It is perhaps telling of liberals’ current disarray that, in a recent newspaper column designed to demonstrate the supposed “resurgence” of political centrism across the West, one of its key British proponents ended up acting as an unwitting cheerleader for its rivals on the Left.

In his Independent column last month, Blairite Labour MP Chuka Umunna sought to contrast the “ugly extreme” Left to the successes of the new centrism, citing the case of Spain. He claimed that the bolder, more attractive measures in the recent Spanish budget agreement owe to Pedro Sánchez’s center-left Socialist Party (PSOE), which was elected as a minority administration last June. Yet in so doing, he papered over left-wing grouping Unidos Podemos’s unmistakable fingerprints on all three of the reforms he highlights in the article.

Umunna’s bungled analysis was quickly jumped on by a number of UK and Spanish commentators, raising awareness of Podemos’s achievements in a deal which had up to then received scant media coverage outside of Spain. Invoking the budget’s proposed 23 percent minimum wage hike, “[further] government spending on public services” (including €1.3 billion in unemployment and disability benefits), “a 3 percent tax on big tech companies and a tax on the super-rich,” Umunna stumbled on contributions Ione Belarra, one of Podemos’s lead negotiators in the budget deal, claimed as “undoubtedly ours.”