Podemos had formed a pre-election alliance -- "United We Can" -- with Spain's Unite Left (UL), an established party of left groups that includes the Communist Party, but made little effort to mobilize it. Indeed, Iglesias disparaged IU members as "sad, boring and bitter" and "defeatists whose pessimism is infectious," language that did not endear IU's rank and file to Podemos. Figures show that Podemos did poorly in areas where the IU was strong.
The Galicia and Basque elections indicate that Podemos is still a national force. The Party will likely pick up PSOE's members who cannot tolerate the idea that their party would allow the likes of Rajoy to form a government. Podemos will also need to shore up its alliance with the IU and curb its language about old leftists (which young leftists tend to eventually become).
The path for the Socialists is less certain.
If the PSOE is not to become a footnote in Spain's history, it will have to suppress its hostility to Podemos and recognize that two party domination of the country is in the past. The Socialists will also have to swallow their resistance to a Catalan referendum, if for no other reason than it will be impossible to block it in the long run. Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont recently announced an independence plebiscite would be held no later than September 2017 regardless of what Madrid wants.
The right in Spain may have a government, but it is not one supported by the majority of the country's people. Nor will its programs address Spain's unemployment rate -- at 20 percent, the second highest in Europe behind Greece -- or the country's crisis in health care, education and housing.
For the left, unity would seem to be the central goal, similar to Portugal, where the Portuguese Socialist Workers Party formed a united front with the Left Bloc and the Communist/Green Alliance. While the united front has its divisions, the parties put them aside in the interests of rolling back some of the austerity policies that have made Portugal the home of Europe's greatest level of economic inequality.
The importance of the European left finding common ground is underscored by the rising power of the extreme right in countries like France, Austria, England, Poland, Greece, Hungry, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany. The economic and social crises generated by almost a decade of austerity and growing inequality needs programmatic solutions that only the left has the imagination to construct.
One immediate initiative would be to join Syriza's and Podemos' call for a European debt conference modeled on the 1953 London Conference that canceled much of Germany's wartime debt and ignited the German economy.
But the left needs to hurry lest xenophobia, racism, hate and repression, the four horsemen of the right's apocalypse, engulf Europe.
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