The leader of Spain’s Podemos party, Pablo Iglesias, recently explained why he thought the deal Syriza reached with the European institutions was “sadly, the only thing they could have done.” As a small southern European government, Greece didn’t have the political power to go another route.

He added that even Podemos would only be able to deliver very limited reforms:

We can’t do more than that. We defend the same thing that Christian Democracy did thirty years ago. But in this chess game in which we have got almost nothing, there’s not much more we can do. Spain can do a little more than Greece . . . but the limits are massive. Is politics nice? No, it’s absolutely horrible, abject, the worst thing. [But] what the situation in Europe has shown is that politics depends on the power you’ve got.