Podemos even worse than Syriza as a party of the left?
Podemos’ decision to offer itself up as a political platform for NATO and the Spanish army to play a public role in political life is a warning as to its utterly reactionary role….
Whilst General Rodríguez was overseeing four F-18 fighters, one Boeing 707 refuelling plane, a frigate, a submarine and one surveillance plane in Libya, then-unknown academics Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón were criticizing “humanitarian” intervention and “those supposedly on the left” who voted for it.
The days in which Iglesias and Errejón tried to exploit anti-war sentiment and railed against the Spanish army’s bloody history in their local TV programme La Tuerka are long gone, however.
Three years after the Libya war, they founded Podemos along with a group of former Stalinists, academics and the Pabloite Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anticapitalist Left). The latter had supported the NATO intervention, calling for an “unconditional supply of weapons to the [Libyan] rebels.”
In Catalonia, Podemos is now in coalition with the Greens (ICV), who denounced opposition to the Libyan war as “infantile anti-Americanism.”
Iglesias’ alignment on the general staff is a political indictment of all the bankrupt middle class organizations who helped create this reactionary, anti-Marxist populist party.
Podemos was in particular closed aligned with the Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party in Greece. Since the Syriza government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras came to power this year promising to end austerity, and then implemented new savage austerity against the workers in Greece, there can be no question that Iglesias would carry out similar right-wing policies in Spain. Its populist rhetoric was merely a political cover for utterly anti-working class politics.…
