The year started well for supporters of Europe’s “left populist” parties. In January, Syriza won parliamentary elections in Greece and its telegenic leader Alexis Tsipras quickly became the scourge of the European Union establishment and the hero of Europe’s progressives. “Syriza, Podemos, venceremos!” (Syriza, Podemos, we will win) chanted Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, at a rally in Valencia, where 9,000 supporters celebrated their Greek sister party’s victory.

Iglesias changed his Twitter picture to one of him and Tsipras, and tweeted: “2015 will be the year of change in Spain and Europe. We will start in Greece. Let’s go Alexis, let’s go!”

Less than a year later, Tsipras has vanished from Iglesias’s Twitter profile and the relationship between the two main parties of Europe’s populist left has significantly cooled. And while Europe has changed, it has not been in the direction that Iglesias and Tsipras were hoping for. Instead of being challenged by a “radical left revolution”, the EU was shaken to the bone by the refugee crisis and the Paris attacks, responding with a decisive shift to the right in both discourse and policies. The “anti-austerity” agenda of the “radical” left finds it harder to be heard in public debate, and the results of the Spanish elections will not fundamentally change that.

At the beginning of the year Podemos was in a three-horse race for first place with the centre-left Socialist party (PSOE) and the centre-right Popular party (PP). Although the PP prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, tried to calm fears in the EU and Spain by stressing that “Spain is not Greece”, polls showed a similar, if less dramatic, implosion of the two established parties and a rapid rise of new challenger parties – Podemos, and the less radical Ciudadanos (Citizens). The latter emerged from the left in Catalonia, but has shifted more to the centre since it went national.

As we now know, Podemos peaked at the moment Syriza came to power, pushing towards 30% in the polls. But as soon as Tspiras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, unleashed their short and thoroughly unsuccessful revolt against the EU elite, support for Podemos started to drop. As it turned out, Spain was not Greece and even many leftwing voters didn’t want it to be.

Iglesias tried to stem the tide by slowly but steadily distancing himself from Tsipras, initially with little effect. By the time the Greeks went back to the polls, in September, and re-elected Tsipras and his reformed party, in terms of both programme and personnel, Podemos had disappointed in municipal and regional elections and had lost almost half of its support in the national polls.

While the implosion of Podemos was undoubtedly reinforced by internal factors – including a tax scandal of co-founder Carlos Monedero and an increasingly vocal discontent with the centralisation of power within the party – the association with the failed project of Syriza played a more structural role. Once the connection turned from attractive to toxic, and people started to worry that Spain could become Greece under a Podemos government, Iglesias responded by distancing himself not just from Syriza, but also from his own radical agenda.

The new strategy was no longer aimed at winning the elections and transforming Spain, and Europe, into a progressive utopia, but at survival as a political party. Both ideologically and organisationally disconnected from the energy and infrastructure of the former Indignados movement, Podemos has entered electoral coalitions in several major regions of Spain, in which it often follows rather than leads – a strategy that prevented embarrassment in the regional and municipal elections this year.

Sunday’s election results seem to indicate that Iglesias’s realpolitik turn has paid off, at least in terms of electoral support. Podemos came third in terms of votes and seats. Moreover, both Ciudadanos and the United Left (IU) disappointed, giving the spotlight to Podemos. At the same time, Podemos’s 69 seats overstates its real political power, as a significant part comes through electoral coalitions, such as with En Comú Podem, which came first in Catalonia (with 12-13 seats) but whose leader has said, “We are not Podemos’ branch office … We are a Catalan alliance.”

The coming weeks will show what the future holds for Podemos. No clear favourite coalitions are visible. Forming a “grand coalition”, like in Germany, would be suicide for both the PP and the PSOE. The broadly expected PP-Citizens coalition is a few seats short of a majority, which could be provided by some regional parties. PSOE and Podemos are far removed from a parliamentary majority, even with IU and leftwing regionalist parties. This leaves a PSOE-Podemos-Citizens coalition, which would only benefit the PP. The fact that Podemos is considered a coalition option by most Spanish parties is testament to its “normalisation”.

Although ideological moderation and organisational centralisation helped Podemos and Syriza survive as significant electoral contenders, it has also caused leftwing populism to lose some of its mystique and allure. There is no reason to assume that similar left populist movements will emerge in other parts of Europe, particularly now that much of the political agenda has shifted away from socioeconomic towards sociocultural issues such as immigration and terrorism – and the toxic, but hardly proven, link between them.

While the political mainstream’s handling of these issues, as well as the still-continuing economic crisis, will continue to boost populist sentiments across the EU, it will not benefit the populist left, but rather the far right, be it in the old form of Marine Le Pen in France or in the new form of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.