This Is What Happens In A Podemos Citizens’ Circle

(12/06/2014) “Don’t let them take the piss! If Podemos is just Pablo Iglesias, I’m leaving!”, said a long-haired woman in a white t-shirt and a red cardigan, to general applause.

(Originally published on June 12, 2014)

On a very warm June evening, around 100 people gathered in a civic centre over the rail tracks in the southern part of the south-eastern city of Murcia, in a working-class area where the yellow paint peeled off the outer walls, 30 minutes walk from the perfumed strolls with ice cream that couples and tourists go on through the city centre, around the cathedral that took four centuries to finish.

There was no air conditioning in the large room full of second-hand books piled on shelves, children’s drawings taped to the walls, old clothes, tables and garden chairs, which had been laid out in an actual circle.

At one point, a table with an old woman sitting on top of it collapsed, causing general consternation for a few seconds, until she got up, smiling but embarrassed.

The 100—who later swelled to around 150—wore t-shirts, shorts, dresses, jeans, trainers and sandals. There were men and women of all ages, and even some children and a baby. They had each decided to come together at dinner time to talk about politics, about a letter that pony-talied party leader Pablo Iglesias had published, about the Podemos meeting in Madrid on Saturday and about the possible infiltration of their brand new political force by a group called Anticapitalist Left.

Mobile phones rang over the discussions. A GPS alarm went off: “100m to Calle Fuensanta … beep … beep”. It was chaos. Could Podemos really govern Spain like this one day? The confusion, heat and shouting lasted throughout the assembly meeting, in which the arguing and rambling did, in the end, after three long hours, lead somewhere.

Why, I wondered, did all of these people choose to come here and participate in Podemos? How was this better than the established political parties and systems?

At least half of the discussion was about the discussion itself. “Circles”, said a spokesman: “are a decisive part of Podemos”.

When anyone tried to control the debate too much, people got angry and demanded to be heard: “There’s no dialogue!”, one man complained loudly at one point, although a majority did eventually get fed up with a woman called Isabel—previously one of the four or five dominating the debate—after two hours of sweaty discussion and disagreement.

“Will you let me speak?”, she asked.

“Nooooo…!”, cried a dozen people.

“Get out!”, shouted one teenage lad.

“No one throws me out of Podemos”, she contested defiantly, proudly.

“Out!”, shouted the teenage lad again.

“Will you shut up, woman!”, grumbled an old man as she finally left, to continue her ranting outside: “I am Podemos, I am Podemos”.

The circle’s coordinator had asked people to keep to two or three minutes each, to “stop this getting chaotic”, but it was chaotic anyway. The group set about trying to elect some representatives to send to the Madrid meeting, and to agree on a group response to leader Iglesias’s letter to members, which had not been well received at all.

“This is lovely, but a work in progress, and we’re making it up as we go along”, said one man: “We’ve had to work hard on the elections, and we haven’t had time to do these new lists for coordinating teams.”.

“Pablo Iglesias is bloody cheeky!”, shouted another: “we want open democracy!”.

A young woman, who said she was a teacher, even nervously suggested a great circle of circles as a better way of discussing everything, until everyone was satisfied with the outcome, and so that all felt like they had participated.

“The basis of Podemos is representation from below”, said a 40-year old woman in a white t-shirt with a pink rabbit on it: “so how are we going to work if there’s a group trying to manage everything from above!?”

National leaders Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón got some praise for a job well done so far but members were very wary.

“Don’t let them take the piss! If Podemos is just Pablo Iglesias, I’m leaving!”, said a long-haired woman in a white t-shirt and a red cardigan, to general applause.

An older, balding, white-haired man said he was: “radically against closed lists. Either we sort this out or the Podemos bubble is going to burst.”.

There was disagreement about every point on the agenda, about some points which were not on it, and even about the best way to discuss the disagreements. A younger girl with a long ponytail, glasses and a green skirt attempted to keep a record of proposals and the main points of the discussion, but she was shouted down when she got the summary wrong half-way through.

After an hour and a half of debate, people were still not clear on most of the main points. An older woman created a stir by saying this was serious: “We’re doing politics, not playing a game”.

“And we’re not!?”, another woman spat back.

In the end, the group voted that most of them didn’t like Pablo Iglesias’s letter, but then the majority of the majority voted that it didn’t really matter one way or another, because it was just a letter.

They also voted to send between two and five delegates to Madrid for Saturday’s meeting, and then voted again to choose the five, after six volunteered. The man in the red t-shirt doing the hand counting gave up, after it became clear that almost no one wanted to pick Antonio, who had said excitedly that he felt “like a fish in water” in Podemos.

I asked two of the lucky chosen five how Podemos was going to work in practice.

33-year-old Carlos Egio, an unemployed journalist from Murcia who acts as an unofficial circle spokesman, said that: “Despite the three hours we’ve been here, and the heat, and that it seems chaotic, we do get round to a coherent group point of view in the end. That’s what makes us different from a traditional party. That’s what gives people hope.”

“If in five months we’ve managed to organise a party”, he said: “a political initiative, capable of motivating so many people, not only at the ballot box but locally too, I trust we will be able to do it right.”.

26-year-old Rebecca Martínez, an unemployed translator studying for a doctorate degree, is a Podemos veteran who has been around since the start, four months ago.

“I was totally fed up with the system”, she said. “I understood that the main parties didn’t represent me. This has to work from below, with votes and debate and arguments. I decided to chip in my little grain of sand.”

She too was confident Podemos would be able to govern Spain in a year or 15-months time: “but I can’t tell you how right now. We can’t have a very defined route map at the moment, this is all about being spontaneous and participative.”

Medical student Sergio, another one of the chosen five, had been participating in Podemos for all of a week before being chosen by the group to go to Madrid. Carlos and Rebecca told me attendance had tripled since 1.2 million Spaniards voted for the party in the European elections on May 25.

An older man suggested there might now be 1,000 Podemos circles, multiplied by five volunteers from each circle, so the meeting in Madrid on Saturday could be a gigantic 5,000 person Podemos assembly. To discuss everything. At length.

No one had any idea about how they were going to pay for the volunteers’ trip to Madrid. “We can talk about it on Facebook!”

The meeting ended with shouts of “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”, as everyone put away their own garden chair and walked out into the heat of the Murcian night.