Podemos, the upheaval of Spanish politics and the challenge of populism

1. For a detailed account of all these elections, see Cordero and Montero (Citation2016), Rodon and Hierro (Citation2016), Orriols and Cordero (Citation2016), Judis (Citation2016), and Simón (Citation2017).

2. ‘The people’ translates two different terms in Spanish, ‘el pueblo,’ classical subject of the left and nationalism, and ‘la gente,’ a term much less loaded politically, which is the one employed by Podemos.

3. It is certain that, despite the fact that Podemos has never publicly defended populism, its leaders have theorized this strategy in articles and interviews that are very accessible. The fact that some of its leaders are prolific political scientists will ease the future task of researchers.

4. This project started in 2010 with the broadcasting, in a modest community television, of a political talkshow (La Tuerka), hosted by Pablo Iglesias.

5. Study 2981, March 2013.

6. The use of the idea of ‘party-movement’ is growing, but it lacks conceptual accuracy. However, the case of Podemos does not fully fit the two criteria indicated by Kitschelt (Citation2006) in what constitutes the clearest and most influential definition: Podemos has made an enormous investment ‘in an organizational infrastructure of collective action as well as in procedures of social choice’ (Citation2006, 208) or, in other words, its organizational resources and programmatic breadth are close to those of the other parties.

7. Bolleyer (Citation2013, 21) defines the leadership-structure dilemma as ‘the tension between the interest of the founding elites to protect their own position and pursue their immediate interests in the newly formed party structure and the anticipated (individual and collective) benefits and costs of future party institutionalization’.

8. The functioning of this ‘war machine’ has aroused many controversies. While it was relatively successful to face simultaneously the ex nihilo party-building and the electoral sprint, it did not contribute to integrate the internal pluralism and to distribute power to grass-roots structures. The pernicious effects that followed appeared more clearly after the split of the official sector between Iglesias and Errejón ca. the spring of 2016. The winner-take-all model paved the way for a zero-sum struggle for internal power, and the use of plebiscitary mechanisms hindered the possibility for a richer deliberation.

9. The most striking outcome was the loss of one million votes of the ‘Unidos Podemos’ coalition in the June 2015 elections with respect to the votes that both parties obtained separately in the elections of December 2016. In the absence of a convincing explanation, the most prudent approach seems to be to attribute this outcome to a variety of factors.

10. It is necessary to clarify that Podemos has avoided the left-right axis, but also has rejected to present itself as ‘neither left-wing nor right-wing’ (see Rivero and Iglesias Citation2014).

11. The qualitative study 2926 of the CIS offers interesting examples of the diverse social representations of the categories of left and right in Spain. For a general discussion, see Mair (Citation2007).

12. Indeed, the confusion is not only about what populism is, but also about who are populists. According to some authors (Delsol Citation2015; Müller Citation2016), Podemos would not represent a case of populism.

13. Aslanidis (2015) has shown that this choice allows us to avoid the theoretical flaws of the influential definition of populism as a ‘thin-ideology’ (Mudde Citation2004) and fits better with many of the existing empirical studies. In other words: populism is an ideology thin enough to be better conceptualized as a rhetoric or a discursive framework – ‘an anti-elite discourse in the name of the sovereign People’ (Citation2016, 96) – that is expressed in varying degrees.