On February 11, 2017, Pablo Iglesias took the stage at Madrid’s Vistalegre arena and addressed an apprehensive audience. The increasingly harsh standoff with his number two man, Íñigo Errejón, was finally resolved in favor of Podemos’s leader, whose list of candidates for the party’s Citizen Council received over 50 percent of votes against his rival’s 33 percent. Iglesias reassured the public, still concerned about the possibility of a schism, that it had given Podemos a mandate for “unity and humility.” With Errejón — presented as the party’s leading moderate — defeated, the stage was set for a shift to the left and a return to the combative, anti-establishment ethos that made the party widely successful in its first two years of existence.

The turn, however, has yet to reenergize Podemos. With Spanish nationalism on the rise, progressive forces have experienced setbacks in opinion polls and Catalonia’s December election. In fact, Podemos’s poll standing is now at its lowest level since the period before its first general election campaign in 2015. The center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) remains ahead of Podemos in spite of its support for Mariano Rajoy’s conservative (Partido Popular, PP for short) government. Faced with this state of affairs, party loyalists will point to Catalonia’s failed bid for independence and the media’s constant attacks against the party.

These explanations hold some truth, but fail to contextualize the pervasive sense of stagnation. Podemos’s position on Catalonia, far more accommodating than that of the Spanish government, was a source of strength rather than weakness in the past. Media hostility alone shouldn’t be enough to corner a party that until recently displayed outstanding communication skills. The challenge that Podemos faces is a deeper one: determining what the party stands for at Spain’s present juncture. The party’s raison d’être, once so compelling, has become muddled by a succession of tactical swerves.