The political suicide of Pablo Iglesias
50 days ago, he was Deputy Prime Minister. He rose from nothing and goes back there after resigning from Spanish politics on Tuesday.
Pablo Iglesias once gave the King of Spain a DVD box set of Game of Thrones, to much giggling and criticsm at the time, depending which side you were on. Famously a fan of watching Netflix series, his own story of political power has now ended with a suicidal leap from the towering position of Deputy Prime Minister, on which the governing left-wing coalition depended, to a sad regional nothing after resiging from everything late on Tuesday evening. He ended his last battle at the polls in a loserˋs fifth place.
Doubtless large numbers of the millions of Spaniards who voted for him over the past seven years are also despondent this week. He did manage to give them hope and channel their anger and frustration after years of unemployment and broken futures during the last economic crisis. When Podemos won five MEPs at the 2014 European Elections, the Spanish establishment, which he was angrily promising to overthrow, was shocked. No one knew who he was and how he would try to achieve his revolutionary aims.
A week later, Mariano Rajoy announced that King Juan Carlos would abdicate that very month. Lightning fast insistutional change suddenly moved to the top of the national agenda. The old guard was worried the Socialist Party would go back to being republican. So at the time, the Game of Thrones DVD gesture was not quite just a rhetorical flourish for the TV cameras. Having spent years trying to sell Spaniards his neo-Marxist plan for the country, mostly in an angry manner (he was always very good at whipping up crowds at rallies), he bought a nice bourgeoius house in a comfy part of Madrid and settled down to have a couple of kids.
Why would such a feisty political operative of any colour just turn around and give up? How can he believe he will have more power and influence on the Spanish left or on the course of the nation as a whole than as Deputy Prime Minister? What will Podemos now turn in to, having coalesced around his figure personally so much? And with Ciudadanos also about to disappear from Spanish politics (Albert Rivera resigned after the last general election), what will voters say about these new parties who promised so much and delivered so very little?
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