"Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe"

[ellenrr]

With Spain's national elections coming on Dec 20, this is imo an important book.

"Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe by Pablo Iglesias"
review in London Review of Books by Dan Hancock, Dec 2015

excerpt:

Spain goes to the polls on 20 December in what will be a historic election. Since the 1980s, general elections in Spain have been two-way races between the conservative Partido Popular (the People’s Party, or PP) and the centre-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE). The PP won the most recent election, in 2011, with 44.6 per cent of the vote; the PSOE gained 28.8 per cent. But in December the two parties’ combined share of the vote is unlikely to exceed 50 per cent. The two new contenders are Podemos and the centre-right populists Ciudadanos (Citizens). Ciudadanos have been doing better in the pre-election polls, but Podemos has been the big story since its formation and astonishing rise in 2014. Like Syriza, it has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism. In the European elections of May 2014, with a tiny, crowd-funded budget and just four months of existence, it gained 1.2 million votes and five MEPs. By the end of the year it led the two establishment parties in the polls.

The roots of Podemos lie in the huge 2011 indignados protests against the Spanish political system in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.

From the outset, Iglesias and his comrades understood that it was vital to know how to operate on hostile media and political terrain. They had to be realistic about the hegemonic strength of Spanish neoliberalism and the gap between what was being said in the streets and squares about the struggles of everyday life and what was making it into the mainstream media. Much has been made of the indignados’ exploration of digital democracy (they have used such platforms as Reddit to discuss policy proposals, and the online forum Plaza Podemos to vote on them), but Iglesias makes it clear that he believes TV remains ‘the great medium of our time’, the primary place for challenging establishment narratives and language. ‘When our adversaries use terms like la casta, revolving door, the “Berlusconisation” of politics, eviction, precarity,’ he writes, ‘they’re acknowledging the displacement of the fight onto a terrain that favours us.’

A large part of the book is devoted to a tour of Spain’s 20th century and its glaring precedents for the present: a succession of grim lessons concerning the use of crises by the strong to repress the weak, unnecessary compromises and the betrayal of mass movements. There are contemporary resonances everywhere: especially, given the likelihood of a coalition government after 20 December, in a passage about the subduing and incorporation of marginal parties in the 1910's to prop up national governments. One message is clear throughout: under capitalism, democracy is always incomplete, and always contingent.

Capitalism is rarely named explicitly as the enemy ideology, in part because attacking capitalism head-on is identified with the (failed) way of the old left, but perhaps also because it hardly needs spelling out. Fundamental to Podemos – as it was to the indignados – is the sense that Spanish democratic sovereignty has been usurped by the forces of global capitalism, represented recently in the form of the Troika, with the co-operation of the country’s own political and economic elites. As if to demonstrate this, in 2011 the PP and PSOE agreed to a constitutional reform that made it a legal obligation for Spain’s governing party to designate balancing the budget a priority over public spending and investment – in Iglesias’s words, formalising ‘the victory of a Hayekian Europe’.

Podemos aims its critique not just at European austerity, but also at the failures of Spain’s post-Franco settlement.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n24/dan-hancox/can-they

[Proserpina]

1. I'm afraid that, until the Eurozone is no more

there will be NO democracy in Europe. It isn't allowed or tolerated by the foolish prison agreement the nations signed their people into.