This week’s Spanish elections will be a major test, but the leftist party has already proved it can capture the popular imagination without snatching the centre ground. Does Iglesias’s brand of radicalism provide a blueprint for the Labour leader? Approaching the offices of Podemos, Spain’s 20-month-old party of the revitalised left, has a touch of the pilgrimage to it. It’s just an ordinary office block in central Madrid, young people beavering about; it could be anyone’s political HQ. But the party itself, the speed of its growth, the radical mould-breaking of its socialist leader, Pablo Iglesias, is significant for left-wing parties everywhere. Like Syriza in Greece, Podemos has already, merely by existing, achieved what was previously thought of as impossible: the capture of popular imagination by some means other than snatching the centre ground. If Pablo Iglesias can win in Sunday’s elections, Jeremy Corbyn can, Bernie Sanders can. More than that, he will have taken the whole conception of “moderation” – as a static political quality that normal people yearn for – and smashed it. That’s why people hang on his every word. In person, Iglesias is confident and trenchant, but always calm. He looks younger than his 37 years, especially on the roof in the sharp November sun, having his photo taken, yet he has the mature authority of the university lecturer. He speaks as though it comes as no surprise to have people listening intently to him; there’s something faintly Hollywood about the way he describes himself and his trajectory. Talking about the party – which hit a peak of popularity in December of 2014, but tailed off significantly this year – he reaches for a boxing simile. “I always give the example of Muhammad Ali. At the beginning, he boxed, moving quickly and delivering a lot of blows. But in the famous battle in Kinshasa with George Foreman, he learned how to receive blows, learned to withstand many attacks, resisting them to finally win.” Continue reading...
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