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This chapter discusses the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), which remains Spain's most electorally successful political party. Although the PSOE has avoided the fate of its Greek sister party, PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) at the hands of the radical-left Syriza, it has struggled to cope with the emergence of Pablo Iglesias's Podemos (‘We can’) in 2014. The dilemmas faced by the PSOE are hardly unique. With a significant proportion of the electorate having lost confidence in both the way it is governed and in the traditional parties of government, the PSOE has struggled to maintain its credibility, regarded as being stale, irrelevant, and incapable of responding to the sense of insecurity felt by many at a time of economic uncertainty. The alternative offered by a new attractive, media-savvy Podemos, capable of appealing to sections of the electorate that have deserted the PSOE, poses a very real threat.

Chapter 10, “15-M and Podemos: Explaining the Puzzle of the ‘Electoral Turn,’ ” explores the relationship between 15-M and Podemos to answer a central puzzle that arises from the case of 15-M: How did so many members of a movement that was radically committed to critiquing representative democracy embrace the Podemos electoral initiative less than three years later while still claiming allegiance to the spirit and identity of the 15-M movement? It argues that party strategists engaged in extensive discursive work to overcome their cognitive dissonance and realign their activist identities to embrace an electoral option without reneging their 15-M identity. Podemos managed to convince 15-M activists by offering the promise of integrating core elements of 15-M political culture into the party, including autonomy, feminism, and a digitally enabled hacker ethic.

Chapter 11, “Podemos: A Hybrid Party?” traces the evolution of Podemos from its inception through its two constituent assemblies to address the question of whether movement and party logics can ever be reconciled. This chapter provides an analysis of the tensions and contradictions of hybrid parties. Hybrid or movement parties—initially at least—need to satisfy and maintain legitimacy with their movement base, which in the case of Podemos is 15-M. Since its inception, Podemos has struggled to satisfy the expectations of its activist base and to strike a balance between (horizontal) movement and (vertical) party, a challenge all the more difficult given the 15-M movement’s commitment to participatory democracy. The chapter explores the central tension between movement and party by analyzing internal and 15-M movement critiques of the party and the challenges it faces in trying to maintain the support of its activist grassroots base.

This chapter explores technopopulism as an empirical phenomenon. The primary claim of this chapter is that technocratic and populist appeals can be combined in a variety of different ways. The chapter lays out three ideal-types of such syntheses and explores each ideal-type through an exemplary case. The first ideal-type is ‘technopopulism through the party’, explored through a discussion of the British ‘New Labour’ Party of the 1990s and 2000s. The second ideal-type is ‘technopopulism from below’, explored through the case of the Italian Five Star Movement. The third ideal-type is ‘technopopulism from above’, explored through the case of Emmanuel Macron and his ‘En Marche’ movement. The chapter also discusses a number of cases that are products of both the ideological and the technopopulist political logics, such as Spain’s Podemos and the Lega in Italy.

This chapter responds to Kate Nash’s contribution by examining what she describes as the two sovereignties that shape the life of contemporary human rights: the first, the state sovereignty of the Westphalian international system within which institutionalized human rights are firmly embedded; the second, the popular sovereignty of democratic polities, which is anchored in shifting notions of citizenship, culture, and identity. As the chapter explains, this ‘double bind’ of sovereignty was already present from the time of the French Revolution, which instantiated a similar division between universal ideals and the interests of citizens living in particular nation-states. As between these two, as the chapter concludes, it would appear inevitable that the cosmopolitan aspirations of universal human rights are bound to give way to more modest articulations of rights and political action, that is, human rights understood and practised in the plural.

Left-wing populist parties have joined coalition governments in Greece and Spain. This chapter examines their programs and their performance in office, showing that the parties displayed some of the characteristics associated with populism but few anti-constitutional ones even as they sponsored or supported some constitutional changes.