To Storm the Heavens

At his final campaign rally before winning the 2015 Greek general election, Alexis Tsipras gave a warm welcome to the new leader of the Spanish left, Pablo Iglesias, who strode onstage to rapturous applause as Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We Take Manhattan’ blared in the background. Iglesias embraced his Greek counterpart and the two stood with their arms raised in defiance: the image of a confident, insurgent left, poised to take power from a discredited political class at the height of the eurozone crisis.

Iglesias’s party, Podemos, had topped opinion polls in Spain early that year and seemed on course to replicate Syriza’s rise. Combining his personal charisma with an innovative communications style and populist vituperation against Spanish elites, the party had channelled mass discontent at austerity into a new transformative project — all within twelve months of its founding. ‘First we take Athens’, Tsipras tweeted after the rally, ‘then we take Madrid’.

Now, a decade later, both parties are exhausted and increasingly marginal in their respective nations, lacking the strong leadership and political orientation that were once their defining features. What explains this reversal, and what comes in its aftermath?

While Syriza’s trajectory was defined by its failed confrontation with the Troika, Podemos’s story is more complex: not a single moment of truth, but a gradual process of retreat and fragmentation, as its hopes of surpassing the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) receded and its poll numbers slid into irreversible decline. At the same time as its electoral ambitions came apart, though, another arc bent in the opposite direction, with Podemos continuing to exert a powerful ideological influence on Spanish politics, turning it into Europe’s progressive outlier.

We can only draw the right lessons from this experiment if we grasp these two distinct dimensions: the failure of Podemos’s radical mission, which flowed from its inability to resolve fundamental strategic and organisational problems, and its strange, lingering afterlife. Governing some of the country’s largest cities and eventually ascending to national office as the junior coalition partner to PSOE, Podemos and its allies made clearer policy gains than left-populist forces elsewhere on the continent. Spain’s recent positions on migration and the welfare state are a reflection of this legacy, which anchored PSOE to the left. Yet the regeneration of the old social-democratic establishment was a bitter pill for a party that had hoped to bury it.

The Podemos Hypothesis

The cracks within Podemos were apparent early on. Sergio Pascual, the party’s first Secretary of Organisation, remembers having ‘mixed feelings’ on the night of the 2015 elections. On the surface the results were impressive, with Podemos securing almost 21 percent of the vote to PSOE’s 22 percent. Yet Pascual knew that this one-point gap made all the difference. ‘We bet everything on the sorpasso of the Socialist Party’, he tells me, ‘sacrificing internal democracy and part of our programmatic identity to achieve it in an immediate electoral blitzkrieg. But once it failed to materialise, we faced a difficult institutional balance of power.’

Many of Podemos’s initial leading cadre, Pascual included, had previously worked as political advisors to leftist governments in Latin America. They saw a parallel between the Pink Tide backlash against neoliberalism and the crisis of representation in austerity-era Spain, arguing that the same conditions which had undermined traditional party systems in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia — allowing left-populist leaders to rapidly assemble new electoral majorities — had now arrived in Europe. The Indignados movement of 2011 was an unmistakable sign, bringing millions to the streets with the chant of ‘They Don’t Represent Us’.

By late 2013, Iglesias’s incendiary appearances on TV panel shows had turned the 35-year-old political scientist into a tribune for the disaffected. The pony-tailed professor eschewed the traditional language of the left and instead presented a series of populist binaries: el pueblo versus la casta, democracy versus oligarchy. After Spain’s existing left-wing party, Izquierda Unida, refused to join a united slate for the 2014 European elections, Podemos ran its own independent campaign with Iglesias’s face on the ballot papers instead of a party logo. It won 8 percent of the national vote. The leadership was convinced that a historic window of opportunity had opened. The task was to capture government within a single electoral cycle.

Blitzkrieg to Attrition

Podemos adopted a top-down organisational structure with a focus on media spectacle and message discipline, built for rapid advance at the ballot box. To ‘storm the heavens’, Iglesias declared, an ‘electoral war machine’ was needed for a twelve-month institutional assault.

One of the Podemos parliamentarians elected in 2015, Txema Guijarro, recalls the ‘epic character’ of that campaign: ‘Our Latin American experiences intoxicated us with the idea that winning was all-or-nothing. But maybe that was part of our miscalculation. In reality, the Spanish parliamentary system was never going to be as conducive to that kind of breakthrough, nor was the political system as fragile as it was in, say, Ecuador.’

The problem of translating the rapid insurgency into a more durable project became visible after the vote, which produced a deadlocked parliament and raised the prospect of a deal between Podemos and PSOE. There was no consensus among the leadership about how to move forward. For Iglesias the plan was simple: try to negotiate a coalition government of near equals, or, if that failed, force fresh elections. This threatened to deepen Spain’s crisis of governability and keep the right-wing government of the Partido Popular in power, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. ‘He knew our outsider appeal had a limited shelf-life’, says Pascual, ‘so he calculated that if PSOE would not share power with us, we should combine our vote with Izquierda Unida’s in a new electoral alliance that would allow us to beat PSOE in a second election’.

The party’s chief strategist, Iñigo Errejón, favoured a more conciliatory approach. He pushed for Podemos to allow PSOE to form a minority government so as to thwart the narrative that they were plunging the country into chaos. And he rejected the idea of forming a pact with Izquierda Unida, which, as he saw it, would mark a retreat from populism — with its below/above binary supplanting left/right — to a conventional strategy of ‘left unity’. Errejón began to organise within the party to challenge Iglesias’s dominance. As factional fighting spilled out into the open, amplified by a hostile media, Podemos lost momentum.

In the end Iglesias’s position won out; IU agreed to join a Unidas Podemos slate ahead of the June 2016 election, which was called to break the impasse in parliament. But much of the damage was already done. With more than a million left-wing voters deciding to stay home, the new alliance was unable to match the tally that Podemos had gotten just six months earlier. There now seemed to be no real possibility of eclipsing PSOE in the short term. The Iglesias and Errejón factions continued to clash: one calling for a line of open confrontation with PSOE, the other wanting to reduce antagonism and win support from wavering Socialists. The internal war accelerated the party’s downward spiral.

The Reset

Iglesias again emerged victorious from this dispute. He built his strategy on the assumption that Spain was headed for a grand coalition of the centre. PSOE had recently launched an internal coup against its progressive leader, Pedro Sánchez, which seemed to suggest that the irreformable establishment was closing ranks. Podemos thus tried to stick to its intransigent position and consolidate its outsider status. But soon enough the political landscape shifted. In a surprise turn, Sánchez took on the old guard of his party, faced down his right-wing challenger and triumphed in the 2017 leadership contest, styling himself as the saviour of the Spanish left.

This closed off much of the political space Podemos had previously occupied. ‘We underestimated Sánchez,’ Guijarro concedes, ‘not least in his ability to push through a certain renovation in his own party. In making his comeback, he incorporated elements of our discourse and programme while minimising any openings available to us institutionally.’

The wider coordinates were also in flux thanks to a partial economic recovery and a reactionary tide of Spanish nationalism unleashed by the failed push for Catalan independence. The supposed threat to Spanish unity was now top of the agenda, and Podemos was struggling to respond. Miguel Urbán, a leading figure in the party’s radical Anticapitalista wing, and a member of the European Parliament until 2024, highlights its misreading of the conjuncture: ‘The electoral war machine model, with its hyperleadership structure, had marginalised early on any role for activists in the party, just when there had been a wave of popular enthusiasm around the project . . . By the time Podemos’s core leadership realised it had gone too far and attempted to reverse course, it had already undermined the conditions that would have made such a change of focus possible.’

The power struggle within Podemos’s leadership meanwhile led to a major split in 2019. Sidelined by Iglesias, Errejón struck a deal with Madrid’s left-wing mayor, Manuela Carmena, to set up a new regional platform called Más Madrid. He took most of his allies from the party with him, launching an unsuccessful bid for the capital’s regional presidency. Guijarro sees this as the result of a broader ‘failure of method’, in which Podemos’s inability to ‘create effective mechanisms for institutional dialogue and bargaining’ made it impossible to mediate internal disagreements.

At this point Iglesias changed tack. The same leader who had previously called for maximal antagonism with PSOE was now increasingly convinced that entering a Sánchez-led coalition was the sole means to stabilise the left, while renewing his own public image and that of the party leadership. By going all-in on this alliance, he argued, Unidas Podemos could block Sánchez’s preferred option: a more piecemeal coalition in which the centre and the right would wield real power, while the radical left would get only minor concessions.

Faustian Pact

The path to this agreement was long, running through two more general elections in 2019, during which Unidas Podemos’s vote share fell even further, to 14.3 percent in April and 12.9 percent in November. Finally, after four elections in four years, Sánchez found himself with no alternatives: he was forced to form Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, including five Unidas Podemos ministers, with Iglesias as deputy PM.

When I interviewed Iglesias in his ministerial office in October 2020 he acknowledged it was hard to get an electoral payoff as a junior partner — that PSOE stood to reap the rewards from any progressive measures they pushed through — but he insisted the arrangement had nonetheless opened up new possibilities for his party. ‘This allows us to make up part of the leadership of the state, it allows us to form government cadres which we did not have, it allows us an understanding of and a praxis in the state that you don’t get from local or regional governments. And’, he reminded me, ‘we are young — a political force that reached government after existing for only six years.’

Seven months later, Iglesias had resigned. Governing turned out to be a gruelling process for him and his ministers. Their social agenda came up against fierce PSOE resistance and they swallowed some unpalatable policies in areas like defence and law and order. In the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic, Unidas Podemos engaged in a series of highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias and free speech, but lacked the heft to force PSOE’s hand on any of these issues. The bitterness of the struggle diminished Iglesias’s public profile. ‘It’s clear’, he conceded on the night he stepped down, ‘that at this point I’m not contributing to the cause’.

Still, Unidas Podemos’s impact on government was real. Even with its limited leverage, it passed measures that were among the standout achievements of the coalition’s first term: a 46 percent rise in the minimum wage, a major new social welfare programme, a Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme, and a successful energy price cap during the Ukraine war which effectively contained inflation. With the far right on the rise, Unidas Podemos also played a key role in resisting its bigotry, calling for migrants to have their status regularised en masse.

As Iglesias exited the stage, much of Podemos’s political capital dissipated along with its dominance on the left. The most popular left leader to emerge during this period was Yolanda Díaz. A labour lawyer and member of the Communist Party, she took up the post of labour minister and was praised for her Covid furlough scheme as well as her major progressive reform of the country’s employment laws, which strengthened collective bargaining rights and massively reduced the use of temporary fixed-term contracts. Her political approach was distinct to the left populism of Podemos: rather than stoking binary antagonisms, she pursued a more cautious tripartism, striking deals between workers, business and the state. When Iglesias anointed her as his successor in the role of deputy PM and figurehead of Unidas Podemos, he passed the baton to someone outside his own party, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of its exhaustion. 

It then fell to Díaz’s new electoral vehicle, Sumar, to reactivate the country’s radical forces, with Errejón brought back into the fold as her de facto second in command. She set about integrating various national and regional formations into an alliance which, like its predecessor, was top-heavy and leader-centred, promising to extend the progress made under the coalition. But unlike Podemos, Sumar’s origins did not lie in a movement wave beyond the established institutions; the fact that it was built exclusively from high office ended up reinforcing its subordination to Sánchez. Díaz’s main task became balancing the competing demands of Sumar’s internal actors and continuing to negotiate from a position of weakness with PSOE. Without a transformative offer, she failed to build out from her pandemic-era popularity and construct a sustainable electoral brand. Sexual misconduct allegations against Errejón further undermined Sumar’s credibility, and it unravelled at striking speed.

Sánchez Hegemonic

This implosion was yet another blow for an already demoralised Spanish left. In retrospect it seems obvious that many of the strategic decisions of left populism — not just in Spain, but elsewhere in the West — were based on a fundamental overconfidence about the pace and extent of the establishment’s decline. When it became clear that the existing order could stave off collapse, the left found itself disoriented, and struggled to develop a more durable approach to institutional politics. It was one thing to channel outrage at elites during a moment of crisis, but another to create mass identification with a political project while putting down the territorial roots and extra-parliamentary structures needed for sustained electoral engagement. 

The result was that Unidas Podemos was already in retreat as it entered cabinet. Though it exercised significant influence in certain areas of government policy, the main political beneficiary was Sánchez — who made a show of standing above the tense negotiations between his ministers and acting as the final arbiter. This allowed him to tack left in response to public pressure without giving elites much cause to worry. He struck a delicate compromise between the different elements of the wider governing bloc, carving out greater autonomy from the right of his own party, while advancing or frustrating the left’s priorities as circumstances required. Sánchez broke with the continent-wide assault on migrants and implemented the Podemos policy to secure their status, welcoming 1.5 million new arrivals within three years. He courted major investments in renewables, greening the Spanish energy sector more rapidly than its European peers and lowering utility bills. And he vowed to ‘defend the welfare state tooth and nail’ against cuts and privatisation. On his watch, tax revenues and public spending have soared, while the economy has grown faster than any other major eurozone country.

Yet Sánchez has also thwarted every part of the Podemos programme that relied on confrontation with the Spanish power structure. Even as he and his family became the targets of a concerted lawfare campaign, the PM refused to rein in the reactionary judiciary or democratise the state, for instance by removing the Francoist Official Secrets Act or restrictions on public protest. He has repeatedly shied away from challenging the rentier interests who dominate the property market, allowing the country’s affordability crisis to deepen as young people continue to be priced out of decent housing. His government has been mired in corruption scandals, with senior figures accused of influence peddling and skimming money off state contracts. The limits of his reform agenda are, predictably, being exploited by the right bloc — which has won a series of regional victories, and is determined to dislodge PSOE in next year’s general elections.

Yet perhaps the most consequential change to have taken place under Sánchez is the direction of Spanish foreign policy. With much of Europe’s political class lying supine before Trump II, Sánchez is one of the few Western leaders to have openly challenged Washington: rejecting its calls to raise defence spending to 5 percent, pushing the EU to end its association agreement with Israel, refusing the use of Spanish bases for the war on Iran, and forging closer ties with China and nations of the Global South — with investment in electric vehicles, batteries and other green technologies aimed at unleashing a new phase of industrial development.

This is not an index of Sánchez’s radicalism so much as his wager that Spain has more to gain from adapting to the new geography of global economic power than it does from clinging to the old Atlantic order. There is a certain irony here. Although the left populism of the 2010s drew inspiration from Latin America, its main focus was the gulf between masses and elites within the Spanish nation-state. Sánchez’s social democracy, by contrast, has no Third Worldist influences — it is a simple outgrowth of the PSOE tradition that emerged after the dictatorship — yet it has been effective in grappling with the changing international balance of power. Its willingness to reimagine Spain’s role in the global order and reject the logic of the New Cold War is its most consequential feature, which may have major implications further down the line.

More than a decade after Tsipras and Iglesias electrified the crowds in Athens, we now see Sánchez embracing Lula da Silva at the first ever Spain–Brazil summit in Barcelona — the two leaders promising to build an anti-war, anti-Trump bloc that will unite progressive governments across the planet. This is not an image of rebels primed to storm the heavens, but of statesmen offering protection from the excesses of a dying empire. Instead of a war on the establishment, the new centre left offers a refuge from the brutalities of neofascism. Their ambition for the existing order is not destruction but revivification. In a world sliding towards chaos, it’s easy to see the appeal.