Six years after the banking crisis plunged the European Union into uncharted waters, a new political tide has begun to change the direction of the union's collective voyage with remarkable speed. Spurred on by the election victory of Syriza in Greece, the Spanish anti-austerity party, Podemos staged a massive national demonstration in Madrid last Saturday. This week, the state-funded Centre for Sociological Investigation (CIS) survey showed Podemos edging past the Socialist Party (PSOE) and nipping at the heels of the governing Partido Popular (PP). Many polls had already put Podemos in lead position, but this was the first time that the CIS had confirmed that Spain's two-party system, solidly established for more than 30 years, may be collapsing.
Spain is not Greece. The PP claims that the country has turned around its banking crisis, and its economy grew 2 per cent last year. But unemployment still stands at 24 per cent, with double that number of young people workless. Many Spanish people agree with Podemos's analysis that the working and middle classes are continuing to pay for a crisis created by, and for, the very rich. Their anger has been further fuelled by a stream of political corruption scandals, dating back to the PSOE governments of the 1990s and continuing unabated under the PP today. Both these parties complacently assert the virtues of alternancia, whereby they, and no other parties, alternately form governments as public opinion switches between centre-left and centre-right.
Podemos has used social media to channel and amplify the raw fury of the indignados street movement of recent years to a much more heterogeneous public. By broadly targeting the political establishment it has become both magnet and stimulant for social discontent. Ironically, the party has probably also siphoned off some social radicals from the burgeoning Catalan and Basque independence movements, thus potentially easing one of Spain's biggest challenges.
Critics accuse Podemos of authoritarian leanings. Some leaders certainly had links to Latin American revolutionary movements. But contemporary Spain has too much experience of democracy to be seduced by disciples of Hugo Chávez. Most supporters probably see Podemos - which translates as "We Can" – more as a means to forcing a radical and necessary reform on the existing system rather than as a weapon to destroy it. A series of local and regional elections, leading to general elections in early winter, will challenge Podemos to present viable solutions, rather than catchy slogans, to resolve Spain's multiple crises. The "dreams" espoused last Saturday by its leader, Pablo Iglesias, may indeed soon become responsibilities. And that prospect in itself sends a very clear message to Brussels.