Real Democracy? Inside SYRIZA and Podemos

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, radical left parties in the South of Europe seemed to be having their day. Two new radical left formations, SYRIZA, a coalition established in 2004 that transformed into a party in 2012 (Greece) and Podemos (Spain), a new party established in 2014, experienced significant membership inflow, electoral success and government participation as respectively major and minor coalition partners. Both parties openly linked their calls for public support with claims to internal democratic innovation. Much discussion was had in the academic literature, associating aspects of those claims with new party models such as the ‘mass-connective party’ (Porcaro 2013) or the ‘digital party’ (Gerbaudo 2018). The aim of this paper is to lay out and compare the two parties’ inner democratic evolution over the past decade. Drawing on the literature on IPD the paper will address processes of leadership and candidate selection, as well as members’ participation in policy-making, both offline and online. It will be argued that the two most successful RLPs of Southern Europe have taken different paths when it comes to internal party democracy, but seem to be headed in the same direction: combining ‘hyperleadership’ with limited substantive opportunities for members to shape party policy.