This paper explores the populism articulated by Podemos ("we can"), a Spanish political party that emerged from a grassroots movement in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession. Within only two years, Podemos became Spain's third national party, fragmenting Spain's historical two-party system and forcing new political alignments. Embracing populism in response to the legitimation crisis of the ruling political class, Podemos claims to offer alternative politics, committed to a gender-informed interpretation of democratic renewal based on the "feminization of politics." However, despite these aspirations Podemos has failed to materialize its transformative premises, instead reproducing the very same "masculinized" logic of politics that it openly problematizes.
Through discourse analysis of secondary sources, participatory fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I identify a friction within Podemos' unique combination of populism, pluralism and feminism. First, I use the ideational approach (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017) to examine how Podemos' populism is built upon the antagonism between the 'common people' and the 'elite' (casta), where the existence of a 'general will' of the people is assumed and the capacity of its leaders to interpret and catalyze it is proclaimed (Laclau, 2007). Second, I examine how Podemos struggles to perform key elements of the party's pluralist and feminist commitments, such as collaborative and decentralized leaderships, processes of consensus decision-making, bottom-up structures, and dialogue with a plurality of actors.
My analysis and fieldwork illustrate how the practices of Podemos recreate: top-down party structures, adversarial dynamics, homogenization of the people and emphasis on the nation, charismatic and dominant leaderships, and a hierarchy based on intellectual authority. I argue that these are the result of the party's complicity with dominant masculine politics, expressed through the populist emphasis on winning power in the name of the 'people.' The discrepancy between Podemos' discourse and practices reveals how the party's institutionalized politics privilege a specific understanding of empowerment, characterized by the tacit acceptance of dominant masculine traits-such as competition, confrontation and hierarchy-as both normative in political power relations, and unavoidable features of political organization, communication, and leadership. The translation of this notion of empowerment into the prioritization of electoral politics, political communication and strategy leads Podemos to reproduce the gendered culture of traditional and mainstream parties.
This paper engages with recent invitations to expand the research on populism from a gender perspective (Köttig, Bitzan and Pető, 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2015; Norocel 2013, 2015), while also contributing to a comparative reflection on the allegedly inclusionary logic fostered by left-wing populisms (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013). Using Podemos as an exemplary and explanatory case, I shed light on the correlation between the possibilities (and failures) of political transformation promoted by political newcomers and their gendered practices. In this way, this research also contributes to the ongoing debate about what type of relation, if any, feminist politics entertain with populist forces.
