Contemporary Populist Discourse in Spanish Politics: The Case of Podemos

Spain lacked a relevant populist political party in the recent past. However, in the past two years, Podemos, a new political party has become a political success at the local, regional and national level in Spanish politics. Podemos combined radical left policy proposals and intense populist appeals. In this paper we built on Gómez-Reino and Llamazares first analysis on Podemos’s political discourse on the 2014 European elections to investigate the populist discourse in the 2015 Spanish general elections. We seek to ascertain the degree to which Podemos’ populist discourse in the elections clearly departs from the other parties in the Spanish party system. Moreover, we seek to determine the extent to which the party’s political discourse exhibits continuity and changes in such a short period of time, in the context of an open political opportunity structure and political volatility. In order to conduct this analysis we use data on the populism of party discourses and platforms (as measured by Hawkins’s holistic grading technique) for both 2014 European elections and 2015 general elections.