Iglesias, Errejón, and the Road Not Taken
At stake at this weekend’s congress is whether Podemos will be a party that merely seeks to win elections or one that wants to transform society.
This weekend, Podemos will gather for its second congress. The meeting, planned as a kind of internal and external catharsis, will bring to a head all the strategic debates that arose after the party’s leadership imploded in March 2016. This division had, until last spring, been only latent, held primarily by the minority membership who had always opposed the party model and strategy codified at Podemos’s first congress in Vistalegre in October 2014.
The Three Souls of Podemos
The three factions within Podemos are represented by Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón, and the Anticapitalistas.
Until last spring, Iglesias and Errejón shared the leadership having pushed the Anticapitalistas to the margins at the party’s inception in 2014. At the first party congress later that year, they successfully pushed for Podemos to aim for victory in the 2015 general election, establishing a centralized, homogeneous, and top-down organizational structure to achieve this goal. The result would come to be known as the electoral war machine or, simply, the Vistalegre model.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.