Pablo Iglesias, above, the leader of Podemos, at a rally in Sevilla earlier this year. | David Ramos/ Getty Images Forum Has the party ended for Podemos? After a meteoric rise, Spain’s radical left loses its luster.

MADRID — Pablo Iglesias stood on a podium in the massive Puerta del Sol, delivering a speech to 100,000 supporters on January 31. It was the biggest political gathering Spain had seen for years, confirming that the left-wing Podemos — and its leader, Iglesias, dressed in a windcheater, his ponytail swishing behind him — had become a phenomenon. Adding to the euphoria, Podemos’ ally Syriza had won the Greek elections days earlier, on an anti-austerity platform similar to that of the Spanish party.

Podemos (or “We Can,” in Spanish), then less than a year old, was leading opinion polls and looking like a genuine contender in the next general elections. For the first time in three-and-a-half decades, Spain’s bi-party political scene, which had been utterly dominated by the governing Popular Party (PP) and the Socialists, was under siege.

“We’re a country of ordinary people, we dream like Don Quixote but we take our dreams very seriously,” Iglesias, who is now 37, told his supporters as he vowed to battle austerity and corruption by kicking the traditional parties out of government.

“This year, we’re starting something new, this is the year of change.”

Ten months on and that year is nearly up. With a general election on December 20, change is in the air, although not exactly what Iglesias had in mind.

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Since that moment of elation, his party has struggled. Back then, 28 percent of Spaniards supported Podemos; now only 17 percent do, according to Metroscopia. On Sunday, the polling firm published the results of a study showing that the PP and the Socialists are in a three-way tie with Ciudadanos (“Citizens”), another relatively new party, five points ahead of Podemos in fourth place.

A below-par performance by Iglesias in a recent informal televised debate with the young leader of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, reflected Podemos’ struggle to deliver on its early promise. During the pre-debate chat, a jaded-looking Iglesias admitted that Spain’s political pressure cooker was taking its toll and that he relished taking refuge in Brussels, where he holds a seat in the European Parliament.

“Nobody knows me there,” he said. “So I can walk along the street without any problems, drink a coffee quietly in a café — it’s wonderful.”

It was a remarkably tame comment from a man who so recently had been labeled a firebrand.

Having threatened to take Spain’s political elite by storm and create an anti-austerity earthquake whose tremors would be felt around Europe, Podemos is now in danger of being seen as a spent force — a quiet coffee.

“Why is Podemos losing ground?” asked the newspaper El País, as it described the party as “falling behind and scrambling to redefine itself.”

Formed in January 2014, by a group of leftist academics from Madrid’s Complutense University and members of the Anti-Capitalist Left, a fringe political party, Podemos immediately managed to exploit the simmering outrage many Spaniards felt at their country’s ongoing economic and social crisis.

Unemployment was dropping from a record high of 27 percent in 2013 and the economy was showing signs of recovery after the deepest recession of the Spanish democratic era. However, the effects of that crisis continued to bite, most visibly with the eviction of homeowners for failing to keep up with mortgage payments. When Podemos formed, around 20,000 families were being evicted each year.

Attacking both the Spanish political class and Europe’s obsession with austerity, Podemos promised to step in and end evictions, introduce a new state handout, lower the retirement age, discipline the financial sector and clean up corruption. Four months after its formation, it scooped up 1.2 million votes in European elections and five EU parliamentary seats.

Attacking both the Spanish political class and Europe’s obsession with austerity, Podemos promised to step in and end evictions, introduce a new state handout, lower the retirement age, discipline the financial sector and clean up corruption.

“Podemos are politicians who don’t wear ties who have managed to get the Spaniards who don’t wear ties to vote,” noted electoral expert Narciso Michavila.

But some observers believe that the ability to attract an array of different voters made for a fragile electoral base, helping explain the party’s gradual but constant decline of recent months.

“They were selling a narrative to Spaniards that included corruption and outrage at the political system and which at the same time tried to explain the economic crisis,” said José Fernández-Albertos, a political scientist at the CSIC Spanish National Research Council. “All this united very different voters: urban middle classes who criticized the political system as well as those who were most affected by the economic situation.”

But he adds that as the party’s policy program came under scrutiny, “those urban middle classes who were supporting Podemos started to get frightened by issues such as Spain’s eurozone membership, or they didn’t trust the ideological baggage of the leaders of Podemos.”

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That baggage was at least partly packed in the radical leftist arenas of Latin America. In its early days, Podemos’ message seemed to echo the confrontational style of Venezuela’s late leader Hugo Chávez or Bolivia’s President Evo Morales. While those Andean politicians lambasted the “oligarchy,” Iglesias and his colleagues targeted “the caste”: the bankers and politicians who were seen as causing the economic crisis and were often mired in corruption.

The resumés of the party’s leaders bore this connection out: Podemos deputy leader, Íñigo Errejón, wrote his doctoral thesis about Morales’ first term and the party’s former number three, Juan Carlos Monedero, who was an adviser to Chávez.

A scandal over Monedero’s tax situation, after it emerged he had received a €425,000 payment from the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua for economic work, both reinforced the perceived radicalism of Podemos and provoked charges of hypocrisy regarding the party’s crusade against corruption. In April, Monedero resigned from the party — but the damage had been done.

Podemos’s beginnings, greatly inspired by the “indignados,” or “outraged,” civic protest movement that erupted in May 2011, suddenly seemed a long way in the past.

“It’s not the same being a political party as being a political movement,” admits Miguel Urbán, a Podemos MEP who says the party’s creation sprang from a conversation he had with his friend Iglesias in the summer of 2013.

“You lose some of your freshness and you get put alongside the parties of the ‘regime,’” he tells POLITICO. “It also means that part of the electorate no longer looks at you with the same hope and excitement as they did before.”

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Héctor Rivera was among the disillusioned. A left-leaning young activist, he joined Podemos soon after the party was founded, attending the weekly meetings of one of its local chapters in the working-class Madrid district of Vallecas. These circles were a novelty in Spanish politics, a chance for the grass roots to debate local and national issues in a genuinely democratic way and then pass their opinions on to the hierarchy. By the end of 2014, there were hundreds of them, but Rivera started to feel that they were at odds with the party’s reliance on the media-friendly image of Iglesias.

“As more people started to go to the circles, you started to see that there were a lot of people who liked the leader more than the idea of actually doing things together,” he told POLITICO.

“It was contradictory. The ordinary members were supposed to decide and do everything, but in reality that wasn’t the case. The only circle that really counted was the circle of friends around Pablo Iglesias.”

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Whatever the misgivings of his detractors, Iglesias has been a breath of fresh air in Spain’s increasingly stuffy modern democracy. Articulate and intelligent, his willingness to engage in debate — a skill honed on his show, La Tuerka — contrasts with the rigidity of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who often appears bewildered in front of a camera.

Iglesias’ new status as part of the political class he so chastised has, at times, posed dilemmas to which he has had to find imaginative solutions. In April, he was required to greet King Felipe VI in Brussels, in his capacity as a Euro deputy. Iglesias, an avowed republican, eventually decided against snubbing the monarch and instead presented him with a box set of “Game of Thrones” and the words: “I think you’ll like this — you can learn a lot from it.”

But Iglesias, Urbán and other senior figures in the party have admitted to making mistakes as they have sought to find their feet on the political stage.

A commonly voiced regret is that they could have explained their policies better. The party has always insisted that it represents those “down below” rather than those on the left, although its early policies were widely seen as radically leftist. But by late 2014, Podemos had embarked on a move towards the center that would see it drop plans to lower the retirement age, introduce a new state handout and stop paying part of the national debt. “The proposals we offer are those that until recently any social democrat would have accepted,” Iglesias said, to the surprise of many.

Even the term “caste,” such a buzzword in 2014, has apparently been deleted from the Podemos lexicon.

Political experts believe that this toning down of the quasi-Bolivarian rhetoric responds to the fact that as the December election date looms, voters increasingly want concrete, risk-free solutions to a still unstable economic situation, rather than a radical overhaul of the entire state.

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For that reason, Spaniards have closely followed the situation in Greece, searching for parallels with their own country. Podemos enthusiastically allied itself with Greece’s Syriza, with Iglesias even campaigning in Athens ahead of January’s election there. But while Alexis Tspiras’ electoral victory was a boost for Podemos, the agonizing months of negotiation and brinkmanship that followed were not.

“The reason why European institutions and the lenders were so harsh on the Greek government was because they wanted to teach a lesson to those people, especially on the European periphery, who are organizing an alternative way of doing politics,” Pablo Bustinduy, who is head of international relations for Podemos, told POLITICO.

“They were so harsh on Greece in order to teach Spain a lesson,” he added. “Certainly what has happened in Greece has been difficult for our voters because the message that Europe wanted to project is: ‘There is no alternative, there is nothing else you can do to solve these problems.’”

But besides Greece, the Monedero affair, and the party’s attempts to keep a broad array of voters happy, it is the arrival of another upstart, Ciudadanos, that has been perhaps the biggest challenge of all for Podemos. In mid-2014, the chairman of Sabadell bank, Josep Oliu, jokingly told a conference that the country needed “a kind of right-wing Podemos,” combining political regeneration with a business-friendly outlook. Ciudadanos, which emerged as a nationwide force soon after, is arguably exactly that, although the party itself insists it is firmly in the center of the political spectrum.

“[Podemos] is a party that’s good at capturing the state of mind of a lot of people, but it’s a lot weaker than Ciudadanos when it comes to proposing solutions,” says José Ignacio Torreblanca, a political scientist who has written a book about Podemos, “Asaltar los cielos” (“Storming Heaven”). “The vote for Podemos is an emotional vote, but you can’t be emotional or outraged or angry all the time — in the end rational issues come into play.”

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But as the general election approaches, Podemos still has plenty of reasons to be satisfied — and even optimistic. As well as showing Spain’s established parties a new way of doing politics, it is in the running, if not to win on December 20, then feasibly to help form a coalition government. Failing that it will be a formidable opposition party.

“It’s true that our arrival was so astonishing that probably at some point simply saying to a pollster that you were going to vote for Podemos was a way of expressing disgust or contempt or distance from the political establishment,” said Bustinduy.

“But we believe we’re in a very strong position — and we believe that December 20 will mark a before and after in Spanish politics.”

Guy Hedgecoe is a Madrid-based journalist and author of “Freezing Franco: The Battle for Spain’s Memory” (2015).