As a response to the crisis, Spain attempted to abandon its two-party system. Both major parties, the conservative Popular Party and the liberal Socialist Party, showed themselves incapable of doing anything of value about the crisis. So finally, Spaniards moved ahead on introducing a third option.

Of course, there were always other parties on the scene. But they never had enough support to turn into major players in the political arena.

The new third option in Spain is a young leftist party called “Podemos” (translated as “We Can.”) At first, the party sounded quite radical, proposing, among other things, to lower the retirement age to 60 and to refuse to pay Spain’s foreign debt. The wave of enthusiasm for these ideas made the party unexpectedly and massively successful at the European elections of 2014.

However, now that the specter of Spain’s internal elections has appeared on the horizon, the new party has significantly toned down its dramatic proposals. Now it’s all about restructuring the debt, rather than refusing to repay it, and holding on to the retirement age of 65 is presented as a major, if unlikely, achievement. The idea of the basic income (which many people, as weird as it sounds, consider a progressive measure) is being abandoned, as well.

This means that Spain’s new progressive party has moved to the center before it has even had a chance to try itself out in internal elections. Even though the party’s early success was predicated precisely on not being like the boring old center-left Socialist Party, Podemos is turning itself into a copy of the establishment party.