The normalization of left populism? The paradigmatic case of Podemos

Abstract

After a hopeful electoral debut, left populism in Europe has undergone relative normalization. While the literature on new parties might regard the persistence of left populist forces as a success, we deem instead that such an outcome should be considered against the backdrop of the initial left populist hypothesis. Based on a discussion of the existing literature and ten semi-structured interviews with party members, this paper analyses the case of Podemos in Spain as a proxy to assess the fortunes of left populism in Europe at large. We describe its political trajectory and explain its failure to go mainstream by reference to the interplay between, at a macro level, the structure of political opportunities and, at a meso level, its interpretation of the populist strategy. In particular, we focus on the paradoxical effects of the representative void, on the specific and unfavorable mutations of the populist moment in Spain for Podemos, and its own organizational and strategic shortcomings.

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The normalization of left populism? The
paradigmatic case of Podemos
Samuele Mazzolini & Arthur Borriello
To cite this article: Samuele Mazzolini & Arthur Borriello (2021): The normalization of
left populism? The paradigmatic case of Podemos, European Politics and Society, DOI:
10.1080/23745118.2020.1868849
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2020.1868849
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The normalization of left populism? The paradigmatic case of
Podemos
Samuele Mazzolini
a
and Arthur Borriello
b
a
Independent Researcher;
b
CEVIPOL, Université libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium
ABSTRACT
After a hopeful electoral debut, left populism in Europe has
undergone relative normalization. While the literature on new
parties might regard the persistence of left populist forces as a
success, we deem instead that such an outcome should be
considered against the backdrop of the initial left populist
hypothesis. Based on a discussion of the existing literature and
ten semi-structured interviews with party members, this paper
analyses the case of Podemos in Spain as a proxy to assess the
fortunes of left populism in Europe at large. We describe its
political trajectory and explain its failure to go mainstream by
reference to the interplay between, at a macro level, the structure
of political opportunities and, at a meso level, its interpretation of
the populist strategy. In particular, we focus on the paradoxical
effects of the representative void, on the specific and unfavorable
mutations of the populist moment in Spain for Podemos, and its
own organizational and strategic shortcomings.
KEYWORDS
Populism; Podemos; Radical
left; Spanish politics; Political
parties
Introduction
Long regarded as a variant of populism restricted to the American continent, left populism
got its foothold in Europe –most remarkably on its Mediterranean shore –in the wake of the
Great Recession. Yet, left populism is already facing some bottlenecks in the Old Continent
–a situation that contrasts sharply with the sustained growth of radical right parties. From
Syriza’s troubled governmental experience and its recent electoral defeat to France insou-
mise’s downward spiral in the aftermath of the 2017 presidential election, left populism
shares a common fate beyond national borders. This trend did not spare Podemos,
which used to be the main magnet of left populism’s hopes in the European context. Its
recent entry into the national government in alliance with the Spanish socialists came at
high costs: on the road to executive power, Podemos lost two million votes since 2015,
experienced harsh internal tensions, and progressively and largely abandoned the initial
left populist strategy, readopting many traits of a classic radical left formation.
There are two ways to gauge Podemos’performances. Following the classic literature
on new parties, Podemos’relative stabilization might be deemed as a form of
success, considering that this scenario is the exception rather than the rule for new
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Samuele Mazzolini mazzuele@hotmail.com via Montevideo, Milan 19-20144, Italy
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2020.1868849

political contenders. In light of the initial majoritarian aspirations that Podemos drew from
left populism theory, however, the same scenario might also be perceived as a resounding
defeat by the actors themselves. Moreover, even though Podemos is the only entirely new
party among the European cases of left populism, many of the organizational, ideological,
and strategic tensions it experiences seem to hamper all left populist contenders alike,
thus raising the suspicion of a more general trend affecting these parties as left populists.
The present paper thus takes the evolution of Podemos as an ‘extroverted case study’,a
proxy to scrutinize the exogenous and endogenous factors that may apply to European
left populism at large. In order to seize the qualitative novelty of left populism, we delib-
erately depart from the factors (institutional, systemic or individual) that explain the sus-
tainability of new parties in general and opt for a context-specific explanation. We argue
that the best way to understand European left populism’s trajectory is to look at the inter-
play between meso and macro-level factors, i.e. the way these movements have
responded (organizationally, ideologically and strategically) to the political structure of
opportunities of post-recession South European party systems. In doing so, we also try
to supply a balanced account of the role played by structure and agency.
Based on a review of secondary literature and on the analysis of ten semi-structured
interviews with party members, the paper shows that the setbacks endured by the
morada (purple) formation stem from its difficulties to adapt its own discourse, strategy
and organization to a rapidly changing environment in post-recession Spain. This environ-
ment is permeated by a major paradox: the previous model of political representation and
mediation is crumbling and resisting at the same time, with both dynamics being poten-
tially deleterious for a left populist contender. Equally, a number of evolutions in the
Spanish political scenario progressively made the antagonistic questioning of the
whole socio-political system that lies at the core of the left populist strategy less fruitful.
In this complex context, we argue that several Podemos’internal choices hampered its
progression by pushing it into strategic mistakes and organizational deadlocks. As a
result, we contend that Podemos is the perfect example of why left populism, while
well suited to irrupt strongly and quickly within a given political space in times of
acute crisis, has a hard time maintaining and expanding its electoral momentum.
The paper proceeds as follows. In the first section, we present the puzzle of Podemos’
(subjective) failure in view of the literature on the irruption and evolution of new parties.
The second section is dedicated to our methodology and research strategy (Podemos as a
paradigmatic and ‘extroverted’case study for left populism) and the description of
Podemos’political strategy and trajectory from its irruption in the Spanish political
system to the present day. In the third section, we discuss the macro and meso factors
that explain Podemos’fate.
Podemos: objective success or subjective failure?
According to the classic literature on political parties, the rise of a new political challenger
such as Podemos is nothing staggering. Over the past forty years, in a context marked by
the rapid change of party systems, the emergence of new parties has become common-
place and has been successfully explained by political scientists. Scholars have attempted
to define ‘newness’and to shed light on the factors that foster or hamper the entry of new
players in party systems (Lucardie, 2000; Tavits, 2006). Most importantly for our purpose,
2S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

they have scrutinized the conditions under which new parties could build on their initial
breakthrough in the long run and thus become full actors of their national political system
(Bolleyer & Bytzek, 2013). While there is consensus over the importance of the party’s
origin to explain its evolution, scholars disagree on the respective weight of various
factors in explaining the success of new parties over time: institutional factors, socio-
demographic variables, party system structure and contextual elements. In addition, scho-
lars have also insisted on the importance of interactive factors –the accommodative or
adversarial reaction of mainstream parties with regard to the new political challenger
(Meguid, 2005)–as well as on the key role played by newness itself as a ‘winning
formula’(Sikk, 2011). Given their growing numerical importance across established and
new democracies over the past decades, green and radical right parties have attracted
most of the attention. The latter case displays an interesting paradox. While institutiona-
lization can arguably be considered as a synonym of success, since it sustains the persist-
ence of a party over time (Levitsky, 1998; Bolleyer, 2013), it might be seen as negative in
light of its initial anti-establishment élan, which could alienate disgruntled voters the
more the party becomes entrenched within the political system (Krause & Wagner, 2019).
To be sure, those factors explain a lot in Podemos’fate. Like any new party, it has inevi-
tably lost in ‘newness’over time. Like many anti-establishment parties, stepping into the
institutions made it progressively loose part of its externality to the political system it cri-
ticizes. There is, however, another side to this story. For Podemos is not a new anti-estab-
lishment party like any other, but the most iconic example of a trend that has seen the
emergence in Europe of a new type of strategy previously circumscribed to Latin
America: left populism. Although Podemos is specific insofar its very creation was predi-
cated on left populism theory, the adoption of left populist tropes in the aftermath of the
2008 economic crisis has also enabled relatively marginal political formations to swiftly
boost their electoral support (Syriza, LFI) and radical left actors to win intra-party leader-
ship (Corbynism). The equally rapid involution of left populist formations after their early
successes –whether it manifests itself through the disappointing exercise of executive
power, electoral stagnation or decline, or harsh internal tensions leading to party splits
–calls for careful scrutiny. In this sense, their similarities call for an explanation that
goes beyond the ‘newness’of Podemos or the loss of their ‘anti-establishment’nature
and looks at the interplay between their context of emergence and their organizational,
ideological, and strategic characteristics as left populists.
Moreover, while most of the literature favors objective definitions of new parties’
success, we argue that a subjective approach, based on how the actors themselves evalu-
ate the measure of their success (Dunphy & Bale, 2011), is more relevant in this case. Left
populist parties aimed at conquering executive power and ultimately challenging the
European ordoliberal design through the deliberate and reflexive application of a populist
approach. For this reason, they have perceived as a relative failure what would otherwise
have been considered as a resounding success. At best (Syriza), they have reached execu-
tive power, but failed to deliver on their most important electoral promises; at worst
(Podemos, LFI), they have stabilized their national parliamentary presence, thus achieving
persistence and avoiding marginalization, while failing to go mainstream (Stanley et al.,
2019). In short, they have endured a process of ‘normalization’, which we understand
here as encompassing several organizational and ideological evolutions, among which
some are common to anti-establishment parties in general and others are specificto
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 3

left populism: (1) the partial institutionalization of party structures and loss of touch with
social movements, (2) the repudiation of the initial alterity vis-à-vis the rest of the party
system, and the rescaling of their ambitions, be them electoral or governmental (3) the
relative stabilization/decline of electoral performances beneath their stated aspirations,
and (4) the repositioning into a more classic position on the left-right divide.
For all these reasons, we argue that analysing left populism’s recent trajectory requires
a more context-based and qualitative approach than is usually the case for the radical right
and green formations. Such analysis should be able to (1) take the initial ambitions of left
populist actors seriously and explain why they have not been able to realize them, and (2)
consider the factors specific to these actors as left populists that can, at least in part,
explain the common patterns in their evolution. We contend that the best way to do
so is to look at the interplay between, at the macro level of analysis, the structure of pol-
itical opportunities (and the progressive narrowing of this window over time) and, at the
meso level, the agency of these movements, which pays heed to the specific political
hypothesis explicitly borrowed –and framed in these terms –by Podemos from the
oeuvre of Ernesto Laclau in order to irrupt ex nihilo into the political arena: left populism.
Case selection and methodology: Podemos as a paradigmatic and
‘extroverted’case study’
Among the few existing cases of left populism across Europe, Podemos appears as a para-
digmatic case. The claim rests on the belief that Podemos highlights in an exemplary way
some of the general characteristics defining left populism in Europe (Flyvbjerg, 2001,
p. 80). Its insistence on the praxis-theory nexus, its rapid and out-of-ordinary electoral
ascent, its negation of the old leftist symbolism and its capacity to incarnate ‘newness’
have been prototypical. As put by Heidegger, a paradigm can be discerned because it
shines (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 80) –and, arguably, at the beginning Podemos shone, being
one the most talked about political phenomena in Europe. Moreover, in terms of objective
success, Podemos is situated halfway between LFI and Syriza: it disrupted its domestic
political system to a much larger extent than the former, without experiencing the
latter’s troubled exercise of national executive power. By focusing on the evolution of
Podemos, this paper also aims to furnish some hints on the ups and downs of European
left populism at large. As well as being paradigmatic, Podemos can also function as a
proxy to study a broader political reality and, although we do not provide any explicit
and balanced comparison between two or more cases here, this in-depth analysis of a
single case carries an indirect though intended comparative weight in the light of the
similar dynamics inherent to the interplay between the left populist strategy and the
European socio-political conditions. This implicit form of comparison –which Richard
Rose (1991) synthetized as ‘extroverted case study’(p. 454) –has been first popularized
by Tocqueville (1946), who famously stated that ‘in America [he] saw more than
America; [he] sought there the image of democracy itself’(p. 14). Such a research strategy
always pursues the ambition of generalizing part of its findings to a broader range of pol-
itical phenomena (Lichbach & Zuckerman, 1997, p. 4), while allowing for the in-depth
scrutiny of a specific context.
This type of qualitative analysis of Podemos’evolution is based on a discussion of the
existing literature and ten semi-structured interviews with party members and ex-party
4S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

members, realized between mid-October 2019 and late January 2020. The interviewees –
among whom are several founding members of the party –are mostly executives of the
party at the national level or in several important Autonomous Communities (Basque
Country, Castile La Mancha, Andalusia, Valencian Community). Most importantly, they
cover the three main tendencies within Podemos (Pablo Iglesias’official line, Iñigo Erre-
jón’s national-popular project and the anti-capitalist sector). Despite playing an auxiliary
role, these interviews, explicitly framed around the strategic, ideological, and organiz-
ational quandaries of the party in relation to the structural bottlenecks, helped us to
trace back the main steps of its rapid transformation and the main exogenous and
endogenous factors explaining this process. In other terms, they furnish an important her-
meneutical element in so far as the self-interpretations of the key internal players are con-
cerned. It can thus be said that their presence is more subterranean that it looks prima
facie, as they led us to a better comprehension of the phenomenon in tandem with
the existing literature.
Podemos and the left populist hypothesis
Few political subjects have represented such an explicit application of left populism as
Podemos, which stands out as the clearest attempt at putting in practice the theoretical
tools honed by Laclau over the past decades (see Laclau, 2005). This was acknowledged
by the very founders of Podemos (Errejón, 2014; Iglesias, 2015, p. 14) and concretely
determined by the centrality in designing Podemos’overall strategy of Íñigo Errejón,
whose proximity to the ‘Essex school’is clearly testified, among other things, by his
intense dialogue with Mouffe (Errejón & Mouffe, 2016). Laclau treats populism as a politi-
cal logic that presupposes a division of the social space into two camps. In short, a political
practice tends towards populism when a plurality of demands is rendered analogous with
respect to a common adversary such that their particular content is sacrificed on the altar
of constructing a broader popular identity. Since populism is simply a logic and does not
in itself designate any precise normative orientation, it is necessarily parasitic upon some
substantive ideology. In a nutshell, left populism would thus amount to an antagonistic
political practice, coalescing heterogenous demands and normatively inspired by socialist
ideals. Podemos translated these theoretical insights into a political strategy exhibiting a
number of substantial differences vis-à-vis the radical left. By invoking the concept of
‘transversality’, it attempted to reach out beyond the declining circle of those who
have already pledged their political allegiance to the left and successfully attracted a
profile of supporters that distinguishes it from the established radical-left electorate
(Ramiro & Gomez, 2017). This was achieved by adopting an altogether new symbolism
and jargon –thus strongly downplaying the relevance of the left/right dichotomy –,
by privileging the most popular demands and struggles while discarding those perceived
as minoritarian (Franzé, 2015, p. 10), and by relying on the charismatic talent of its leader,
Pablo Iglesias. By focusing on the production of a straightforward and easy-to-grasp
popular identity to offer to the electorate, this approach contrasts sharply with the con-
temporary radical left, which is typically keen to preserve the autonomy of each demand/
struggle/group involved, and is often perceived as tangled-up in internal doctrinal dis-
putes far removed from real life issues. Another crucial difference lies in the fact that
the radical left treated elections as simply mirroring the political capital accumulated in
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 5

the social sphere; conversely, Podemos thought of elections as moments of ‘political
acceleration’, thus displaying a talent for engineering explosive and successful electoral
campaigns. Antagonism, transversality, leader-centrism, and electioneering are thus the
core characteristics defining left-populism as a specific political strategy.
From disruption to normalization: Podemos’shifts on the road to national
government
After the initial successes registered in a period of deep socio-economic and political
crisis, Podemos has suffered a phase of electoral downturns, internal tensions, and sub-
sequent rescaling of its political ambitions. Podemos was born out of the willingness of
several actors (mainly politicized intellectuals) to give a political legacy to the Indignados,
the anti-austerity movement that originated in May 2011. Created in early 2014 with the
aim to ‘translate’this social thrust, Podemos performed surprisingly well two months later
at the EU elections (5 MEPs, 8% of the vote). The party then grew exponentially until the
2015 general election, in which it obtained 69 seats (corresponding to 20.66% of the vote)
–the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) being only 340.000 votes ahead. Podemos
had reached its apex. From there on, it experienced electoral reversals that unleashed
harsh internal conflicts. The decline started with the failed sorpasso (overtaking) on the
PSOE at the electoral repetition of June 2016. The PSOE, on the one hand, stabilized
rather than collapsed (it lost five seats and remained by large the second party of the
country). Podemos’performances, on the other, stagnated. Although in the meantime
it had formed an electoral alliance with the radical left party Izquierda Unida, the cartel
lost 3% of the vote share (amounting approximately to one million votes) previously rep-
resented by the two forces of the coalition. Yet, Unidos Podemos (UP –later renamed
Unidas Podemos) still represented about 20% of the electorate. From there on,
however, strategic issues (the choice of alliances, the ideological positioning and the dis-
cursive strategies) started tearing Podemos up. Those discrepancies famously came to the
light during the Vistalegre II Congress of the party in February 2017, which sanctioned the
victory of Pablo Iglesias’strategic line over Íñigo Errejón’s.
The populist inclination of Podemos progressively faded away in two respects. The first
one has to do with how radical the frontier erected with the whole political system is. On
this account, the party progressively switched from an irreconcilable antagonistic relation
to the Spanish political system born out of the 1978 democratic Transition to an agonistic
opposition to some of its aspects, while sticking to most of its constitutional foundations
(Franzé, 2018, pp. 67–69). Yet, disagreements arouse as to what approach was to be main-
tained with a fundamental piece of that system, i.e. the socialists, with Iglesias defending
the most intransigent position. The second aspect is related to transversality, that is the
capacity to present itself as different from and irreducible to the already symbolized
system of political signifiers, and thus be able to articulate ‘a people’out of ostensibly
antithetical constituencies. On this front, too, the populist credentials of Podemos were
reduced to the benefit of a repositioning of the party on the radical left of the political
spectrum. The alliance with IU continued and the party’s discourse recuperated a more
pronounced leftist vocabulary and symbolism. Internally, this repositioning was hotly
debated too, with Errejón upholding the transversal cause. The ‘return’to the radical
left was further fostered by the adversaries (in particular the PSOE), which were interested
6S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

in undercutting a new political divide (the ‘old’vs the ‘new’) that could threaten the pos-
ition they had secured in the Spanish political field since the democratic transition.
Meanwhile, the coalition underwent a steady decline in the polls, stabilizing itself
between 10% and 15% of the vote share. In 2019, it ranged from 14.3% in the first
general elections in April to the disappointing 10% in the EU elections in May. Most
recently, in the electoral repetition of November 2019 following the failed negotiations
with the Socialists, UP obtained 12.8% of the votes. This time around, the negotiations
ushered the formation of a coalition government, with five ministers of UP, including
the Vice-Presidency occupied by Iglesias. This represents a striking achievement in a
country where the two major parties were used to govern alone through the parliamen-
tary support of other minor forces. Even though it did not manage to go mainstream,
Podemos was able to avoid the definitive marginalization common to many newcomers
and ‘fringe’parties (Stanley et al., 2019). Nevertheless, at the end of this six-year political
cycle, Podemos is barely recognizable. From a transversal populist party hostile to the
whole party system and aiming at winning an overall majority, it progressively ‘normal-
ized’and transformed into a renewed version of the Spanish radical left, although electo-
rally stronger than its European counterparts, and whose only available strategy is that of
a constant bargaining with the socialists from a minority position.
Explaining the rise and fall of Podemos
In order to explain the failure of Podemos at sustaining its initial impetus and going main-
stream, it is necessary to scrutinize the structural environment in which it arose and
evolved, which, although with different nuances, holds true in the Southern European
context as a whole and applies to other left populist trajectories.
The macro conditions for the rise of left populism in the South of Europe are best
understood as a combination of long-term and short-term crises. The political manage-
ment of the financial crisis opened a populist ‘moment’, i.e. a specific conjuncture charac-
terized by high politicization, creation of new political subjectivities and sudden electoral
realignment. Beside the worsening material conditions of working and middle classes, the
perceived convergence of political elites around austerity policies opened a vast breach
between a large part of the citizenry and its representatives, thus accentuating the
‘post-democratic’nature of contemporary politics (Crouch, 2004;Mouffe, 2005). Unsur-
prisingly, in the countries in which the association of centre-left parties with unpopular
policies proved indelible, they virtually disappeared (Greece, France) or underwent a sub-
stantive downsizing (Italy, Spain), paving the way for the irruption of left populist insur-
gents. This situation, however, did not emerge ex nihilo. Rather, it accelerated and
catalyzed the long-term erosion of party democracy, which had already fostered the
coming of a populist zeitgeist (Mudde, 2004). In short, the model of representation in
which traditional mass parties acted as agents of mediation between the citizens and
the state, providing ideological coherence to the claims of specific constituencies and
aiming to exercise power in the name of a perceived general interest, progressively
faded away, resulting in a representative void (Mair, 2013). It was replaced by the
advent of a new model of ‘leader democracy’(Calise, 2016) in which ‘liquid’or ‘digital’
parties (Gerbaudo, 2018; Urbinati, 2019) are eager to mobilize atomized voters through
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 7

a direct relationship between the leader and the basis, rendering the old party structures
increasingly superfluous.
Overall, these evolutions considerably downplayed the significance of deep-rooted
political cleavages and gave rise to a new line of conflict between populism and technoc-
racy, much more volatile in nature and better suited to the configuration of the void (Bick-
erton & Invernizzi Accetti, 2017). The ‘era of disintermediation’is indeed extremely
favorable to populist parties’direct modes of communication and organization, bypassing
intermediary bodies and disrupting traditional political allegiances. Here, however, lies
the paradox: the era of disintermediation is both what enables populism to achieve
quick success and what hinders it from stabilizing in the long run. The decline of tra-
ditional political affiliations may well be the condition of possibility for populist actors
to articulate new demands and reframe political identities, but it also means that it is
nowadays much more difficult to root those newly created affiliations.
However, the difficulties do not end here. The new political agents do not operate on a
field bereft of all previous political bonds: the void is only relative. Although weakened,
the traditional cleavages (with their corresponding institutions and affiliations) are still
alive and impose limits on populists’operations. The erosion of party democracy is
thus paradoxically both too incomplete and too advanced for populist actors. On one
side, their progression is hampered by the relative resilience of traditional cleavages,
which narrows the political space available. On the other, once they successfully irrupt
onto the political scene, they have trouble stabilizing, owing to the extreme political vola-
tility and, as we shall argue later, to their own lack of solid intra –and extra-party struc-
tures. This explains very well the dilemmas left populists are caught in. They might take
note of the resilience of the traditional cleavages and decide to relocate themselves more
clearly along those to build long-term party loyalties. By doing so, however, they run the
risk of rapidly losing their transversal appeal, which was key to reframe political identities
and live up to their own hegemonic ambitions. By contrast, they might be tempted to
abandon any specific ideological and sociological ubi consistam, thereby lacking the clas-
sical levers to win the long-term loyalty of an electorate –the only guarantee of stability in
an increasingly volatile context.
These paradoxes fully played out in the case under study. Podemos’fate can be best
understood as the outcome of the complex interplay between the structure of political
opportunities, which became growingly hostile, and its interpretation of the populist
strategy, which we deem to have been characterized by remarkable inadequacies. The
former, macro-level factor is context-specific and has to do with the peculiar mutations
of the populist moment in Spain. As for the latter aspect, the meso-level, it is concerned
with the strategic and organizational deadlocks encountered by Podemos. Some of these
questions find a parallel in other left populist parties in Europe, although with different
nuances which invite for further research.
The mutations of the populist moment
After the electoral repetition of 2016, the margins for Podemos’left populist strategy were
further narrowed by a new phase of sedimentation of political conflicts –even if charac-
terized by a higher volatility and unpredictability than before. Following Bruce Ackerman,
Íñigo Errejón theorized this situation as a shift from ‘hot’to ‘cold’political times
8S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

(Errejón, 2016). In the latter context, the demand for political radicality and frontal oppo-
sition to the existing political system diminishes and the fluidity of political identities
slows down. Although the feeling that the crisis was still ongoing remained widespread
(40dB, 2018), the rise of other forces such as Ciudadanos and Vox and the crystallization of
the new situation left less room for further gains. As hinted above, the traditional political
apparatuses did not disappear with the crisis, making it exceedingly difficult to de-identify
large segments of the electorate and rearticulate their claims through a populist dis-
course. More specifically, the socialist party was able to get back promptly many of the
voters that had switched to Podemos in 2015–2016 (Orriols & Cordero, 2016), thereby
showing its solid anchoring in several social segments and territorial areas. Between
the general elections of June 2016 and April 2019, UP lost to PSOE over a million of its
previous voters, amounting to more than 20% of its electorate (Garrido, 2019). Part of
the endogenous and exogenous factors that had eroded the PSOE hegemony since Zapa-
tero’s second mandate –extremely adverse economic conditions, ideological-program-
matic confusion and uneasy renewal of its national leadership, above all (Delgado
Fernández & Cazorla-Martín, 2017)–seemingly faded away. After several years of opposi-
tion to Rajoy’s government and a noticeable move to the left under the leadership of
Pedro Sanchez, it was increasingly difficult to sell the electorate on the idea that the
Socialist Party was colluding with the Popular Party –a slow transformation that ulti-
mately led to Podemos’indirect endorsement of the PSOE as a newly legitimate progress-
ive actor.
1
Moreover, the irruption of new actors on the right of the political spectrum reshuffled
the cards. First, Ciudadanos emerged on the national political scene as the ‘Podemos of
the centre-right’. Second, the spectacular rise of Vox put an end to the absence of a
far-right force that represented a ‘Spanish exception’in the European context (Peres,
2019, p. 140). Those evolutions deprived Podemos of its exclusive role of political challen-
ger and progressively favored the return to a left-right axis of political confrontation
between two opposite blocks, although no longer configured in a (albeit imperfect, as
the Spanish one always was) two-party system.
2
In this situation, Podemos was
somehow naturally induced to switch back to a leftist symbolism. Things were made
even more complex by the blazing up of the Catalan question, which completely
obscured other political issues. On the issue, Podemos took an intermediate position
that was little rewarding in a context of high polarization.
3
These evolutions deeply com-
plexified the political space by multiplying the axes of confrontation: left vs. right, old vs.
new parties, technocracy vs. populism, and centralists vs. regionalists. In such a context,
the task of building a transversal and radical force capable of challenging alone the dom-
inance of the traditional elites became increasingly difficult. As a result, Podemos was
faced with a double difficulty. On one side, it found increasingly hard to keep setting
the political agenda of the country as it did at the beginning of its march, since other
axes, less favorable to its own gamble, emerged in the national scenario. On the other,
as for those axes that were instead congenial to it, Podemos was no longer the only pol-
itical actor embodying them. Ciudadanos and later Vox also claimed the representation of
the ‘new’and of the struggle to a sclerotic political system.
Another issue accounts for leaving the populist door ajar. Despite the strategy of trans-
versality attempting to go beyond left and right, Podemos by and large attracted left-wing
voters, especially among young and educated urban dwellers (CIS, 2014,2016a,2016b). In
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 9

fact, Podemos has always been overwhelmingly perceived as located on the far left of the
classical political spectrum by the electorate at large (CIS, 2014,2016a,2016b,2019). This
does not mean that the transversal appeal was useless. Without it, Podemos would have
not managed to shake offthe aura of marginality attached to the radical left and would
have not achieved the support of many leftists for whom the category had no mobilizing
power (Ramiro & Gomez, 2017; Rendueles & Sola, 2018, p. 40). It is precisely because it
attracted voters that generically identified as progressive that the fading away of the trans-
versal appeal did not fare too well. Faced with the upsurge of right-wing nationalism, and
once the impact of the 2011–2013 protest cycle ebbed, the average progressive voter that
was at some point enticed by Podemos was more interested in defeating the Right than
challenging the socio-economic system as a whole (Schavelzon & Webber, 2018, p. 186; Vil-
lacañas, 2017, p. 166). As the socialists resisted the initial electoral assault of Podemos and
endogenized some of its ideas,
4
the latter backtracked to a more classical radical left reg-
ister with a scarce inclination for finding a compromise, and the former won back the
central stage of progressive politics in Spain.
5
Despite no longer being against the whole
political system, Iglesias indeed displayed a bold attitude towards the socialists once the
top priority of a large chunk of his potential electorate switched to more modest ambitions.
Coming back to our distinction on the two ways to interpret the populist positionality,
Podemos showed itself highly populist in its intransigence towards the socialists once
that approach no longer paid offelectorally, and little populist insofar as the question of
transversality is concerned, with the consequence of being increasingly perceived as pol-
itically fanciful.
Strategical and organizational deadlocks
However, it has not simply been a matter of exogeneous causes making for the reversal of
Podemos’progression. Several elements ascribable to the populist approach are also to
be closely scrutinized. The extremely voluntarist, vertical, and formal nature of Laclau’s
conception of politics has somehow diverted the attention of left populist leaders away
from the necessary organizational work and territorial anchoring. Arguably, this issue is
also strongly correlated to the newness of Podemos. Here, questions of inexperience,
lack of personnel and unbalance between short-term and long-term tasks had a strong
influence. Three problematic aspects stand out in this respect.
First, Podemos suffered from a Latin American tropism (Chazel, 2019) that led it to mis-
interpret its own context of emergence: as many founding members now easily admit,
6
they considerably overestimated the degree of ‘Latinamericanization’of Spain (i.e. the
severity of the socio-political crisis and the fluidity of political identities) and underesti-
mated the capacity of resilience of Spanish institutions and main political and social
actors. In other words, even though Western European party systems certainly underwent
a process of de-institutionalization over the past decades (Chiaramonte & Emanuele,
2017), Latin American left populist experiences took place in less articulated civil societies,
whose role of ‘armor’ensured to the hegemony of established political parties was inferior
than the protective density of European ‘fortresses’(Gramsci, 1971, pp. 235–238). In Spain,
Podemos took a crisis of representation for a much more global regime crisis, thus over-
estimating the extent to which it could question the social order.
7
Finally, the presidential
systems of Latin America –as opposed to Spain’s parliamentary system –facilitated
10 S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

processes of political aggregation around individualities, while allowing to gain a more
immediate political command. In Latin America, left-wing populism has therefore
managed to access power with a speed unthinkable in the European context. By the
same token, while the construction of a ‘national-popular’camp has always been the
paramount task of Latin American populisms, the translation of this strategy has
showed mixed records so far in Europe. In particular, the attempt of Podemos to regain
national symbols –such as the term patria –met with the strong embedding of these
in a previous right-wing tradition. The historical centrifugal tendencies, the emergence
of the Catalan issue and the intermediate position adopted by Podemos on the latter
made the appropriation of such symbols less plausible. Moreover, by limiting its articula-
tion to demands or political symbols, Podemos seems to have failed to articulate what
Ostiguy calls ‘the low’, that is an excess that ‘originates from the outside of the system
of political meanings’(2015, p. 150). He refers to this as ‘plebeian grammar’,oras‘disor-
ganized and emotive vitalism’, which can take disparate forms such as references to foot-
ball, music or any other national-popular expression (2015, pp. 149–151). Podemos’
populism has instead displayed a somewhat cold and contrived form: a hypothesis gen-
erated in university classrooms, as many of them candidly had it. This clearly collides with
what would seem to be a much more natural propensity of right-wing populists, who are
more at ease with seizing symbols and references of national-popular import.
Second, the leader’s centrality rapidly appeared as a double-edged sword. Initially,
unmediated communication between a leader without ordinary oratory skills such as Igle-
sias and his supporters, was a key element in furnishing an element of political passion
that the radical left was otherwise bereft. However, the dependence on charismatic
figures can also become extremely deleterious as it tends to polarize potential sympathi-
zers around the leader rather than around the political project that he embodies. This is
particularly pernicious when a party is still ‘young’and its volatility quite high. The limit of
such a dependence openly came to the fore when controversies around Iglesias blew up
(e.g. when he purchased an expensive residence). Between October 2016 and July 2018,
Iglesias’s evaluation significantly deteriorated not only among the electorate at large, but
also among his own voters, making him the worst ranked leader in this regard (CIS, 2016b,
2018). Unlike many successful right-wing populist parties (Rassemblement national in
France and Lega in Italy, for instance), the dependence on the leader was not counterba-
lanced by the presence of relatively strong party structures and regional baronies. In these
conditions, any mistake of the party’s leader inevitably redounds on the party as a whole.
Relatedly, the third element lies in the limits of its organizational model. Podemos
proved extremely centralist and vertical, thereby neglecting the construction of inter-
mediary structures and decentralized fiefdoms. This owes to a particular way in which
populism was interpreted and put into practice by Podemos.
8
Mutatis mutandis, populism
took the place of what Gramsci, borrowing from military language, called war of move-
ment, i.e. a phase of political conflict made up of deep and fast manoeuvres, a sharp chal-
lenge to the political system, capable of clearly pushing forward the front line. It is no
coincidence that Errejón coined the expression ‘electoral war machine’to refer to the
type of party he was trying to construct when he occupied the role of Political Secretary
of Podemos (Errejón, 2014). However, such an approach, while arguably key in re-estab-
lishing some centrality to radical politics and almost necessary for a previously non-exist-
ent subject, overlooked the pre-eminence that, in modern mass societies, Gramsci
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 11

attributed to the war of position or, put otherwise, to the process of slow accumulation
and underground wear and tear of the political enemy (Gramsci, 1971, p. 238). The con-
centration on building up a vertical apparatus with an exclusively electoral focus aimed at
generating immediate consensus achieved its proposed goal, which otherwise would
have probably been out of reach. But it also had two major negative consequences.
Firstly, it prevented Podemos from serenely managing its internal dissents, as it devel-
oped neither the intermediary structures nor an internally diffuse adequate political
culture in order to channel a constructive opposition to the leader’s line.
9
In such an
environment, a challenge to the leader could only be treated as an act of treason.
10
Such internal quarrels, which received uncommon attention from mainstream media
and thus widely reverberated, reversed the initial capacity to offer an appealing
popular identity and restored the image of a pugnacious radical left force, self-absorbed
in its internal differences. Secondly, the cultural, pedagogical and molecular work was
postponed to a later stage that never was.
11
This imbalance made Podemos ill-suited
to the cold times of politics and therefore unable to consolidate and dig cultural trenches,
solidify the conquered ground, irradiate its influence to other sites of the social and create
lasting institutions capable of sustaining their action over time. Concretely, this would
have meant, among the other things, making the party, via twin organizations and
through partnerships with other civil society actors, a prime mover in generating commu-
nity bonds in the ambit of recreational activities; providing a useful institutional point of
reference for ongoing social struggles of different sorts; creating new myths and symbols
capable of consolidating a new political epic; recruiting talented individuals at national
and local level (Errejón, 2016). Equally, Podemos has neither benefited from nor
spurred enough the kind of underground culture wars around values and beliefs that
assisted the rise of right populism and the alt-right elsewhere. All these tasks were only
partly pursued and the consequent failure to systematically entrench the party in
society exposed Podemos to the ongoing political volatility, since it did not build the net-
works of mediation and representation that are necessary to win the stable loyalty of a
particular segment of the electorate.
Conclusion
This paper has analysed the factors that contributed to halt and reverse the initial rise of a
textbook example of left populism in Europe: Podemos. At first, the populist approach
represented a powerful tool for a new, ostensibly socialist-leaning group to forcefully
irrupt into the political scene while differentiating itself from the repertoire of the existing
radical left. Similarly, this strategy enabled other left-wing political actors in Europe to
disrupt the structure of the party system in their respective countries, at least to some
extent. The left populist hypothesis has undoubtedly proved extremely useful for those
parties to reframe the contours of political identities. However, this approach interacted
in complex and, in the medium run, unfavorable ways with the background context. In
particular, the paradoxes of the void (the partial resilience of existing allegiances and insti-
tutions coupled by the difficulty to become entrenched in society at large) and the
mutations of the populist moment in Spain (diminishment of polarization, heightened
electoral competition, emergence of unfavorable issues) drastically reduced the room
for manoeuvre. As a result, Podemos attempted to soften its iconoclastic thrust and
12 S. MAZZOLINI AND A. BORRIELLO

re-direct its struggle for hegemony from the political stage as a whole to the niche of the
left, with the consequence of significantly downsizing the ambitions of its populist
gamble –while nevertheless securing an undisputed predominance within the radical
left and making it to national government in coalition with the socialists.
All in all, however, neither the fully populist strategy, nor the leftist afterthought, seemed
to provide a satisfactory way out of what remains an irreducible paradox. Moreover, some
instruments pertaining to the populist repertoire stayed and, we argue, are in themselves
responsible for the misfortunes of left populism. Such an approach was compounded by
the fact that Podemos was an entirely new subject in the national arena, a position that,
as shown in the literature, may be favorable at the beginning once the cut-offpoint of pol-
itical anonymity is superseded, but with potentially negative repercussions in the medium
to long-run. In particular, the Latin American origin of many of Podemos’political intuitions
led it to overlook the different social order it was taking issue with, grossly miscalculating
the strength of its rivals and the degree of the crisis. Relatedly, an excessive dependence on
the leader and the presence of a vertical and centralist structure made Podemos more
exposed to electoral volatility and prone to disregard the work of construction of organiz-
ation and insertion in different spaces of society. Consequently, the Spanish left populist
party was unable to deal adequately with the relatively ‘colder’times of politics, to
handle its internal tensions serenely and entrench its presence nationally. Moreover,
Podemos’current participation in national government might even accentuate these
organizational flaws by channelling resources towards the party-in-office and further delay-
ing the construction of intermediary structures.
To be sure, the responsibility of Podemos in its own relative failure should be mitigated
by the many factors at play that were out of its control or common to any new political
challenger, and it cannot be ruled out that future strategic adjustments will retrospec-
tively make the current bottlenecks a mere momentary impasse. Still, it seems that
Podemos’trajectory up to this point can be traced back to the complex interaction
between the contemporary socio-political context, on one hand, and its peculiar mobiliz-
ation of a populist approach, on the other. This holds true also for Podemos’European
counterparts, as they also displayed similar features and parabolas although with
different nuances and within their own peculiar national scenarios. In order to make
sense of such similarities and differences, which would permit to better account for the
viability, resilience, effectiveness and relevance of left populism in the Old Continent,
the present work represents an open invitation for further research of a comparative
kind between Podemos and other European left populist actors.
Notes
1. Interview with Antonio Estañ, Valencia, 7 November 2019.
2. Interview with Pedro Honrubia, Madrid, 4 December 2019.
3. As Dina had it, ‘In such a polarized context, we positioned ourselves as the referee. Yet, team
A or team B may well win a game, but the referee is the one who never wins’(Interview with
Dina Bousselham, Coslada, 17 October 2019).
4. Interview with Ferran Martínez Ruiz, Valencia, 2 November 2019.
5. As an interviewee had it, ‘Podemos moved, in four years, from trying to change the pie and
eat most of it, to fight for a small piece of the unchanged pie’(interview with José García
Molina, Talavera de la Reina, 26 October 2019).
EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 13

6. ‘Because we were thinking from a Latin American perspective, we did not take sufficiently
into account the institutional density and the capacity of Spanish institutions to resist the
crisis’(interview with Germán Cano, Madrid, 3 December 2019).
7. Interview with Jorge Lago, Madrid, 18 November 2019.
8. ‘I think that in Spain, this strategy of building a broad party, transversal, in Latin American
populist terms, was almost impossible, but we ended up with the hierarchical structure of
populism. It is perhaps the worst of both worlds’(interview with Jacinto Morano, Madrid,
27 November 2019).
9. As explained by several interviewees, many members who initially agreed on the vertical
design of the party as a short-term tool to win the elections, later asked for more internal
democracy and turned against the current leadership, which was at risk of losing control
over many territories (interview with Clara Serra, Madrid, 24 January 2020).
10. This was imputed by some to the majoritarian internal mode of decision-making, according
to which the winning faction could win everything, leaving practically no room to internal
minorities (interview with Jacinto Morano, Madrid, 27 November 2019).
11. ‘We do not have training for executives. […] You already have two or three charges, you take on
the direction of your localsection, and you have a publicposition because there are not enough
candidates. This does not give you time to train the members. I think Podemos should settle, but
when could it?’(interview with Valentina Torres Zorrilla, Bilbao, 1 December 2019).
ORCID
Samuele Mazzolini http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5390-5554
Arthur Borriello http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1354-6419
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