Podemos fends off Trump parallels as Spain debates populism

The electoral earthquake in the United States has unleashed a fierce debate in Spain about populism and forced the leftists of Podemos to defend themselves from claims that they are a European equivalent of Donald Trump.

Albert Rivera, leader of the liberal Ciudadanos, told one interviewer last Wednesday that Podemos will be “happy” at Mr Trump’s victory, because “in the end, populisms, be they extreme right or extreme left, defend the same things”.

Mr Rivera added that “Podemos and Trump have similar electoral platforms”. He pointed to the former’s scepticism regarding the euro and Nato membership and its hostility to global free trade deals.

Podemos was founded in 2014, targeting austerity and corruption and  positioning itself as the representative of those downtrodden by Spain’s political and economic elites, which it characterised as “the caste”. Ciudadanos arrived soon after, with a more mainstream programme further to the right of the political spectrum.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias responded angrily to Mr Rivera's comments, describing them on Twitter as "somewhere between ignorance, lies and shamelessness". He also described Mr Rivera as the "lapdog" of Mariano Rajoy, due to Ciudadanos's support of the latter last month, allowing him to become prime minister again.

Mr Iglesias cited a recent tweet by Ciudadanos’s senior economic adviser, Luis Garicano, showing a photo of sub-Saharan African migrants scaling the fence separating Morocco and the Spanish city of Melilla. “There must be a reason why a decent fence can’t be built in Melilla. What is it?” Mr Garicano said.

“Who sounds like Trump now?” the Podemos leader wrote, referencing the tweet.

But the Trump comparisons have also come from Podemos’s rivals on the left, the Socialist Party. The US property magnate and Mr Iglesias’s party “drink from the same fountain”, according to Susana Díaz, the Socialist premier of Andalusia.

“When I heard the Republican candidate say that the corrupt caste had to be thrown out of institutions, that music sounded familiar to me and to millions of Spaniards,” she said. “It’s the music of Podemos.”

But in a blog post, Mr Iglesias expressed his disgust at the US president-elect, describing him as a “fascist”.

Podemos has frequently faced comparisons with foreign political phenomena, including Syriza in Greece or Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement, with both of which it has had links. But the Spanish party does seem to accept the “populist” label and Mr Iglesias, a political scientist by profession, examined this issue in his blog.

“Populists are outsiders, they may be from the right, the left, ultra-liberal or protectionists,” he noted. “Does that mean that the so-called extremes meet, or resemble each other? Not at all.”

He also underlined the fact that, unlike many other countries, Spain has not seen a surge in far-right politics recently.

“Today we can say that, thanks to Podemos, there is no political force similar to Donald Trump or Marine le Pen,” Mr Iglesias told reporters.

Fellow Podemos leader Pablo Echenique even penned an open letter to Mr Trump, ridiculing the comparisons. “I know now . . . that you will be the ‘American Podemos’ and you will thus fight hard against sexism, guns, climate change, fracking, racism, inequality, wars and poverty,” he wrote.