Íñigo Errejón: “Left and right are no longer useful to express the will and need for change of one part of society”
Íñigo Errejon (Madrid, 1983) affirms that the effects that Podemos, the political party founded by him, Pablo Iglesias and other activists, has had for the last months “were difficult to imagine”. Last week, the secretary of Podemos visited the University of Barcelona to participate in the summer course La nova política (New politics), coordinated by David Brunet, political scientist and former adviser to the Ecuadorean Government at the Center for Political and Social Studies (CEPS) Foundation. Errejón holds a PhD in Political Sciences. On his lecture, he described his experience as founder of the party and director of the successful campaigns carried out for European, local and autonomous elections.
Íñigo Errejon (Madrid, 1983) affirms that the effects that Podemos, the political party founded by him, Pablo Iglesias and other activists, has had for the last months “were difficult to imagine”. Last week, the secretary of Podemos visited the University of Barcelona to participate in the summer course La nova política (New politics), coordinated by David Brunet, political scientist and former adviser to the Ecuadorean Government at the Center for Political and Social Studies (CEPS) Foundation. Errejón holds a PhD in Political Sciences. On his lecture, he described his experience as founder of the party and director of the successful campaigns carried out for European, local and autonomous elections.
A campaign with few resources
On 11 March 2014, a new political party was register at the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. Four months later, Podemos ran for Europe elections and took five seats in the European Parliament; it was the fourth most voted party in Spain. “It would be presumptuous to reconstruct a story of success in which everything was planned. To be true, the process has been full of unexpected events and luck”, he emphasized. “Without economic resources —we spent around 100,000 euros obtained from crowdfunding—, with few organizational resources and asking friends for some help, it was difficult to imagine”.
Surprise after good election results took place not only in the ranks of the party but also in the rest of parties and the media: “The questions we were first posed indicate so many things about the environment that surrounds us. They were interested in knowing the formula to get such a big representation considering that we departed from anonymity. However, analysis had to be centred not on political marketing, but on policies and what was happening in Spain that enabled us appeared”, he pointed out.
Rupture of the consensus reached in 1978
Podemos co-founder emphasized that one of causes that produced the political burst of his party is the rupture of the consensus reached with the Constitution of 1978. Crisis was marked by economic recession that break the feeling of social progress and by corruption. “On the one hand, corruption makes people think that authorities do not obey the Constitution. And on the other hand, people stop thinking that every generation will live better than the former one. Feeling that progress has stopped make people think that leaders do not seek society welfare and are unable to offer future prospects to people”, he argued.
In this sense, Errejón explained that “the crisis of the Constitution of 1978” does not mean that everything happened at that moment had sense; it questions to what extent does it meet peopleʼs needs: “It is not about challenging the past, but to analyse to what extent is it unable to offer new possibilities”, he pointed out.
The importance of the 15-M movement
The 15-M movement emerges in this context of rupture. It played a key role in the creation of the party. “The 15-M movement included in the political agenda problems that do not exist before —for example, eviction— and suggested who are responsible for these problems and who are the victims; besides, it awaked solidarity among groups who had only shared anger until then”, he explained.
Although the 15-M movement did not propose a specific model, the political scientist considers that it generated an alternative view of politics because movement supporters have more things in common among them than with politicians. This situation become an opportunity to found the party: “A situation of organic crisis in which consensus in economy, territory, etc. are broken is a good moment to launch a political idea, build a majority that goes further than the divisions between left and right, and break the idea that social and political aspects do not go together”, he said.
Concerning the future of the party, Errejón pointed out that “the aim of politics is to give meaning to things and create narratives able to group wills; it is a process which is not tied, the doubt is if it is going to be capitalized by the elite or by popular forces”. “It must be considered that people cannot mobilize every day and so fervour will be lost sooner or later”. Moreover, he admitted that the problem is to go from ideas to reality and specific measures, and to face the danger of “being pure and do not win, so turning into irrelevant, o being so similar to you opponents that you have become one of them”.
On his speech, Errejón also analysed Catalonia's sovereignty process and the role of the president of the Government of Catalonia: “Artur Mas is not the creator of the independence fervour, but he is on the crest of the wave and he has the power to manage it. He has built a political scenario and a dominant hegemony which also leaves many people apart”, he concluded.