An unvarnished portrait of Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s enfant terrible

Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of Democracy in Europe, by Pablo Iglesias (Verso)

Pablo Iglesias is a master of political communication. The Spanish politician can fire up a live audience of thousands with a brief speech, charm millions of viewers through the television screen and engage persuasively in one-on-one conversations. The success of Podemos, the anti-establishment party he helped found, owes everything to him, and to his special gift with the spoken word. The written word, however, is a different matter.
“Politics in a Time of Crisis…” [was] published in English just ahead of Spain’s general election on December 20. It brings together four essays: on the nature of power, on Spanish history, on the origins of the recent economic crisis and on the present state of the nation. It is padded out with a couple of speeches and a foreword written by Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister (a friend and political ally).
The book serves as an introduction to one of the Iberian peninsula’s most original and talented politicians of recent years. Iglesias helped launch Podemos in January 2014, with no programme and no money. In May it won 8 per cent of the vote in EU elections. At one point this year, polls suggested it might become the biggest bloc in the Spanish parliament. Support has fallen since but Podemos is certain to enter Spain’s legislature this month, a standard bearer for Europe’s radical new left.
As Iglesias makes clear, the bulk of the book was written before Podemos was founded. It therefore provides an unvarnished glimpse of the author’s thinking, without the layers of moderation and calculation that party politics demand. He says in the preface: “This book is unusual. Neither the thoughts set down in it, nor the style of writing, were conditioned by the kind of political responsibilities I have now … Here you have me, then — ready for a duel in the OK Corral, wearing my last grin as an enfant terrible.”
That makes the book sound somewhat more thrilling than it is. Its main flaw is the absence of an overarching theme. Instead, there is a series of vignettes and observations that are at times pertinent and illuminating. Often they are neither. Iglesias gallops through complex topics (the last century of Spanish history, say) at such speed that he is likely to leave most readers frustrated. The former political scientist also displays an unfortunate fondness for academic jargon, and for the kind of sentence that collapses into itself like a soufflé. Take this one: “The fact is that the readjustment of power relations within the state apparatus is one of the keys to transformative political action.” Is that really a fact? And, if it is, what the hell does it mean?
There is much that makes sense in Iglesias’s critique of modern capitalism, not least his (widely shared) anger at the tendency to “privatise the profits and socialise the risks” in modern banking. But he slips too easily into conspiracy theories and generalisations. The eurozone crisis, for example, is cast as part of an international master plan to convert the European periphery into a factory for “low-paid, labour-intensive products and services”. Iglesias adds: “Our province of Spain has been selected, along with Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, to act as the slum of the Europe invented by the Party of Wall Street.”
What shines through is Iglesias’s determination to rid the left of its ambivalence towards political power. He ridicules the “white knights of the purity of principle”, too obsessed with theory to actually fight for change.
There are important insights scattered throughout, not least about the economic forces and political frustrations that allowed Podemos to flourish. In some ways, however, the arguments are undermined by the simple passage of time: for all the deep economic problems that remain, countries such as Spain and Ireland have yet to be converted into slums. On the contrary, European Commission data show they are the fastest-growing economies in the eurozone this year. Spain’s established parties are battered and wounded — but polls suggest they will remain the largest forces in parliament.
Iglesias ends his book with four simple words: “Tomorrow belongs to us.” He may yet be proved correct. Right now, however, the old order looks pretty resilient. Tobias Buck, Financial Times (The writer is the FT’s Madrid bureau chief.)