MU

Ten years ago a far-right party with parliamentary representation was the exception not the norm in Europe. Clearly we now find ourselves in a different context defined by austerity and the financial crisis, but also by a crisis of Europe’s post-war political systems. This is exemplified by the continent’s social-democratic parties. In moving to the neoliberal center in recent decades, they have abandoned the social and class interests they were created to represent, leaving large sections of society feeling unrepresented by the political system in the process.

The acceleration of the neoliberal project after 2008 has deepened this crisis such that in the electoral field — though not the social — there is now a degree of polarization comparable in intensity to the 1930s. Yet such polarization is much more diverse and contradictory than the classical antagonism between fascism and communism. For example, it can even take the form of a confrontation between the extreme right and the right as it is responding more to the opposition between the inside of the system and an outside. What we have is a popular revolt against the establishment and the wider political regime.

Clearly with the far right you end up with a contradictory form of revolt which combines anger at growing social inequality with identitarian and xenophobic elements. Yet it can occupy this pole of protest across much of Europe in part because austerity has produced an imaginary of scarcity amongst the majority of the population — a sense that there is not enough for everyone. This lends itself to a terrain of political confrontation not only directed against the political system but which also pits the poor against each other. We have the second-to-last against the last, the native against the immigrant.

By contrast in Spain the polarization of the political field was determined through the cycle of popular mobilizations beginning with 15M then the Mareas [anti-austerity “waves”], PAH [anti-eviction struggle] and later Podemos. This imposed a logic of class struggle, which rather than demand the exclusion of particular sectors from existing forms redistribution, sought to criticize the inadequacy of this redistribution itself while, at the same time, pointing towards the elites as the cause. These movements also proposed a collective response to the crisis. You can see this in slogans such as juntos podemos [together we can] and images of neighbors organizing to block evictions.

In Europe populism has traditionally been a reactionary phenomenon. Unlike in Latin America or in the United States with the People’s Party in the late 19th century, we have no tradition of progressive populism. This is what we in Podemos have tried to construct as a vaccine against the popular right — speaking not so much of left against right but of those from below against those from above, of the popular classes against the elites.