Podemos En El Exterior: a Transnational Partisan Network Mobilizing Young “Exiliados” at the Crossroads of Spanish and Receiving-Countries Politics

In Spain, the 2008 economic crisis caused a substantial rise in emigration. Between 2008 and 2014, 2,6 million people left the country, among which many high-skilled young Spanish, affected by underemployment (Arango, 2016). This Spanish “brain drain” has soon been emphasized by social organizations and placed at the forefront of political debate by the anti- austerity party Podemos, funded in 2014, with the slogan “Nevermore a country without its people”. It appears that Podemos narrative resonated deeply within the young Spanish diaspora. As the party launched hundreds of activists “circles”, nearly thirty of them were created outside Spain, mostly in European capitals and Latin-American countries. This process led to the activation of a powerful transnational network of circles called Podemos en el Exterior. The aim of this paper is to analyze the motivations and forms of young Spanish migrants’ political involvement in Podemos European circles. This work is the result of several months of qualitative survey: our study is based on ethnographic observations and interviews realized with members of Podemos Paris circle between October 2015 and May 2016, completed with material from a 2020 survey on Podemos Brussels. After a presentation of Podemos en el Exterior’s transnational network, we first analyze the process leading to this young Spanish’s political mobilization “from outside”. By portraying themselves as “exiliados”, these Podemos activists frame their migration trajectories in collective and political terms: they are part of a “lost generation” sacrificed on the altar of austerity and denied by Homeland political authorities. Participating to a Podemos circle abroad is both a way to protest against this “exile” and to reconnect themselves with Spanish politics, as many of them present a political background in social movements. Secondly, we study how this political commitment takes the shape of a “hybrid action repertoire” (Fourn, 2014), associating in the case of Podemos Paris the transnational, the Spanish and the French participation scales. Members of Podemos Paris cooperate with activists from other circles abroad in order to build a transnational coalition inside Podemos, to make sure the party truly becomes the “emigrants’ party”. They also campaign abroad for Spanish elections, by mobilizing the diaspora in France and using their emigrant condition as an “awareness-raising device” (Traïni, 2009) towards voters in Spain. Finally, members of Paris’s circle assume the role of Podemos ambassadors abroad, creating ties with activists and leaders of French political parties, in a context of growing interest in the Spanish anti-austerity movement among the European left.