Podemos, at the origins of the internal conflicts around the ‘populist hypothesis’ : a comparison of the theoretical production, public speeches and militant trajectories of Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón

Résumé En

This article aims to clarify the internal conflicts dividing the Spanish political party Podemos, born in January 2014, by basing itself on the theoretical production, public speeches and militant trajectories of two leaders of the party, Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón. The second Citizen Assembly of the party (known as ‘Vistalegre II’), held in February 2017, marked a breakpoint in Podemos’ strategy and brought to light the weaknesses of the apparent consensus between the two leaders. This dispute has been described as a conflict between a traditional left-wing (Iglesias) and a classic populist strategy (Errejón). According to our work, they both defended a populist strategy but had different understandings of it. The main objective of this article is to show that the internal debate about the relevance, the implementation and the interpretation of Ernesto Laclau’s theory on populism is a key factor in order to understand the factionalisation that occurred around the question of which strategy should Podemos adopt. This later led to the split between both leaders. We argue that those controversies can be understood by going back to their sources through the analysis of the activist and intellectual biographies of the two founders of the party.