Podemos’ unfulfilled promises.
BY SANTIAGO ALVAREZ GOMEZ
In March 2014, a political party driven by citizens who had been organising in support groups and calling for public demonstrations against austerity measures and the political elites officially broke into the Spanish political landscape.
Initially, Podemos shared the promise of delivering a “new politics” supported by digital technology: a new party not just to challenge the traditional bipartisan logic of power distribution between the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and the People’s Party (PP), but to correct the everlasting vices of partisan democracy. That is, pushing “a new politics” avowing to be more democratic, more open to ordinary people, more immediate and direct, more authentic and transparent than the one offered by “la casta”.
Admittedly, Podemos promised to revolutionise how political parties organise and how they make decisions. This quest has manifested in Podemos’ creation of online decision-making platforms promoting competing visions of digital democracy.
In spite of its pyramidal and centralised features, with the local units (“circles”) at the base and an executive body (the “Citizens’ Council”) and a Secretary-General at the top, the Citizens’ Assembly, comprising all “cyber members” — the party’s decisional body, host online tools through which participants can contribute qualitatively to decision making and participate in voting processes.
Podemos’ public sphere (Plaza Podemos 2.0) relates to the effective use that the party has made of the cyberspace. However, the top-down character of Podemos’ internal democracy has limited the scope of the promised citizens’ revolution. Either for its tendency to acquire plebiscitary features or its purely reactive mode of intervention, citizens’ participation has lagged both online and offline over the years.
To pay a remedy to this situation, Podemos should consider implementing several countermeasures. For instance, additional weight needs to be given to bottom-up initiatives, in particular, deliberative processes with a binding mandate (and reasonable participation thresholds). This strategy would ensure more active and meaningful participation of members and better inclusiveness in internal party life.
More generally, a less naive approach needs to accompany discussions about digital technology and its potential for the democratisation of political parties, acknowledging the continuity of power structures and conceding that digital technology, far from eliminating them, can serve to strengthen them.
Podemos’ cofounder Carolina Bescansa once affirmed that “there is a Podemos to win and a Podemos to protest”, further evidencing the contradiction between the realpolitik and the party’s promise of taking (seriously) into account the citizens’ dreams of “a new politics”.
In November 2019, the Socialist Workers’ Party and Podemos agreed on the basis of a coalition government. The question is whether Podemos, while in power, will be able to fulfil its promises or if the political party will continue to succumb to the logic of the Spanish political system, which demands agreements between parties’ castas to form governments — and make them last longer.
References:
1. Gerbaudo, P. (2019). “Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online decision-making platforms”. Part Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068819884878
2. Meyenberg, Y. (2017). “Disputar la democracia. El caso de Podemos en España”. Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, May-August, 62(30), pp. 221–241.
