Four things to know about Podemos
1. Podemos has become the preferred political option in Spain.
Podemos (“We can”) is the only party in recent history to rise at the top of national electorate preferences in less than a year. If elections were held in Spain tomorrow, Podemos would win a decent, although probably not absolute majority in the country’s parliament (a poll published in January by EL País ranked Podemos first, with 28% of the vote). The party was officially founded in 2014, and was born out of the Indignados movement, an heterogeneous platform created in Spain in 2012 to lead protests against the established political system. In less than a year, Podemos gained over 300,000 members and the potential support of almost 3.5 million voters through the set-up of an Internet-based network. The party already won five seats out of Spain’s 54 in the European Parliament at the May 2014 elections.
