In terms of growth in popularity, the political party of the moment in Spain is not Podemos, but Ciudadanos. El País quotes polling company Metroscopia as saying that “The emergence of Ciudadanos has attracted a portion of voters who some months back were prepared to vote for Podemos rather than voting for the PP or PSOE”. The party won 9 seats in the recent Andalucian elections, thereby contributing to a sense of failure in the 15 seats won by Podemos, which might otherwise have been seen as a creditable showing. The party’s telegenic leader, Albert Rivera, is quoted in the same article criticising Podemos’s message and its “arrogant attitude”. Against Podemos’s antagonistic approach to power elites, Rivera and his speak of “a Spain without sides”, “without vengeance” and “dreams” and a load more bullshit that sounds to me like it comes from Alianza Popular’s first election campaign but somehow sounds fresh to a large part of the Spanish electorate.
A favourable Financial Times profile says Ciudadanos could win up to 20 per cent of the vote in the forthcoming general elections. The rise in popularity coincides with stagnation and consternation within Podemos, as demonstrated by the recent stepping down of Juan Carlos Monedero, usually described as Podemos’s number 3, from his leadership responsibilities.
Monedero had been the subject of ferocious media scrutiny. He had earned large sums of money from consultancy work with Latin American governments, and had paid this money into a company in Spain for the purpose of funding La Tuerka, the television programme that had proven key in shaping and developing Podemos’s media profile. These facts had come to light in 2014, but it was only after Podemos’s ‘March for Change’ at the end of January, which saw tens of thousands fill Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, that they became a central focus for Spain’s media.
Most egregiously, the main respectable daily in Spain, the aforementioned El País, published a front page story claiming Monedero had falsified his academic CV. The claims were false, and Monedero had done nothing illegal, but the mud –dredged up in part by a remarkable intervention from the Minister for Finance who saw fit to comment on the tax particulars of an individual citizen- stuck. The momentum generated by Podemos’s ‘March for Change’ dissipated as Spain’s media ceaselessly linked Podemos with televised scenes of disturbances of Venezuela, where Monedero had been an advisor to the Chávez government. The suggestions –based on a longstanding racist characterisation of Venezuela in Spain’s media- were clear: Podemos was a party that would have you queuing for toilet roll and locked up for complaining about it.
It is hard to say how much Monedero’s departure from the top echelons will affect Podemos. Immediately prior to his exit last week, he gave a radio interview where he warned that Podemos was running the risk of resembling that which it aspired to replace. It certainly seems as though people higher up had begun to see Monedero’s presence as a liability for its electoral prospects. Whilst observers outside Spain have tended to focus on the influence of Ernesto Laclau (with rarely a mention for Chantal Mouffe, it should be noted), primarily on account of Íñigo Errejón, the party’s political secretary and communications strategist, Monedero is the academic whose stamp loomed the largest, at least in the initial irruption of the grouping, in its confrontational discourse and then in the institutional design put forward by the Claro Que Podemos grouping that won out in the Citizen Assembly.
Monedero is an engaging and often witty speaker, with a more eccentric and unpredictable disposition than other key figures. I would imagine that the lines from Pablo Iglesias in his March For Change speech, referring to the need for citizens to be like Don Quixotes, came from him, or at least his influence. What is clear from Podemos’s latest promotional video, however, with its emphasis on conformity and seriousness, is that Monedero’s irreverent and frequently heart-on-sleeve approach –he was wont to describe Podemos as a ‘factory of love’- is surplus to the requirements of the ‘electoral war machine’.
“We are lawyers, teachers, engineers, researchers, civil servants”, murmur the unison voices in the video. But there is no place for taxi drivers, nurses, firefighters, or –to use the example of the President of Venezuela much-maligned — bus drivers. The electoral war machine seeks to dispute the terrain eyed up by Ciudadanos –disaffected PP and PSOE voters, people who believe politics is a matter of technical competence, people who wear Lacoste gear and loafers and express vaguely left-wing sentiments without any substantial conviction- and in so doing, it appears to have switched the ‘we’ from the expression ‘Podemos’, that was supposed to encompass the whole of society, to a ‘we’ of elect middle-class experts.
Maybe Monedero’s departure will spur a change of approach. Pablo Iglesias in recent days has cast a far more militant figure than in recent months. He has written of the need to tell the unadorned truths that others dare not say, however uncomfortable it might make Spain’s elites, and, apparently in response to Monedero’s criticisms, says that ‘we will not win by resembling the adversary, but by being ourselves’. It seems a far cry from the video just released.
Meanwhile, Ciudadanos, or ‘C’s’ for short, has been the focus of greater critical scrutiny in recent days, with a video outlining its links to the far-right going viral. Among the revelations, or recapitulations, of the video is Ciudadanos’ links with Libertas, the right-wing Atlanticist grouping founded by Irish millionaire defence contractor for the US military Declan Ganley. Ciudadanos was part of Libertas’s coalition for the 2009 European elections, and the coalition with Libertas –which was opposed to abortion and marriage equality- caused certain members to leave as it was in conflict with the group’s supposedly centre-left orientation. Albert Rivera however, stayed firm on maintaining the alliance with Ganley.
Here the role of Libertas in the Lisbon Treaty referendum campaign in Ireland is worth recalling. It sought a No vote, and its principal objection was the effect signing the Treaty would have on Ireland’s ability to keep corporation tax low. Its other main objection was the (preposterous) preoccupation with Ireland maintaining a Commissioner. Thus the referendum campaign was framed in exclusively neo-liberal terms, with the wider social implications of the Treaty kept out of public scrutiny.
It is clear in hindsight that the Libertas of those days was not at all a formation set on world domination, but on maintaining the boundaries of public deliberation along narrow lines, allowing for the expression of disaffection with elite management and certain corrupt practices, but with the ultimate goal of keeping things largely as they were, with a strenuously pro-capitalist bent, in keeping with US strategic interests. That is the same pattern operating with Ciudadanos in NATO member Spain, and its history shows Ciudadanos is more than happy to ally with explicitly right-wing reactionary forces in pursuit of common ends. Perhaps the ‘C’ in ‘C’s’ stands for CIA.
How Podemos deals with all this depends on what Podemos takes shape in light of the ongoing consternation, not only from Juan Carlos Monedero but also many activists who have long decried the course the party has taken since its foundational citizen assembly. The electoral machine, having now jettisoned one of its Dr Frankensteins, appears to have abandoned the ‘factory of love’ altogether and is operating an inexorable logic of moderation and decaffeination. It is a monster all right, but right now it does not look much like the one so many of its original supporters had hoped for.
