EU politics: Europe’s populist parties aren’t done by a long shot - by Eric Reguly

If there were a single image that summed up the quick rise of Europe’s anti-establishment parties, is was the one of Alexis Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias together, on stage, at an anti-austerity rally in Athens just before the Jan. 25 Greek election. Wearing their trademark open-neck blue shirts – no neckties ever for them – their arms were outstretched, as if in celebration, as the crowd cheered them on.

Mr. Tsipras, the leader of the radical left Syriza party, would win that election; Mr. Iglesias, leader of Podemos (We Can), the Spanish equivalent to Syriza, would top the polls in Spain, much to the distress of the mainstream parties.

The image implied that the populist revolution had arrived in Europe, where the centre-right and centre-left parties that had ruled for decades were in full retreat as voters grew angry at the stalled recovery, the harsh austerity measures and the obscene unemployment levels.

But could January have been the peak of the populist movement? Shortly thereafter, Syriza was riven by infighting as its efforts to make a breakthrough with its bailout masters in Brussels and Berlin went nowhere. Podemos’s rise stalled as spring approached. In Britain, the UK Independence Party, whose goal is to yank Britain out of the European Union, won only one seat in the May 7 election; even UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, got shut out. Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, Italy’s biggest opposition party, lost momentum. While the Euroskeptic Finns Party placed second in Finland’s election, their vote tally fell by two points.

Investors have applauded the apparently flattening popularity curve of the protest parties. Bond yields, with a little help from the European Central Bank’s ultra-easy monetary policy, have sunk throughout the euro zone. The rage against the middle-party machine seemed less shrill as the economy improved. The falling euro and oil prices, and the ECBs €1.1-trillion ($1.3-trillion) quantitative easing program, helped.

Not so fast. Rumors that the populist surge is over might be exaggerated, greatly so.

Read more: Europe’s populist parties aren’t done by a long shot - The Globe and Mail

Spain: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics - by Giles Tremlett

At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple. His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought, was not just something to be studied.

 It was something you either did, or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and – as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered, globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant ideology.

Iglesias and the students, ex-students and faculty academics worked hard to spread their ideas. They produced political television shows and collaborated with their Latin American heroes – left-leaning populist leaders such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador or Evo Morales of Bolivia. But when they launched their own political party on 17 January 2014 and gave it the name Podemos (“We Can”), many dismissed it.

With no money, no structure and few concrete policies, it looked like just one of several angry, anti-austerity parties destined to fade away within months.

A year later, on 31 January 2015, Iglesias strode across a stage in Madrid’s emblematic central square, the Puerta del Sol. It was filled with 150,000 people, squeezed in so tightly that it was impossible to move.

He addressed the crowd with the impassioned rhetoric for which opponents have branded him a dangerous leftwing populist. He railed against the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” who had humiliated them all.

He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”. Spain was in the grip of historic, convulsive change. The serried crowd were heirs to the common folk who – armed with knives, flowerpots and stones – had rebelled against Napoleonic troops in nearby streets two centuries earlier. “We can dream, we can win!” he shouted.

Polls suggest that he is right. Since 1982, Spain has been governed by only two parties. Yet El País newspaper now places Podemos at 22%, ahead of both the ruling conservative Partido Popular (PP) and its leftwing opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).

If Podemos can grow further, Iglesias could become prime minister after elections that are expected in November. This would be an almost unheard-of achievement for such a young party.

Many in the Puerta del Sol longed to see that day. “Yes we can! Yes we can!” they chanted. Other onlookers shivered, recalling Iglesias’s praise for Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chávez and fearing an eruption of Latin American-style populism in a country gripped by debt, austerity and unemployment.

But without Podemos, supporters feared, Spain faced the prospect of becoming like Greece, with its disintegrating welfare state, crumbling middle class and rampant inequality.

Read more: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics | Giles Tremlett | World news | The Guardian