21st Century Wire says…
Back in January, 21WIRE reported how Spain’s political crowd-funding fledgling sensation Podemos drew 100,000 to an anti-austerity rally in Madrid.
Many mainstream pundits and political ‘experts’ expecting a flash in the pan which would quickly disappear as fast as it appeared, only that’s not what’s happening…
Global Research reports this week:
“According to some current polls, Podemos, though founded only in January 2014, is the strongest party today with an almost 28 per cent voter approval, one year before the parliamentary elections.”
(Image Source: Politica El Pais)
“What is more remarkable about Podemos than the poll results, which can merely be volatile snapshots of the moment, is the social mobilization that the organization set in motion. 900 Podemos base groups, so called circles, have formed throughout the whole country. Almost 10,000 people took part in the party’s founding congress in October. And in municipal district assemblies hundreds of neighbours discuss the crisis, capitalism, and ‘real democracy’ – and in this case ‘neighbours’ means literally neighbours. Podemos has left the subcultural milieus behind.”
Whatever one’s feeling are about Podemos, or any other new and emerging grass-roots political movement in Europe today, the recharged political conversation Spain is witnessing is undeniable.
As the Northern Europe leans towards right-wing nationalism and fascism lite, southern Europe, for now anyway, appears to be heading into a more liberal democratic political environment, and championing local government over the supremacy of the centralized monolithic model. Writer Raul Zelik explains:
“Even if one almost always goes wrong with such prognoses, the fact is that the Spanish state is facing the biggest rupture since the end of the Franco dictatorship.“
“Guanyem / Ganemos Initiatives have real chances of winning the mayoral elections in May. In recent months in Catalonia, millions were on the street calling for the democratic right to self-determination, to which Madrid could only answer with new prohibitions.“
“The level of debate is astounding, determined as it is, on the one hand, by a pragmatism directed at the 2015 elections and, on the other, by sharp criticism of neoliberalism and bourgeois political routine.”
What’s next? By destroying the economies of southern Europe, Brussels bankers and their bureaucrats have almost guaranteed that Podemos will not only hang on this year, they will grow and thrive well into the foreseeable future.
Whether this will be a catalyst for improvement in the country’s economic and social woes remains to be seen.
READ MORE SPAIN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Spain Files