El Secretario General de Podemos hace un extenso análisis sobre el surgimiento de Podemos y su visión política de la que extractamos
For the founders of Podemos, this was not a novel hypothesis; we had begun to sketch it out in our initial reflections on the 15-M movement. Our thinking drew on a particular set of political experiences—Latin America’s ‘gained decade’—and a specific model for political communication: our television programme, La Tuerka [The Screw]. Analysis of the developments in Latin America offered us new theoretical tools for interpreting the reality of the Spanish crisis, within the context of the Eurozone periphery; from 2011, we began to talk about the ‘latinamericanization’ of Southern Europe as opening a new structure of political opportunity. This populist possibility was theorized most specifically by Íñigo Errejón, drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau.
The second key to this hypothesis was La Tuerka. From the start, within our modest means, we understood La Tuerka as a ‘party’. People no longer engage politically through parties, we thought, but through the media. La Tuerka and our second programme, Fort Apache, were the ‘parties’ through which we would wage our political struggle on the most fundamental terrain of ideological production: television. La Tuerka became our preparatory school, teaching us how to intervene most effectively on mainstream television talk shows. It also trained us for the consultancy work in political communication that we developed, which in turn gave us experience in planning electoral campaigns and advising spokespeople and political leaders. Thanks to La Tuerka and the training it gave us, we learned how to produce television ‘slots’—and how to think politically within the medium of TV.
From our launch in January 2014 until the Euro-elections that May, the political leadership of Podemos was constituted by a group of a few dozen cadres, who took on all the usual tasks of a campaign team. Along with a group of lecturers and researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid, this drew on a new generation of militants from Juventud sin Futuro (Youth without a Future), student associations, La Tuerka and other political and social organizations, as well as alternative cultural projects and 15-M. This group formed the initial nucleus of Podemos and ran its initial campaign, focusing on communication—social networks, TV shows, public events, propaganda.
…Our vital goal this year is to overtake PSOE —an essential precondition for political change in Spain, even if we don’t manage to outstrip the PP. [... Nuestro objetivo fundamental de este año es superar al PSOE -una condición previa esencial para el cambio político en España–, incluso si no logramos superar el PP].New Left Review
