2026-01-05
30 分钟This is The Guardian.
This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art.
Inside the rise and fall of Bodemos,
we believed we had a stake in the future by Lilith Vestrinche, read by Nora Lopez Holden.
I never expected to retire in my 30s,
but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible, what it promises, what it extracts.
A decade at the heart of Spain's boldest modern political experiment,
aged me in ways I've only just begun to fathom.
In May 2014, just four months after it was founded,
the left-wing Spanish party Podemos, We Can, won five seats in the European Parliament.
As a recent university graduate who had been part of a local polemies group,
or Thyrkoulos as they were known, in Paris, I was hired to work for these MEPs.
We arrived in Brussels as complete tiros and had to learn everything on the job.
But we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call real politics.
That is to say, not the internal power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement,
which were always abundant, but the actual issues, such as gender discrimination and unemployment.
Over the next few years, Podemos continued to disrupt Spain's sclerotic two-party system.
In the November 2019 general elections,
we won enough seats to join Spain's first-ever governing coalition.
Under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as a junior partner to the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party,