by PABLO IGLESIAS
The explosion of the 2008 financial crisis has produced a series of unforeseen political consequences, in Europe in particular. How can the forces of the radical left best respond to this unprecedented challenge? The aim here is to explain the analysis that has informed Podemos’s political strategy in Spain: who we are, where we’re coming from and where we want to go—the fullest reflection on these questions that I’ve been able to set down since being elected leader of Podemos last November. It’s also an opportunity to speak in my own voice, outside the format of mainstream media interviews. Of my combined roles as party General Secretary and political scientist and theorist, the first would not have been possible without the second. This is one of the defining characteristics of Podemos.
Faultlines
The 2008 crisis has now produced unexpected new political openings, in southern Europe in particular, in forms that few could have predicted. State bailouts for bankrupt financial institutions led to ballooning national debts and soaring interest-rate spreads. The emergency policies to ‘save the euro’ imposed—and soon normalized—by the German-led bloc have had disastrous effects in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, where millions have lost their jobs, tens of thousands have been evicted from their homes and the dismantling and privatization of public-health and education systems has sharply accelerated, as the debt burden was shifted from banks to citizens. The eu has been split along north–south lines, a division of labour that mandates a low-wage workforce and cheap goods and services for the Mediterranean countries, while the young and better-trained are forced to migrate. The 2014–20 eu budget represents a victory for this line.
Not so long ago, Spain was being hailed as an eu economic success story thanks to a development model based on real-estate bubbles and corrupt urban projects, overseen since the post-Franco Transition by the Partido Socialista Obrero Espãnol (psoe) and Partido Popular (pp). Now, along with the other piigs, it is being forced to surrender historic social rights through austerity policies that Germany and its northern allies would never impose at home. But the crisis itself has helped to forge new political forces, most notably Syriza in Greece—which finally has a sovereign government, defending a social Europe—as well as Podemos in Spain, opening up the possibility of real political change and the recuperation of social rights. Clearly in present conditions this has nothing to do with revolution, or a transition to socialism, in the historic sense of those terms. But it does become feasible to aim at sovereign processes that would limit the power of finance, spur the transformation of production, ensure a wider redistribution of wealth and push for a more democratic configuration of European institutions.
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