The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito.Wikicommons/ Vecchia Cancelleria. Some rights reserved.On Sunday, June 26, new elections are held in Spain. After the failed attempt to form government, the biggest news to come out of the draw is the alliance between Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU). This political party on the left of the Socialist Party was born in the eighties linked to the Communist Party and to the protests against the Spanish entry into NATO. In the last election IU won a million votes, while Podemos had five million, 300 thousand less than the Socialists. The aim of this alliance is to remove the Socialist Party from second place and force them to negotiate a progressive government in a weaker position, although the most likely scenario is the victory of the conservative Popular Party, without an absolute majority to govern. In sum, the Podemos-IU confluence aims to unlock the political stalemate occuring in the last elections. But how does this calculation work?
Macchiavelli was one of the first thinkers discovering – as Lefort has explained – how politics is always on tenterhooks between what you really are and what you seem to be. Macchiavelli analysed this during the XVI Century, when the intermediation was less complex in terms of ways and possibilities than today. Therefore, his metaphor was simply: politics is not the same in piazza as it is in palazzo.
