Some former communists still think that heaven (like power and the Winter Palace in Russia in 1917) is only to be taken by storm. However, politics demands more methodical siege strategies which, of course, do not exclude certain doses of audacity. And if a leadership team is not able to develop these patient alternative strategies to consolidate its space, then it condemns itself to failure. But if, in addition, it embarks on a self-destructive internal war when it does not meet expectations, the decline accelerates and, sooner or later, leads to extinction or irrelevance.
Well, the history of the political space that opens up to the left of the PSOE – first the PCE, then IU, then Podemos and now Sumar – reproduces this same path of self-destruction time and time again. And it reproduces it on the basis of identical ingredients: erroneous strategies and internecine wars that end in devastating splits. Certainly, only Podemos in the 2015 and 2016 elections caressed the sky with the tips of its fingers, and it lacked little more than one point to place itself in front of the Socialists. It is clear that in the following three years it had suffered several splits and had lost half of its parliamentary representation.
But the self-destructive gene of the alternative left had already manifested itself at other times in its history. For example, in the case of the PCE, strategy errors and results below 11% of the vote triggered two insurmountable fights from 1979: the generational one (between the young and the old guard) and the ideological one (between the Eurocommunists and the Leninists, or between the renewalists and the orthodox). The electoral catastrophe of 1982 (with a fall from 23 to four seats) culminated the internal split, with a subsequent split led by the same former secretary general.
Seven years had to pass for a new formulation of the post-communist space to recover the same electoral supports of the transition. The new brand was born under the umbrella of the referendum on NATO in 1986, it was called Esquerra Unida and tried to group around the PCE the numerous galaxy of radical groups that until then had presented themselves separately. Carrillo dubbed it a “pot of crickets”, but under the leadership of an orthodox communist like Julio Anguita, the new formation came to dream of overtaking (replacing a worn-out PSOE as the leading force of the left).
In this case, the strategic error lay in the clamp that Anguita orchestrated with Aznar to suffocate the PSOE (rejecting local pacts that would have avoided PP governments). This policy brought together the entire anti-socialist left vote around IU, but, again, without going beyond 11% of the votes in 1996. The overtake was a mirage. And with the popular ones already established in the Government, the useful vote went to the PSOE (the same as some prominent IU cadres). The post-communist area came to fall below 4% of the votes.
More than a decade later, the recovery of the alternative left was now born outside the organic circuits of IU, through a generational insurrection: the 15-M movement. This youthful outburst, spurred by the great recession of 2008 , crystallized electorally in the European elections of 2014 through Podemos. And the new brand broke all the ceilings in the 2015 and 2016 general elections. More than 70 seats.
The problem with Podemos is that it brought together a very heterogeneous magma: activists without party experience, communist youth activists and a myriad of veterans of the extreme marginal left. And all of this without the organizational tradition and territorial implementation of traditional parties. It was enough to register online.
However, the assault on the sky was once again a failed expectation. The coalition with IU did not lead to the sought-after overtaking. On the contrary, it diluted the initial populist and renewing genetics of Podemos and tied its space to the delimited post-communist heritage. From here, ideological quarrels, internal wars and, very soon, purges and splits arose. Today, ten years after its founding, the renewed struggle between the purists (Podem) and the pragmatists (Sumar) is once again masking a vicious power struggle in which the losers practice a policy that has historically proven lethal for the alternative left: “Dying by killing”.
