the communists (los rojos) in the Civil War still generates shudders.
By April, Podemos had dropped to 13% in the polls as Iglesias’ scheming was definitely hurting. How well the pact with Garzón’s IU actually helped is still to be discerned, as they rallied to 21% in two months. There was discontent within Podemos between the Pablistas and the Errejonistas. Errejón continued with a Laclau-driven message of the floating empty signifier of populist reasoning, detached from traditional leftist rhetoric or style. This was seen as more attractive to the young and the swing vote of the insecure middle-aged. The older voters were sticking to the traditional parties; even the poor of Andalucía continued to depend on the PSOE machine politics of local welfare.
Errejón continued to preach the transversality of a new progressive alliance – Confluence as a constellation of progressive parties – across the layers, across the scales, flowing deep and flowing wide. And not a more traditional identification with the Left.
At times, Errejón talks of a new social democracy for the twenty-first century – a position Iglesias increasingly took in the May and June run-up to 26-J: the basic guaranteed income; a solidarity tax on the financial sector; reversal of cuts in health and education; reinstatement of collective bargaining rights; a ban on utilities from cutting off poor people; defending social rights; protecting the potentially homeless from eviction; reimposing rent controls.
Our book ends as it begins – with the book cover image of Errejón and the other very young and pluri-national Indignados now as legislators for tomorrow in the Parliament situated in Castile. Errejón makes their fervent appeal and implores the old regime to make the needed changes in re-embedding “the social” and changing the state form. Party secretary of political and social analysis/Complutense professor of political sociology and methodology Carolina Bescansa cradles her baby while she participates in both her science and politics as vocations.
The Indignados are a generational and a pluri-national insurgency criticizing the political class, the financiers, and the corrupt traditional political parties rather than blaming immigrants. They seek a pluri-national confederation of states, in a new national state form of autonomous state forms of the “peoples of Spain,” perhaps a United Kingdom of Spain. Some pollsters and pundits foresee Ada Colau of Barcelona as the prime minister who will soon usher in that transition.