Forget Greece. Here’s the Country We Should Be Panicking About.

[Valin]

The Daily Signal:

Mike Gonzalez

July 03, 2015

 

Sick of what Greece is doing to your 401(k)? Well, there’s a bigger threat looming in the form of a far leftist movement in a larger Mediterranean country. Spain’s Podemos party has just taken over the country’s biggest cities. Oh, and it really doesn’t care about your capitalist savings.

 

Podemos, or “We Can” in Spanish—one of its regional affiliates is actually called “Si, se puede,” or literally “Yes, We Can”—might quibble with being identified as leftist, or even as an organized party at all. It sometimes calls itself “an alternative project,” or a “social movement,” and it insists it is all about transcending the left-right paradigm. All the other parties, from left to right, are disparaged as “the caste.”

 

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, a 36-year-old ponytailed academic-turned-media-darling, also insists the party did not borrow its name from Barack Obama but that both borrowed it from Latino activists in the 1960s and ‘70s. “Obama was quite clever using that, but it’s not a creation of Obama,” Iglesias eagerly told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in a Feb. 17 interview.

 

But party, movement or simply “space,” Podemos has been very good at winning elections and amassing power. Even though it did not even present itself as a party in local elections in May, candidates linked to it walked away with the mayoralties of six of Spain’s biggest cities: Madrid, Barcelona, Cadiz, Santiago de Compostela, Zaragoza and La Coruna.

 

Think of it as not just New York, but also Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta all being run by Bill DeBlasio. It means Podemos is now in charge of local policies for 6 million Spaniards in a country of 40 million and leaves it poised to create greater electoral havoc in national elections that have to be called by December this year.

 

(Snip)