Fifteen years ago, in May 2011, Catalonia's youth unemployment rate stood at 43.8%, while Spain's neared 47%. This period saw unprecedented budget cuts and austerity measures, including an express reform of Article 135 of the Spanish Constitution in August 2011, agreed upon by the PSOE and PP. In Catalonia, the Generalitat led spending reductions, closing hospital beds and cutting education budgets.
This environment of impoverishment, mass unemployment, home repossessions, and austerity fuelled widespread despair and indignation, particularly among young people. Anti-austerity protests, similar to those in other countries experiencing shock therapies, quickly spread across Spain. Despite their scale and duration, the 15-M protests were relatively moderate given the circumstances, especially when compared to movements like the 'Yellow Vests' in France.
While the protests had clear socio-economic roots, the 15-M's demands were primarily political. Discussions often focused on corruption and institutional reforms rather than solely on inequality, redistribution, or cuts. Paradoxically, the PSOE-PP two-party system reached its historical peak during this time, collectively securing 83.8% of votes in 2008 and 92% of seats in Congress. By late 2011, their combined vote share was still 73.4%.
Diverse Discontent and Political Translation
The 15-M movement brought together various forms of discontent, connecting them with radical left social movements typically operating at the margins. The severity of the crisis and austerity discredited the two-party system, placing it at the centre of a mass protest movement driven by widespread indignation.
The institutional political translation of the movement was not immediate. It emerged with the 2014 European elections and, more significantly, with the municipal elections in May 2015 and the general elections in December of the same year. In Catalonia, while the 'procés' dominated much of the public conversation, the electoral effects of 15-M were strongly felt.
At the municipal level, this translated into direct but diverse institutional power, with figures like Ada Colau in Barcelona, Joan Ribó in Valencia, Dolors Sabater in Badalona, and Maties Serracant in Sabadell gaining mayoralties. Across Spain, cities such as Madrid, Zaragoza, Cadiz, and A Coruña also saw mayoral positions go to lists linked to this wave.
Beyond Podemos: Electoral Limits
The variety of these municipal governments suggests that the electoral impact of 15-M extended beyond Podemos, though the party led by Pablo Iglesias was undeniably its main protagonist. In December 2015, Podemos garnered over 5 million votes, coming within two points of 'sorpassing' the PSOE. Given that IU had received 3.67%, a combined total would have surpassed a PSOE that was then in decline and increasingly confined to an older electorate.
Traditional left-wing actors, from ICV to IU, repositioned themselves as best they could, albeit with clear discomfort. However, the Unidas Podemos operation, which aimed to definitively seize leadership of the state's left from the PSOE in the repeated 2016 elections, did not succeed. This marked the beginning of the electoral limits for that wave.
A key handicap for the political expressions of 15-M was the rapid exhaustion of its protest cycle. Unlike the 'procés', which lasted nearly a decade, its mobilising cycle was much more ephemeral. Experts in social movements explain that when streets empty, the institutionalisation of movements becomes difficult.
Governing Challenges and Internal Strife
Furthermore, the lack of experienced institutional personnel put new political actors at a disadvantage. This offered an opportunity to traditional left-wing parties, which, despite having few voters and little credibility, possessed experienced staff. Once in government, objective difficulties in fulfilling promises, the slow and conservative inertia of public administration, and constant media and judicial attacks from the right made governance even harder.
In Podemos's case, these structural difficulties were compounded by a deep-seated tradition of internal conflict within the Madrid left. This quickly emerged, going beyond the classic clash between pragmatists and radicals. Personal rivalries and battles among small factions within the M-30 area hampered the party's political trajectory from early on and continue to do so today. While the protagonists change each season, from the initial confrontation between Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón to today's complex constellation, this has been a recurring theme.
The framework of the so-called 'new politics' was particularly conducive to these dynamics, as it heavily emphasised personalism. In the absence of well-structured political organisations, celebrated by some as 'the triumph of the multitudes', 'horizontal networks', and 'movement politics', what often remained was little more than individual figures with many social media followers. Party logos and acronyms were even replaced by leaders' faces on ballot papers.
Strategic Choices and Organisational Weakness
This personalism was not an inevitable outcome but a conscious strategic decision. The often-ephemeral popularity of certain figures gave them a comparative advantage that they decided to fully exploit. They strategically opted for hyper-centralisation and avoided investing effort in building an organisation with local reach and roots. Organisational processes are complex, slow, and draining. Podemos leaders at the time promised a rapid assault on power, seeking an electoral war machine rather than a traditional party.
In hindsight, this was likely the major error of that political space. It is unknown what might have happened if that political energy had transformed into a rooted and solid network of organisations. Perhaps they still would not have succeeded, as building organisations can be counter-cultural in fluid times. However, we do know what happened because they did not: the space became dominated by small factions, splits, splits of splits, coalitions of splits, splits of coalitions, and coalitions of coalitions of splits.
This abandonment of organisational building might seem surprising for a political space led by figures sometimes presented as intellectual heirs to the Gramscian tradition. For Antonio Gramsci, building a party was not merely an electoral engineering matter but an act of historical creation. Gramsci viewed the party as the only instrument capable of transforming a fragmented mass into a conscious political agent. He believed a party should not only win elections but also drive an 'intellectual and moral reform' of society, building a 'new culture' to challenge the hegemony of dominant classes. Gramsci also argued that in Western contexts, with complex and well-structured civil societies, the approach was not one of direct attack.
