Ein sehr informativer und analytischer Artikel über Podemos im Jacobin – Titel:

Podemos and the Paradigm Shift
Podemos emerged in resistance to Spain’s political establishment. But what are the limits to its populist strategy?

….“Izquierda Anticapitalista was a small Trotskyist party with six hundred activists who had splintered from the IU in 2008 to try to follow in the footsteps of France’s New Anticapitalist Party. It provided the organizational muscle that allowed Podemos to take its first steps, but the group of professors sidelined it immediately. Many of them — including Pablo Iglesias himself — were ex-members or collaborators of the IU, which they continued to keep one eye on.

During the last decade, these professors had acted as consultants to several Latin American governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The lessons drawn from this experience have constituted their main source of political inspiration. As Iñigo Errejón wrote a few years ago, they want to translate the Latin American populist ruptures into the Spanish and European context.

Podemos started out with an enormous asset. During 2013, Iglesias had become a very popular TV figure. Since the beginning of the crisis, political talk shows had experienced a certain boom on Spanish television. Iglesias managed to carve out a place for himself on TV; audience rates rocketed when he appeared on screen. His secret was a critical discourse, not too original, but direct, empathic, and simple — perfect for intervening in heated discussions, and very far from academic argumentation.

Nothing is left to improvisation in this strategy. It is a long-term project on which the circle of Iglesias has been working for years against the grain of dominant communication theories. The prevailing idea among the Spanish left was that conventional media was either inaccessible or technologically obsolete, and therefore the most favorable battlefield was that of social networks. Iglesias disagreed.

In Spain, political consensus is built via traditional media: about 60% of the population favors television as their source of political information. So in 2010 Iglesias, along with a group of students, created a counter-hegemonictelevision project, of explicit Gramscian inspiration: La Tuerka (The Screw). In this program they spread the ideas of the Left in a language geared toward the common sense of the social majority. While La Tuerka was only broadcast by a small community TV station, it provided a school for Iglesias to learn some of the communicational strategies that turned him into a celebrity.

But this merger of Latin American populism and media-oriented leadership have limited and presented challenges for Podemos…“