Pablo Iglesias Takes Podemos’s Bottom-Up, Anti-Austerity Politics to New York

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from In These Times:


Pablo Iglesias Takes Podemos’s Bottom-Up, Anti-Austerity Politics to New York
The general secretary of the leftist Spanish party paid homage to American radicals while denouncing “the party of Wall Street.”

BY ALEXANDROS ORPHANIDES


Politics, Pablo Iglesias tells us, is the struggle for the meaning of words.

At a time when “democracy and the very viability of Europe are at a stake,” Iglesias said Tuesday, “(we) must tell the defenders of dogmatism that they are responsible.”

Listening to Iglesias, the 36-year-old Secretary General of the relatively new leftist Spanish political party Podemos, speak, one hears about the haves and the have-nots, of financial elites and of everybody else, of creditor countries and debtor countries, of democratic politics as an instrument for the common people to better their lives.

Podemos (“we can” in Spanish) was born in the wake of the 2011 anti-austerity protests and the Indignados movement, widely considered a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their rapid rise has them poised to break Spain’s two-party deadlock.

With Spanish polls indicating that Podemos is garnering almost 25% of the public support in Spain—3 percentage points ahead of the conservative, Christian democratic ruling People’s Party (PP)—Iglesias is seen by many as a viable political leader. The pony-tailed political science professor-turned-politician represents the hope of an escape from politics as usual and crushing austerity imposed by the European Union. Podemos is the party that brought more than 100,000 people to the streets of Madrid last month in a massive political rally. To his detractors, he is a dangerous populist with no real plan, opportunistically riding a wave of anti-austerity popularity. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17655/pablo_iglesias_new_york