Spanish Socialists Saw Your Party's Crisis Coming — They Lived It a Decade Ago
The revolutionaries who helped build Podemos, then watched it hollow out, recognise the playbook being deployed in Liverpool
As Your Party’s founding conference in Liverpool descended into factional warfare this weekend, with co-founder Zarah Sultana boycotting the first day over the expulsion of socialist activists, veterans of the Spanish left watched with a grim sense of recognition. They had seen this film before. The script was written in Madrid in October 2014, for a congress at the Vistalegre arena.
The parallels are striking enough that Anticapitalistas — the revolutionary socialist organisation that helped found Podemos before being systematically marginalised and eventually expelled — could have written the Liverpool conference agenda themselves. The justification for purging the organised left? Identical. The ‘effective organisation’ rhetoric masking centralisation of power? Word for word. The demand that members cannot belong to two parties simultaneously? The same clause that strangled internal pluralism in the Spanish party a decade ago.
But the Liverpool outcome also revealed something the Spanish experience lacked: antibodies. The 51.6% vote for collective leadership, narrowly defeating Jeremy Corbyn’s preference for a single leader, represents a break from the ‘Great Man’ theory of left politics that enabled Pablo Iglesias to consolidate unchecked power at Vistalegre. Whether these antibodies prove strong enough to resist the disease remains to be seen.
Who Are the Players?
For readers unfamiliar with this weekend’s drama, some context is essential.
Your Party is a new left-wing formation launched in 2025 by Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who led the party from 2015-2020 before being suspended (the pretext was his response to an antisemitism report), and Zarah Sultana, the socialist MP for Coventry South who left Labour in July 2025. The party attracted over 600,000 sign-ups within a week of its announcement, reflecting genuine hunger for a left alternative to Keir Starmer’s Labour.
But the founding process has been plagued by factional conflict between two camps. One centres on Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former chief of staff during his time as Labour leader, and her allies from an organisation called Collective. Murphy is a controversial figure on the British left: credited by some with Labour’s unexpectedly strong 2017 general election performance, blamed by others for strategic failures in 2019, and widely seen as favouring top-down control. The other camp coalesced around Sultana and figures like former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, who favoured a more federated, grassroots-led model.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), many of whose members were expelled from the Liverpool conference, is Britain’s largest revolutionary socialist organisation, though much diminished from its peak. It has a controversial history, including serious mishandling of sexual assault allegations in 2012-13, but remains active in left campaigns. The expulsions triggered Sultana’s boycott and accusations of a ‘witch-hunt’.
The Spanish Precedent: What Actually Happened at Vistalegre
It is crucial to understand the historical record: Podemos was not born as a trap. It was a historic irruption that successfully challenged Spain’s ossified 1978 regime.
Podemos exploded onto Spanish politics in 2014, channelling the energy of the 15M/Indignados movement that had occupied public squares across Spain in protest against austerity and the corrupt bipartisan system of the centre-right PP and centre-left PSOE taking turns in government. Within months of its January 2014 launch, it was polling as Spain’s most popular party. It articulated what Spanish activists called an enmienda a la totalidad — a ‘total indictment’ of the status quo. It captured the sentiment that the wealthy had won the crisis, and turned that anger into an electoral offensive. This was a genuine breakthrough.
What is often forgotten — deliberately erased from official narratives — is that Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anticapitalist Left, later simply Anticapitalistas) was not a competitor to be marginalised but the engine room of this irruption. They provided the legal registration that allowed Podemos to stand in elections. They provided the initial infrastructure and activist cadre. Key early proposals, including the citizen audit of Spain’s debt, came from their programme. Teresa Rodríguez and Miguel Urbán, leading figures of the anticapitalist current, spoke at Podemos’s founding press conference.
The tragedy of Vistalegre is that the leadership used this energy to construct an apparatus designed to exclude the very forces that generated it.
Vistalegre I came in October 2014 — Podemos’s first ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ to establish the party’s structures. Pablo Iglesias and his inner circle, particularly strategist Íñigo Errejón, argued that to ‘storm the heavens’, the party needed a unified command structure, unburdened by internal factions. They proposed what Errejón called a máquina de guerra electoral — an ‘electoral war machine’ — a highly centralised, leader-focused organisation designed for efficiency.
The anticapitalists, led by Rodríguez, proposed an alternative: a more horizontal, assembly-based structure with three co-leaders rather than a single general secretary. They lost overwhelmingly. But the more consequential defeat was the adoption of an ‘Ethical Code’ that banned dual membership — formally prohibiting Podemos members from belonging to any other political party.
This was the trap. Izquierda Anticapitalista, which had existed as a registered party since 2008, was forced to dissolve itself into a mere ‘current’ within Podemos to allow its members to remain. They gave up much of their organisational independence, their legal status, even some of their autonomous communications infrastructure — all in a ‘desperate bid to preserve unity’, as they would later acknowledge. The very structures that would later strangle them were validated by their own acceptance.
Why the War Machine Worked — Initially
Understanding why the centralist model triumphed at Vistalegre is essential for British socialists facing the same dynamics today. The ‘war machine’ was not imposed against the will of the membership — it won overwhelmingly in democratic votes. Why?
The answer lies in what Spanish critics called neocaudillismo — a new form of strongman politics adapted to the media age. The Iglesias model connected powerfully with what the sources describe as ‘the most depoliticised sectors’ of the new membership. These supporters, mobilised by Podemos’s compelling discourse and Iglesias’s media presence, readily accepted hierarchy. Some even called themselves ‘soldiers’.
This is the crucial strategic insight: the populist model specifically appeals to a political constituency comfortable with top-down structures, and this constituency then becomes the base for bureaucratic consolidation. The ‘war machine’ mobilises people who would not engage with more deliberative, assembly-based structures — but those same supporters do not push back when internal democracy is curtailed, because they never valued it in the first place.
The result was what Spanish revolutionaries called a ‘plebiscitary bond’ between leader and masses — a relationship that bypassed intermediate structures of debate, cadre formation, and accountability. Online votes were structured to make control and revocation of leaders by the base impossible. Without an organised, politically educated membership, the leadership had autonomy to impose its direction and sideline democratic structuring.
This model maximised electoral potential among the widest, least-committed electorate. But it simultaneously blocked the creation of a strong, critical base capable of supporting radical transformation once in power — or of resisting when the leadership drifted rightward.
The Machine Ate Its Architects
The irony of Podemos’s trajectory is that the ‘war machine’ didn’t just crush the anticapitalist left — it consumed its own creators. Errejón, who designed the centralised apparatus, found himself unable to function within it. By 2019, he had broken with Iglesias, complaining that he ‘could not breathe’ in the undemocratic organisation he had helped build. He launched his own party, Más País, which struggled to find a distinctive identity before Errejón’s political career collapsed entirely in late 2024.
The political trajectory was equally telling. Iglesias shifted from ‘radical rupture’ rhetoric to seeking alliances with the traditional centre-left PSOE, eventually entering a social-liberal coalition government in 2020. The whole strategy had been centred on executing an electoral sorpasso — overtaking the Socialist Party — and achieving government rapidly, without explicating any project beyond that. Once in government, Podemos found itself administering the system it had promised to challenge. Social struggle became auxiliary to the parliamentary project.
Podemos’s vote collapsed from 21% in 2015 to under 5% by 2023, when it was effectively absorbed into the broader Sumar coalition. The party that had promised to ‘storm the heavens’ ended up as a minor partner managing expectations downward.
Anticapitalistas, having accepted de facto legalisation of autocratic statutes to preserve ‘unity’, finally left in 2020 — six years too late to save the broader class struggle base that had helped found Podemos. ‘Podemos is no longer the organisation we aspired to build,’ they wrote in their departure statement. ‘The organisational model based on centralising powers and decisions in a small group of people linked to public office leaves little space for pluralist collective work.’
Liverpool Echoes Madrid
The parallels at Liverpool are not merely structural — they are almost scripted.
Consider the justification for exclusion. In 2014, the Iglesias faction argued that ‘effectiveness’ required purging organised currents that might complicate unified messaging. In 2025, Your Party organisers expelled SWP members on the grounds that ‘you cannot be a member of two parties’ — despite the SWP not being registered with the Electoral Commission and posing no electoral competition.
Consider the performance of unity while practising exclusion. At Liverpool, while Corbyn spoke from the stage about ‘working together, learning from mistakes, learning from overreach’, security personnel were physically removing an SWP member from the conference floor. The maneuvering style was identical to Vistalegre: smiling and hugging adversaries, claiming the event is an exercise in ‘real democracy’, while dissent is administratively policed.
Consider the attempt to erase socialist identity. At Liverpool, members were asked to choose between names including ‘Your Party’, ‘Our Party’, ‘Popular Alliance’, and ‘For the Many’ — with ‘The Left’ conspicuously absent from the ballot. This echoes Podemos’s deliberate avoidance of ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ language in favour of the people/caste distinction. (To their credit, 80% of Your Party members voted to retain explicit endorsement of ‘socialism’ in the party’s political statement — another antibody absent at Vistalegre.)
The Antibodies: What Liverpool Got Right
Yet Liverpool was not simply Vistalegre repeated. The narrow vote for collective leadership represents something genuinely new in British left politics.
At Vistalegre, there was no serious challenge to Iglesias’s personal leadership. The anticapitalists’ alternative of three co-leaders was defeated overwhelmingly. The Spanish left had not yet learned from the failures of charismatic leader-centric politics.
A decade later, after watching Corbynism rise and fall, after seeing Podemos hollow itself out, after experiencing the limits of the ‘Great Man’ model across the European left, Your Party’s membership — however narrowly — voted against it. ‘I have fought for maximum member democracy since day one,’ Sultana said after the result. ‘Seeing members choose collective leadership is truly exciting.’
The vote to allow dual membership, while hedged with a crucial caveat, also represents a departure from Vistalegre’s absolute prohibition. And the 80% vote to describe the party explicitly as ‘socialist’ — against the instincts of those who prefer vaguer populist framing — suggests a membership more politically conscious than the depoliticised ‘soldiers’ who enabled Iglesias’s consolidation.
The Trap Within the Victory
Many Spanish socialists would urge caution about celebrating these results prematurely.
The dual membership vote — approximately 70% in favour — sounds like a victory for pluralism. But the resolution specifies that other parties must be ‘approved by the CEC as aligning with the party’s values’. This caveat grants the organisational apparatus the power to arbitrarily ‘approve’ harmless groups while banning revolutionary organisations on spurious grounds.
This is precisely the mechanism that allowed Podemos to maintain formal pluralism while practising systematic exclusion. The party never formally banned the anticapitalists; it simply made their existence within the party impossible through bureaucratic obstruction, denial of resources, and selective enforcement of rules.
Crucially, the Liverpool expulsions happened before any democratic vote on dual membership. Members of the SWP were removed on the eve of the conference, their credentials revoked, their participation blocked — all by an ‘unelected interim leadership team’, as critics noted. The subsequent vote to allow dual membership does not automatically reinstate them; that decision falls to the yet-to-be-elected CEC, which will not be formed until February 2026.
This is the pattern: establish bureaucratic control first, then hold votes that ratify structures already built to exclude.
What Is To Be Done?
Three strategic lessons from the Spanish experience deserve immediate attention.
First, build autonomous infrastructure before you need it. When Podemos’s bureaucracy cut off Anticapitalistas’ access to mailing lists, forums, and communication channels, they were silenced. They had surrendered their independent organisation in 2014; by the time they needed it, the capacity was gone. British socialists operating within Your Party should maintain independent communications, membership databases, and organisational structures — not as a hedge against the party, but as a resource for the party if its democratic channels become blocked.
Second, test the structures immediately. Do not wait to see whether the CEC will approve dual membership applications in good faith. Apply for affiliation now. Force explicit decisions that either vindicate the democratic vote or expose bureaucratic obstruction. If the CEC rejects applications from socialist organisations despite the 70% vote for dual membership, it exposes the manoeuvre to the membership while conference decisions are fresh in people’s minds.
Third, fight for programme with the same intensity as structure. The Spanish anticapitalists admitted their gravest error: they focused almost exclusively on democratic form — pluralism, assembly rights, representation — and failed to fight hard enough for programmatic content. This allowed the leadership to adopt a ‘radical aesthetic while hollowing out the programme’. Rules can be changed by future congresses; a membership educated in ecosocialist, feminist, anti-imperialist politics is harder to demobilise.
The Stakes
Your Party represents a genuine opportunity — the first mass-membership socialist formation in British history outside the Labour Party. Its 50,000 paying members and hundreds of thousands of supporters reflect real hunger for an alternative to Starmer’s authoritarian centrism. The energy that carried Corbyn to 13 million votes in 2017 has not disappeared; it has been searching for a vehicle.
But that energy can be captured and neutralised just as it was in Spain. The ‘war machine’ model promises efficiency but delivers oligarchy. The populist hypothesis promises breadth but delivers political vacuity. The exclusion of organised socialists promises unity but delivers demobilisation.
The Liverpool conference offered antibodies that Vistalegre lacked: a vote against single leadership, a vote for explicit socialism, and a membership that forced concessions on dual membership against the apparatus’s initial position. Whether these antibodies prove strong enough depends on what happens in the coming months.
The Spanish experience suggests that the window for democratic consolidation is narrow. Once bureaucratic control is established, reversing it requires more energy than most movements can sustain. Anticapitalistas waited six years to leave Podemos. By then, the party they had helped build was unrecognisable, and much of the energy that had created it had dissipated.
British socialists have the advantage of learning from that experience. The question is whether they will use it.
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Further Reading from Viento Sur
The following articles from Viento Sur, the journal associated with Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state, provide primary source material on the Podemos experience discussed in this article.
1. “Podemos: doble militancia y pluralismo político” / “Podemos: Dual Membership and Political Pluralism”
Raúl Camargo Fernández, October 2014
Written during the Vistalegre I debates, this article warns that the proposed ban on dual membership contradicts Podemos’s founding claim that ‘we don’t ask anyone for their card’. Camargo argues the clause specifically targets Izquierda Anticapitalista while hypocritically allowing members of regional parties like CiU or PNV to hold internal positions. A prophetic analysis of the exclusion mechanism that would later strangle internal pluralism.
2. “Proceso congresual y mutación organizativa” / “Congressional Process and Organisational Mutation”
David Llorente, November 2014
A detailed post-mortem of the Vistalegre I congress documenting how the vote was converted into a plebiscite on Iglesias’s leadership, how ‘block voting’ enabled the exclusion of minority candidates, and how 57% abstention reflected growing disillusionment among the base. Essential documentation of the bureaucratic techniques used to consolidate control.
3. “Podemos ante sí mismo” / “Podemos Facing Itself”
Josep Maria Antentas, January 2017 (Viento Sur nº 150)
A rigorous analysis of the ‘three souls’ of Podemos — Iglesias, Errejón, and Anticapitalistas — written before Vistalegre II. Antentas dissects how the ‘electoral war machine’ became a ‘machine for grinding up militants, dreams and enthusiasm’, describing a model of ‘plebiscitary participation without democracy’ designed to disarm the membership. Contains the crucial insight that the party embodied ‘the impossible utopia of the party without militants’.
4. “Podemos y Vistalegre II. Refundarse sin desnaturalizarse” / “Podemos and Vistalegre II: Refounding Without Losing Its Nature”
Jaime Pastor, January 2017 (Viento Sur nº 150)
Pastor examines whether Podemos can extract lessons from its populist project’s limits and its organisational model, warning it risks being perceived as ‘adapted to a normality that definitively frustrates the hopes of Change’. Includes the crucial formulation: ‘Not the Podemos hypothesis has failed. The Vistalegre hypothesis has failed.’
5. “Podemos: Avon Barksdale se impuso a Stringer Bell” / “Podemos: Avon Barksdale Beat Stringer Bell”
Josep Maria Antentas, February 2017
Using The Wire as an extended metaphor, Antentas analyses Vistalegre II as a confrontation between two ‘blockbuster’ models of Podemos — Iglesias combining ‘commerciality and quality’ versus Errejón’s ‘anything goes for ratings’ — while Anticapitalistas represented ‘The Wire Podemos’, emphasising ‘script quality and narrative consistency’. Argues the congress was ‘a facelift of Vistalegre I’ where the strategic limits of 2014 were never seriously re-examined.
6. “Anticapitalistas debate abandonar Podemos” / “Anticapitalistas Debates Leaving Podemos”
Interview with Raúl Camargo, February 2020
An interview conducted as Anticapitalistas prepared to leave Podemos, explaining the two fundamental reasons for departure: the absence of internal democratic life in an organisation whose bodies rarely meet or deliberate, and the strategic drift toward coalition government with PSOE. Camargo reflects on the emotional weight of leaving a project they helped found: ‘What’s difficult is that other people’s feelings depend on you.’
7. “Fulgor y ocaso de Podemos. Razones de un adiós” / “Rise and Fall of Podemos: Reasons for a Farewell”
Manuel Garí, September 2020 (Viento Sur nº 172)
The definitive balance sheet from Anticapitalistas, explaining both why it was necessary to create Podemos and why it became necessary to leave. Garí acknowledges Anticapitalistas’s key error at Vistalegre I: ‘Given that the framework of dispute was centred on the organisational model, it focused its effort almost exclusively on responding to the internal democratic question... without fighting with sufficient energy for a political project.’ Essential reading on the form-versus-content trap that British socialists must avoid.