Podemos has just been through its first crisis, or what we might call a crisis within a crisis.

In broader society, there is little doubt that we are in the midst of a transition — a regime change emerging from inside the establishment itself. The outcome already seems clear: its aim is to consolidate a restricted and non-sovereign democracy, in which a dominant finance-business-media oligarchy builds a new model of society through attacks on social rights, greater inequality, precarity for most of the population and the disintegration of the labor movement as a subject. These political forces steam on, working in and with the state to alter the political regime and social model.

The other dimension of the current moment is what we might call the autonomy of the political. We are seeing, in the recomposition of the European Union’s southern countries, a fulfillment of Wolfgang Streeck’s prophesy: when a crisis hits, economic powers become active subjects, subordinating politics and institutions to their interests. Crises always reveal the true face of the dominant powers, and their brutality becomes apparent to the majority of the population. At times this provokes a legitimacy crisis, which is what happened in Spain. The strategy of these forces, who we call la trama (i.e. the dominant network of influence and power), has been to seize the reins of political parties, something they have also tried to do with Podemos.