Spain’s Podemos on the defensive as election reckoning looms

MADRID — A decade after it burst onto the scene, disrupting Spain’s two-party politics and reinvigorating the country’s left, Podemos is facing a reckoning.

With local elections being held for 12 of the country’s 17 regional parliaments and in municipalities nationwide on May 28, Podemos lacks strong leadership, with its credibility undermined by a bungled legislative initiative and at loggerheads with its leftist rivals. As a result, the party goes into these elections weaker than at any time since its foundation.

“These are elections that will decide whether or not Podemos will continue to represent a significant political space,” said Oriol Bartomeus, researcher at the Institute for Political Studies (ICPS-UAB) in Barcelona. “Podemos has gone into something akin to survival mode.”

Founded in 2014, Podemos channeled the anger of the Indignados protest movement that had emerged three years earlier. Like its Greek counterpart, Syriza, Podemos capitalized on the discontent generated by the eurozone crisis. In 2015, it was the big electoral success story in Spain as it took control, either directly or via leftist alliances, of major cities including Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña and Zaragoza, and became the third-biggest party in parliament.

But more recently, as the junior partner of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in a coalition government, it has suffered an electoral decline that threatens to become a full-blown crisis. Since 2020, it has registered poor results in regional elections in Galicia, the Basque Country and Andalusia. Meanwhile, its failure to stop a resurgent right in the Madrid region in 2021 triggered the retirement from politics of the divisive party leader, Pablo Iglesias.

His successor, Ione Belarra, the minister for social rights, has been a less forceful presence. Maintaining a high profile in both social media and news media, Iglesias has remained in the spotlight.

“Since leaving, Pablo Iglesias has been behaving a bit like a leader in the shadows,” said Bartomeus. “Quite often the party has moved in a certain way not because of what the current leader, Ione Belarra, says but rather because of what the party’s supposed former leader says.”

Legal loophole

These elections are taking place shortly after the fallout from the so-called Only yes means yes law. That bill, overseen by the stridently feminist Podemos, aimed to ensure consent in sexual relations but inadvertently led to the reduction of hundreds of sex offenders’ prison sentences due to a loophole. This drew accusations of incompetence and the conservative Popular Party (PP) leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, described it as “the law introduced during the democratic era which has done the most harm to women and children.”

Podemos refused to acknowledge serious technical faults in the legislation and blamed the sentence reductions on socially conservative magistrates. The party was left isolated when it voted against the PSOE’s reform of the law, which received the PP’s support.

With the backlash over that law still fresh, Podemos goes into these elections in bunker mentality, warning that the political, economic and media right wing are more intent than ever on bringing about its demise.

“In this campaign, as has become normal over the last nine years, the slogan of the powers that be is clear: Podemos has to be got rid of; Podemos must be killed,” said the party’s congressional spokesman Pablo Echenique.

The large urban hubs where Podemos first made an impact will be a key barometer of its health on May 28. In Barcelona, its local coalition, En Comú Podem, is expected to perform respectably in the municipal elections, while Podemos is aiming to gain representation under its own brand for the first time in Madrid city hall.

However, the party could be in jeopardy in the wider Madrid region, a major political prize. Polls show Podemos losing some or even all of its 10 parliamentary representatives there as it is squeezed by Más Madrid, a splinter party with which it has had a contentious relationship.

On the campaign trail, meanwhile, the party has been doubling down on its social justice platform, proposing the creation of more social housing, public supermarkets and free local transport. As she campaigned in the capital’s working-class district of Vallecas, Belarra underlined the siege mentality.

“These elections are about people trying to bring about the end of Podemos,” she said when asked by POLITICO whether her party’s survival was at stake. “And we have to make those who want to finish us off realize that it’s merely a desire and not a reality.”

As she strolled through the streets of Vallecas, a couple of dozen local residents cheered her on, chanting “Sí se puede” (Yes we can) in a throwback to the party’s roots in the Indignados movement. 

Elena Guisado, a woman in her thirties who was among them, said that Podemos “is the only party that came out of that movement that revolutionized Spain.” She added: “That idea transformed itself into a political party and it has concrete achievements.”

Nearby, Mila Martínez, a bookseller who has voted for Podemos in the past, said she was unsure how she will cast her vote this time. The unexpected fallout of the “Only yes means yes” law worries her, as well as Podemos’ clashes with other leftist parties.

“The left needs to work together, it would have much more strength,” she said.

Divided we fall

That lack of unity was visible when local Podemos politicians staged lock-in protests in Gijón and Fuenlabrada in Madrid last month, demonstrating against electoral lists imposed by their own party leadership.

But the emergence of Sumar, a new leftist movement led by the charismatic labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, has been a much bigger reminder of the Spanish left’s weakness for infighting.

An independent who ran with Unidas Podemos — a joint electoral ticket including Podemos and the communist-led United Left (IU) — in the 2019 general election, Díaz has presented a more conciliatory image to voters than Belarra’s party.

Although Sumar will not run in these local elections, Díaz has said she intends to run for prime minister in the next general election, scheduled for December. In the meantime, she has forged alliances with smaller regional leftist parties while keeping Podemos at arm’s length. She is unwilling, Podemos says, to compete in a primary contest to choose a joint leftist candidate for PM.

The upcoming local elections will give an idea of the support currently enjoyed by left and right nationwide, offering a hint of the result of the general election that will follow. With the Spanish electoral system harshly punishing divided tickets, the question of whether Sumar and Podemos eventually unite could turn out to be crucial.

“Yolanda Díaz and her allies need to decide whether or not [Podemos] would be a drag on their ambitions,” said political commentator Fernando Lussón, adding that the decision could be heavily influenced by the outcome of these elections.