The cracks within Podemos were apparent early on. Sergio Pascual, the party’s first Secretary of Organisation, remembers having ‘mixed feelings’ on the night of the 2015 elections. On the surface the results were impressive, with Podemos securing almost 21 percent of the vote to PSOE’s 22 percent. Yet Pascual knew that this one-point gap made all the difference. ‘We bet everything on the sorpasso of the Socialist Party’, he tells me, ‘sacrificing internal democracy and part of our programmatic identity to achieve it in an immediate electoral blitzkrieg. But once it failed to materialise, we faced a difficult institutional balance of power.’

Many of Podemos’s initial leading cadre, Pascual included, had previously worked as political advisors to leftist governments in Latin America. They saw a parallel between the Pink Tide backlash against neoliberalism and the crisis of representation in austerity-era Spain, arguing that the same conditions which had undermined traditional party systems in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia — allowing left-populist leaders to rapidly assemble new electoral majorities — had now arrived in Europe. The Indignados movement of 2011 was an unmistakable sign, bringing millions to the streets with the chant of ‘They Don’t Represent Us’.

By late 2013, Iglesias’s incendiary appearances on TV panel shows had turned the 35-year-old political scientist into a tribune for the disaffected. The pony-tailed professor eschewed the traditional language of the left and instead presented a series of populist binaries: el pueblo versus la casta, democracy versus oligarchy. After Spain’s existing left-wing party, Izquierda Unida, refused to join a united slate for the 2014 European elections, Podemos ran its own independent campaign with Iglesias’s face on the ballot papers instead of a party logo. It won 8 percent of the national vote. The leadership was convinced that a historic window of opportunity had opened. The task was to capture government within a single electoral cycle.

Podemos adopted a top-down organisational structure with a focus on media spectacle and message discipline, built for rapid advance at the ballot box. To ‘storm the heavens’, Iglesias declared, an ‘electoral war machine’ was needed for a twelve-month institutional assault.

One of the Podemos parliamentarians elected in 2015, Txema Guijarro, recalls the ‘epic character’ of that campaign: ‘Our Latin American experiences intoxicated us with the idea that winning was all-or-nothing. But maybe that was part of our miscalculation. In reality, the Spanish parliamentary system was never going to be as conducive to that kind of breakthrough, nor was the political system as fragile as it was in, say, Ecuador.’

The problem of translating the rapid insurgency into a more durable project became visible after the vote, which produced a deadlocked parliament and raised the prospect of a deal between Podemos and PSOE. There was no consensus among the leadership about how to move forward. For Iglesias the plan was simple: try to negotiate a coalition government of near equals, or, if that failed, force fresh elections. This threatened to deepen Spain’s crisis of governability and keep the right-wing government of the Partido Popular in power, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. ‘He knew our outsider appeal had a limited shelf-life’, says Pascual, ‘so he calculated that if PSOE would not share power with us, we should combine our vote with Izquierda Unida’s in a new electoral alliance that would allow us to beat PSOE in a second election’.

The party’s chief strategist, Iñigo Errejón, favoured a more conciliatory approach. He pushed for Podemos to allow PSOE to form a minority government so as to thwart the narrative that they were plunging the country into chaos. And he rejected the idea of forming a pact with Izquierda Unida, which, as he saw it, would mark a retreat from populism — with its below/above binary supplanting left/right — to a conventional strategy of ‘left unity’. Errejón began to organise within the party to challenge Iglesias’s dominance. As factional fighting spilled out into the open, amplified by a hostile media, Podemos lost momentum.

In the end Iglesias’s position won out; IU agreed to join a Unidas Podemos slate ahead of the June 2016 election, which was called to break the impasse in parliament. But much of the damage was already done. With more than a million left-wing voters deciding to stay home, the new alliance was unable to match the tally that Podemos had gotten just six months earlier. There now seemed to be no real possibility of eclipsing PSOE in the short term. The Iglesias and Errejón factions continued to clash: one calling for a line of open confrontation with PSOE, the other wanting to reduce antagonism and win support from wavering Socialists. The internal war accelerated the party’s downward spiral.

Iglesias again emerged victorious from this dispute. He built his strategy on the assumption that Spain was headed for a grand coalition of the centre. PSOE had recently launched an internal coup against its progressive leader, Pedro Sánchez, which seemed to suggest that the irreformable establishment was closing ranks. Podemos thus tried to stick to its intransigent position and consolidate its outsider status. But soon enough the political landscape shifted. In a surprise turn, Sánchez took on the old guard of his party, faced down his right-wing challenger and triumphed in the 2017 leadership contest, styling himself as the saviour of the Spanish left.

This closed off much of the political space Podemos had previously occupied. ‘We underestimated Sánchez,’ Guijarro concedes, ‘not least in his ability to push through a certain renovation in his own party. In making his comeback, he incorporated elements of our discourse and programme while minimising any openings available to us institutionally.’

The wider coordinates were also in flux thanks to a partial economic recovery and a reactionary tide of Spanish nationalism unleashed by the failed push for Catalan independence. The supposed threat to Spanish unity was now top of the agenda, and Podemos was struggling to respond. Miguel Urbán, a leading figure in the party’s radical Anticapitalista wing, and a member of the European Parliament until 2024, highlights its misreading of the conjuncture: ‘The electoral war machine model, with its hyperleadership structure, had marginalised early on any role for activists in the party, just when there had been a wave of popular enthusiasm around the project . . . By the time Podemos’s core leadership realised it had gone too far and attempted to reverse course, it had already undermined the conditions that would have made such a change of focus possible.’

The power struggle within Podemos’s leadership meanwhile led to a major split in 2019. Sidelined by Iglesias, Errejón struck a deal with Madrid’s left-wing mayor, Manuela Carmena, to set up a new regional platform called Más Madrid. He took most of his allies from the party with him, launching an unsuccessful bid for the capital’s regional presidency. Guijarro sees this as the result of a broader ‘failure of method’, in which Podemos’s inability to ‘create effective mechanisms for institutional dialogue and bargaining’ made it impossible to mediate internal disagreements.

At this point Iglesias changed tack. The same leader who had previously called for maximal antagonism with PSOE was now increasingly convinced that entering a Sánchez-led coalition was the sole means to stabilise the left, while renewing his own public image and that of the party leadership. By going all-in on this alliance, he argued, Unidas Podemos could block Sánchez’s preferred option: a more piecemeal coalition in which the centre and the right would wield real power, while the radical left would get only minor concessions.

The path to this agreement was long, running through two more general elections in 2019, during which Unidas Podemos’s vote share fell even further, to 14.3 percent in April and 12.9 percent in November. Finally, after four elections in four years, Sánchez found himself with no alternatives: he was forced to form Spain’s first left-wing coalition since the 1930s, including five Unidas Podemos ministers, with Iglesias as deputy PM.

When I interviewed Iglesias in his ministerial office in October 2020 he acknowledged it was hard to get an electoral payoff as a junior partner — that PSOE stood to reap the rewards from any progressive measures they pushed through — but he insisted the arrangement had nonetheless opened up new possibilities for his party. ‘This allows us to make up part of the leadership of the state, it allows us to form government cadres which we did not have, it allows us an understanding of and a praxis in the state that you don’t get from local or regional governments. And’, he reminded me, ‘we are young — a political force that reached government after existing for only six years.’

Seven months later, Iglesias had resigned. Governing turned out to be a gruelling process for him and his ministers. Their social agenda came up against fierce PSOE resistance and they swallowed some unpalatable policies in areas like defence and law and order. In the febrile atmosphere of the pandemic, Unidas Podemos engaged in a series of highly charged controversies around lawfare, media bias and free speech, but lacked the heft to force PSOE’s hand on any of these issues. The bitterness of the struggle diminished Iglesias’s public profile. ‘It’s clear’, he conceded on the night he stepped down, ‘that at this point I’m not contributing to the cause’.

Still, Unidas Podemos’s impact on government was real. Even with its limited leverage, it passed measures that were among the standout achievements of the coalition’s first term: a 46 percent rise in the minimum wage, a major new social welfare programme, a Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme, and a successful energy price cap during the Ukraine war which effectively contained inflation. With the far right on the rise, Unidas Podemos also played a key role in resisting its bigotry, calling for migrants to have their status regularised en masse.

As Iglesias exited the stage, much of Podemos’s political capital dissipated along with its dominance on the left. The most popular left leader to emerge during this period was Yolanda Díaz. A labour lawyer and member of the Communist Party, she took up the post of labour minister and was praised for her Covid furlough scheme as well as her major progressive reform of the country’s employment laws, which strengthened collective bargaining rights and massively reduced the use of temporary fixed-term contracts. Her political approach was distinct to the left populism of Podemos: rather than stoking binary antagonisms, she pursued a more cautious tripartism, striking deals between workers, business and the state. When Iglesias anointed her as his successor in the role of deputy PM and figurehead of Unidas Podemos, he passed the baton to someone outside his own party, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of its exhaustion. 

It then fell to Díaz’s new electoral vehicle, Sumar, to reactivate the country’s radical forces, with Errejón brought back into the fold as her de facto second in command. She set about integrating various national and regional formations into an alliance which, like its predecessor, was top-heavy and leader-centred, promising to extend the progress made under the coalition. But unlike Podemos, Sumar’s origins did not lie in a movement wave beyond the established institutions; the fact that it was built exclusively from high office ended up reinforcing its subordination to Sánchez. Díaz’s main task became balancing the competing demands of Sumar’s internal actors and continuing to negotiate from a position of weakness with PSOE. Without a transformative offer, she failed to build out from her pandemic-era popularity and construct a sustainable electoral brand. Sexual misconduct allegations against Errejón further undermined Sumar’s credibility, and it unravelled at striking speed.

This implosion was yet another blow for an already demoralised Spanish left. In retrospect it seems obvious that many of the strategic decisions of left populism — not just in Spain, but elsewhere in the West — were based on a fundamental overconfidence about the pace and extent of the establishment’s decline. When it became clear that the existing order could stave off collapse, the left found itself disoriented, and struggled to develop a more durable approach to institutional politics. It was one thing to channel outrage at elites during a moment of crisis, but another to create mass identification with a political project while putting down the territorial roots and extra-parliamentary structures needed for sustained electoral engagement. 

The result was that Unidas Podemos was already in retreat as it entered cabinet. Though it exercised significant influence in certain areas of government policy, the main political beneficiary was Sánchez — who made a show of standing above the tense negotiations between his ministers and acting as the final arbiter. This allowed him to tack left in response to public pressure without giving elites much cause to worry. He struck a delicate compromise between the different elements of the wider governing bloc, carving out greater autonomy from the right of his own party, while advancing or frustrating the left’s priorities as circumstances required. Sánchez broke with the continent-wide assault on migrants and implemented the Podemos policy to secure their status, welcoming 1.5 million new arrivals within three years. He courted major investments in renewables, greening the Spanish energy sector more rapidly than its European peers and lowering utility bills. And he vowed to ‘defend the welfare state tooth and nail’ against cuts and privatisation. On his watch, tax revenues and public spending have soared, while the economy has grown faster than any other major eurozone country.

Yet Sánchez has also thwarted every part of the Podemos programme that relied on confrontation with the Spanish power structure. Even as he and his family became the targets of a concerted lawfare campaign, the PM refused to rein in the reactionary judiciary or democratise the state, for instance by removing the Francoist Official Secrets Act or restrictions on public protest. He has repeatedly shied away from challenging the rentier interests who dominate the property market, allowing the country’s affordability crisis to deepen as young people continue to be priced out of decent housing. His government has been mired in corruption scandals, with senior figures accused of influence peddling and skimming money off state contracts. The limits of his reform agenda are, predictably, being exploited by the right bloc — which has won a series of regional victories, and is determined to dislodge PSOE in next year’s general elections.

Yet perhaps the most consequential change to have taken place under Sánchez is the direction of Spanish foreign policy. With much of Europe’s political class lying supine before Trump II, Sánchez is one of the few Western leaders to have openly challenged Washington: rejecting its calls to raise defence spending to 5 percent, pushing the EU to end its association agreement with Israel, refusing the use of Spanish bases for the war on Iran, and forging closer ties with China and nations of the Global South — with investment in electric vehicles, batteries and other green technologies aimed at unleashing a new phase of industrial development.

This is not an index of Sánchez’s radicalism so much as his wager that Spain has more to gain from adapting to the new geography of global economic power than it does from clinging to the old Atlantic order. There is a certain irony here. Although the left populism of the 2010s drew inspiration from Latin America, its main focus was the gulf between masses and elites within the Spanish nation-state. Sánchez’s social democracy, by contrast, has no Third Worldist influences — it is a simple outgrowth of the PSOE tradition that emerged after the dictatorship — yet it has been effective in grappling with the changing international balance of power. Its willingness to reimagine Spain’s role in the global order and reject the logic of the New Cold War is its most consequential feature, which may have major implications further down the line.

More than a decade after Tsipras and Iglesias electrified the crowds in Athens, we now see Sánchez embracing Lula da Silva at the first ever Spain–Brazil summit in Barcelona — the two leaders promising to build an anti-war, anti-Trump bloc that will unite progressive governments across the planet. This is not an image of rebels primed to storm the heavens, but of statesmen offering protection from the excesses of a dying empire. Instead of a war on the establishment, the new centre left offers a refuge from the brutalities of neofascism. Their ambition for the existing order is not destruction but revivification. In a world sliding towards chaos, it’s easy to see the appeal.

On Gaza, Burnham still talks only of the ‘disproportionate’ character of ‘what has happened’. This is the language of 2023. It fails to recognise that almost three years of deliberate Israeli destruction have inflicted appalling death, hunger and suffering. Gaza contains the world’s largest population of child amputees, and a new UNICEF study shows that the genocide has imprinted itself in children’s bodies, with one in eight showing signs of stunted growth.

Few apart from Israel’s apologists now doubt the genocide. According to polls, half the British public recognise it, despite media suppression of the term itself. Spain, the only other social-democratic government in Europe, has recognised that this is what is happening, as have Burnham’s cabinet ally, Louise Haigh, and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. The PM needs to catch up.

The terminology is important. It captures the defining features of Israel’s policy: that it has, in the language of the Genocide Convention, ‘deliberately inflicted’ on the Palestinian national group ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction’ in Gaza. The Convention binds the UK to ‘prevent and punish’ genocide when the risk is evident, not years later when a court finally delivers a ruling. This duty was triggered in January 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a ‘plausible risk’ and deemed it necessary to order Israel not to commit genocide.

Now, for more than thirty months, Britain has not only failed in its duty but has remained actively complicit in the crime. The ministers, civil servants and commanders involved in negotiating the RAF’s aid to Israel could even be charged for it. Complicity has been fostered by the Labour Party’s longstanding support of Zionism, the Labour right’s reliance on pro-Israel donors, and its weaponisation of antisemitism to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The costs are now apparent in the rubble of Gaza, as well as in Britain’s changing electoral map.

The UK must belatedly fulfil its duty to prevent genocide and make reparation for the policies of the Rishi Sunak and Starmer governments. The genocide is ongoing and nothing has been done to aid the survivors. Meanwhile, Israel continues to expand its control of Gaza and disobey the nominal restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s ‘peace deal’.

Recognising the genocide means that normal international relations can no longer apply to Israel; the situation demands nothing less than a repudiation of the UK’s alliance with it. The UK-Israel Military Cooperation Agreement, signed by Boris Johnson in 2020, under whose secretive terms Britain has aided the genocide, must be cancelled. Normal economic and cultural relations should be suspended. Members of the IDF who have taken part in the genocide should be denied entry to the UK, and visa-free access for Israelis should be ended to enable this.

A coherent anti-genocide policy would certainly require the mother of all U-turns from Burnham. He has retained several ministers in senior roles who bear direct responsibility for the worst policies under Starmer. The temptation will be strong to keep any shift within the bounds of the symbolic and performative.

But that approach has already been tried: Starmer criticised settler excess, banned some weapons sales and sanctioned individual ministers, with little to no impact in winning back former Labour voters. It is betting a lot on Burnham’s communication skills to believe that this will work a second time. The Palestine Action ban also continues to be a major embarrassment. Almost every Labour MP voted for it, with only nine against, even though seven in ten Labour members opposed it. Unless the Supreme Court rules the ban unlawful, Burnham will have to grasp this nettle and lift it.

Labour continues to focus on intensifying violence and displacement in the West Bank, yet its response there seems to be an escalation of Starmer’s token sanctions. Labour Friends of Israel is lobbying against even this, on the grounds that sanctions on settlements will become sanctions on Israel.

But this is precisely what the sanctions should be doing: targeting the occupying state, not just the settlements it has put in place or the individual extremist politicians at its head. The illegality of the occupation was confirmed in 2024 in a comprehensive judgment by the ICJ. The Labour government, despite the faux support for international law of Starmer and his attorney general Richard Hermer, has still to respond to this ruling. A key test of the reset is whether Burnham will rise to the judgment’s challenge.

At the beginning of 2026, Labour might have worried that an anti-Israel stance would seriously undermine Britain’s relationship with the USA. But the fallout of the Iran War means that all bets are off; Israel is increasingly criticised on all sides of US politics. Burnham might reflect that the war into which Israel bounced Trump — and which Starmer aided even while claiming not to (assistance Burnham has apparently decided to continue) — is a major contributor to Britain’s continuing cost of living crisis.

Israel is increasingly the weakest link in both far-right politics and the USA’s imperial network. Breaking with it is not only the right thing to do for Palestine; this could also be how Britain finally begins to move away from its decades-long dependence on the United States. If Burnham and Miliband cannot execute this shift, the Palestine movement, the Green Party, and the left must make it happen.

The forces harnessing this populist moment in Germany are not exactly new — the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was founded in 2013, far-left Die Linke in 2007 — but they have been given a new lease on life after years on the margins of parliamentary politics. This is particularly the case for the AfD, which is still subject to the political ‘firewall’ that all other parliamentary parties including Die Linke have erected around it, but is currently polling in first place nationally and on the cusp of winning a majority in some eastern states, where protest parties of different persuasions have traditionally been most successful.

At least for now, the AfD seems to be the first address for German voters looking to express frustration with the country’s political and economic situation. For years, exit polls have shown the AfD topping the polls among workers and the unemployed, whose economic anxiety has been ignored by the political mainstream. Like far-right parties practically everywhere, it is particularly strong among lower-middle-class men in rural areas. Yet it is increasingly gaining support among industrial trade unionists, at least some of whom have responded to external economic threats by turning inwards, seeking to protect their jobs by excluding potential competitors from the job market. Although its organised presence within the labour movement remains meagre, at least in demographic terms, the AfD is now Germany’s leading workers’ party.

Ironically, the AfD began as something quite different: a Eurosceptic formation founded in opposition to bailouts for Germany’s Southern European neighbours. Populist, perhaps, but certainly not popular. Indeed, the early AfD was eminently middle class and its activist core remains overwhelmingly so to this day. Its stunning success, then, has less to do with a supposedly populist agenda (as critics are keen to point out, the AfD’s economic programme remains well within the neoliberal mainstream) than with a mixture of deft opportunism and blind luck. As xenophobia began to spread in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘summer of migration’, the AfD quickly positioned itself as the anti-migrant party. When protests against lockdowns broke out during the pandemic, it again pivoted in time to become the voice of Covid-scepticism. The anti-migrant and anti-lockdown waves have long since subsided, but the AfD — now shorn of its more moderate layers — has endured, and is now stronger than ever.

Precisely because of its exclusion from government and polite society, the AfD appears to millions as the only truly authentic voice of protest. The question is whether the party, on track to win a majority in the state of Saxony-Anhalt later this year, might become a victim of its own success: moving from an insurgent outsider to an established governing force. An AfD-led government is certainly an alarming prospect, particularly in a part of the country where its most reactionary elements dominate, but it would not mean the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany, as some alarmist voices tend to imply. The populist decade has already given us several examples of what the European far right in power actually looks like. The governments of Giorgia Meloni in Italy or (until recently) Viktor Orbán in Hungary succeeded in implementing regressive policies, but were — much like their counterparts on the populist left — domesticated by the institutions in which they operated. More importantly, they can, and almost certainly will, be voted out sooner or later, though it is less clear what will come next.

Could Germany’s belated populist turn therefore come to benefit the left? That is hard to say. Die Linke’s path to power has been rocky and winding. Teetering on the brink of political oblivion two years ago, the party has undergone a remarkable rejuvenation under the leadership of Ines Schwerdtner, once the editor of the German edition of Jacobin magazine. Today, it is gaining ground among disaffected centre-left voters and young people in urban areas, but has struggled to win back its traditional eastern electorate from the far right, and has made few inroads among working-class constituencies. As was the case for left populism in the rest of Europe, the resurgence in Germany remains largely restricted to downwardly mobile segments of the professional middle classes. Breaking out of this pattern will be key if Die Linke is to avoid the same fate as Corbynism or similar experiments that came to ruin.

It will also depend on whether the party can learn from the experiences of the last decade. In their book The Populist Moment (2023), Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello describe this trend among left parties as an attempt to ‘rethink mobilisation for an age of demobilisation; to organise for an age of disorganisation’. But while populism has had distinct success in mobilising an electorate, at least sporadically, long-term organising has proven far more difficult. In countries like Spain and Greece, where the left rode the populist wave into government but lacked corresponding structures on the ground, this project is now for all intents and purposes dead.

Schwerdtner for her part prioritises ‘building a house of stone’, meaning a solid organisation rooted in workplaces and communities, as opposed to a short-term electoral focus. But come September, Die Linke stands a good chance of taking first place in the Berlin elections and coming under pressure to join a cross-party coalition to exclude the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt. There are strong arguments for doing so: Berlin is desperately in need of public investment after years of austerity, and it is hard to see any government without Die Linke making the necessary expenditures. As with Zohran Mamdani in New York, the party hopes to turn the city into a beacon of hope for the rest of the country, showing that democratic socialists can not only govern reliably, but improve the lives of their constituents in a meaningful, lasting way.

At the same time, assuming government responsibility — particularly in a poor state like Saxony-Anhalt, where there is little fiscal room for manoeuvre — risks tainting the party as part of the rotten establishment that sparked the populist wave in the first place. As was the case with Syriza in Greece, Die Linke’s foray in government could ultimately end up bolstering the far-right’s reputation as the only ‘real’ opposition and accelerating the country’s rightward drift. Schwerdtner surely had this dynamic in mind when she spoke of taking ‘difficult decisions’ at Die Linke’s party congress back in June. 

Whether or not the AfD or Die Linke find themselves in government later this year, the structural crisis of the German economic model will not be resolved anytime soon. Bearing that in mind, we can expect the populist moment to stretch far into the future, with all the political unpredictability that entails. For Germany’s — and Europe’s — sake, left populism needs to succeed where it failed in the 2010s. That means combining immediate electoral priorities, to restore confidence in the left as a force that can wield effective power, with the slower work of cadre-building and coordinating among our base. These are the foundations on which a house of stone must rest. Without them, parties like Die Linke will, in their desire to halt the advance of the far right at any cost, repeat the same strategic missteps which have undermined their projects in years past.