Six months after the center-left Socialists (PSOE) formed a minority government in Spain, the administration’s future looks increasingly in doubt. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is refusing to rule out fresh elections next May as the parliament remains deadlocked over the budget agreement reached between his party and Podemos. The progressive deal — which includes a 23 percent hike in the minimum wage, rent controls, and a 3 percent tax on big tech companies — lost its majority after Catalan nationalists withdrew their support. With jailed pro-independence leaders who organized last year’s contested referendum on trial in the New Year for rebellion, Catalan parties are demanding that Sánchez make a shift on the question of political prisoners before they back his budget.

Jacobin spoke to Podemos’s Íñigo Errejón about his party’s fight to secure what he calls a “crucial” budget after a decade of grinding austerity. A leading figure in Podemos since its foundation, Errejón was its campaign director during its initial breakthrough at the European elections in 2014 as well as the 2015 and 2016 general elections. While many in Spain were debating the relevancy of populist theory, according to the intellectual and Podemos MP Manolo Monereo, “it was Errejón’s audacity . . . that converted it into [concrete] political proposals, and above all, into an electoral campaign.”

Since 2016 Errejón has upheld the need for Podemos to engage with the PSOE in the institutions, clashing with party leader Pablo Iglesias over the issue at the party’s Vistalegre conference. Yet, as he explains to Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene, betting on such institutional cooperation also opens up a series of contradictions that need navigating. The most important of these is how to combine such engagement with the center-left with Podemos’s own long-term vision of building a national-popular bloc capable of taking on the Spanish oligarchy.