Pablo Iglesias. Demotix/Hugo Ortuno. Some rights reserved.The significance of Syriza’s electoral victory for anti-austerity parties and politics across Europe is slowly, but steadily sinking in. The next showdown will be in Spain where local and regional elections are due on 24 May, and a general election will be held before the end of the year. An electoral victory of Podemos will signal that the hard line neo-liberal block opposing anti-austerity policies in the Eurozone has not succeeded in silencing the voices of the people. Even without an electoral victory though, Podemos have won: they have already changed the political terrain in Spain and beyond.
Europe has been divided along an invisible, transnational frontier. Two camps, for and against austerity, rally their forces across national borders. Before, during and after the recent Greek elections, Spanish politicians went to Greece to rally support for their friends there, in the hope that this would in return help their own electoral prospects at home. The Spanish Prime Minister, the conservative Mariano Rajoy, went to Athens in support of his conservative counterpart, the now former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. It is no coincidence that, after the Greek elections and during the negotiations with the Eurogroup, Rajoy and the Portuguese PM, Pedro Passos Coelho, have both tried their best to block any favourable agreement for Greece.
The same gathering of forces is taking place on the opposite camp. Both the leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, and the leader of Izquierda Unida, Cayo Lara, took the trip to Athens in support of Syriza before the election. Although they all agreed that ‘Spain is different’, they also tried to articulate the Greek election in a way that would play into their own hands at home.
