The results of yesterday’s Spanish elections leave politics there in a completely new situation with no clear government on offer, but they also mark the breakthrough of a new left party into mainstream politics in a European country with Podemos defying the pollsters and getting more than 20 per cent of the vote. The final count shows the outgoing right-wing Partido Popular with 123 seats, having lost a third of its seats but still coming…
Tag: Politics
Britain’s Podemos moment
If the result of the Labour leadership election shows anything, it is that democracy can make the impossible possible. To have predicted this landslide as recently as three months ago would have risked been considered someone who had lost any sound grasp of reality. Yet, it has happened, in what can only be called a democratic revolution. It is Britain’s Podemos moment. For capital’s version of reality has seeped into every nook and cranny of…
Andalucian elections show new politics emerging
Spanish politics have excited interest throughout Europe since the breakthrough of Podemos in the European elections in May 2014. Likened to Syriza in Greece, they yesterday faced their first electoral test in Spain in the elections in the autonomous province of Andalucia. These elections are the first of a wave of municipal, regional and national elections that hold the promise of a transformation of Spanish politics before the end of 2015. The results as they…
Renua and Sinn Féin: Chilling reminders of how little has changed
At last the Irish crisis has spawned a new political party! Ireland has been something of an oddity amid the volatility that characterises European politics today that we have taken so long to see a new party emerging from the wreckage that our economic and political elites landed us in. Greece has given us Syriza, Spain Podemos and now Ciudadanos, and Portugal Tempo de Avanzar. Neither has such political creativity been confined to the left…
Growing inequality: alarming evidence from the latest data
Riveted by the Greece versus Germany standoff over the past week, some may have been distracted from the release of important data on inequality in Ireland. Rather like buses in Dublin, you wait ages for one and then three come along together. So it was with reports on inequality over the last week. The most significant among them is the TASC report entitled Cherishing All Equally: Economic Inequality in Ireland by Nat O’Connor and Cormac…