“WE NEED more Quixotes,” urged Pablo Iglesias, the mass before him hanging on his every word: “We are dreamers, but we take our dreams very seriously.” The rally in Madrid’s central square last January was a milestone in the transformation of Podemos from a gang of professors into the movement that it is today. Last month it polled 21% in Spain’s general election. Like their counterparts in Greece’s Syriza, Mr Iglesias and his comrades take inspiration from the late Ernesto Laclau, an Argentine sociologist at Essex University. He wrote that lefties should embrace populism; combining charismatic, top-down leadership with bottom-up assemblies, marches and occupations. To know how much Podemos inspires Jeremy Corbyn is to understand the Labour Party today. Rare is the senior Corbynite who has not visited Madrid. Last summer Mr Iglesias endorsed his British admirer, who had hailed the Spaniard’s “new way of doing politics”. Seumas Milne, now Labour’s head of strategy (and, long ago, a trainee at this newspaper, where he learned of capitalism’s wickedness), wrote of the similarities between the two men. Momentum, the group that agitates for Mr Corbyn in...
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