The LinkedIn Left
Lilith Verstrynge turns the collapse of Podemos into a story mainly about herself.
Lilith Verstrynge’s account of her time in Podemos offers insights into the party’s collapse, but it’s fundamentally undermined by a problem that plagues much contemporary left-wing politics: a focus on personal experience and self-actualisation rather than the collective project itself. Her essay at times reads less like a serious political analysis and more like an extended LinkedIn post explaining a career change, complete with therapeutic language about “falling out of love” and finding herself through political activism.
She opens by announcing she “never expected to retire in (her) thirties”. What does any of this matter? She’s writing about the rise and fall of a political movement that briefly threatened to transform Spanish politics, that brought millions of people out of apathy, that formed part of a government, and yet she presents it primarily as a chapter in her own personal development.
The essay’s emotional centre of gravity isn’t the fate of Podemos or its supporters, but Verstrynge’s own feelings of disillusionment and her ultimate decision to leave politics for a quieter life teaching in Paris.
This narcissistic framing becomes particularly grating when she presents her departure as some kind of principled stand. “No one should stay in politics merely out of fear of losing their place,” she writes, as if leaving politics at 31 to pursue an academic career is an act of courage rather than the entirely predictable endpoint of someone who was never really that committed to the project in the first place.
She kept her resignation statement brief, she tells us, “thinking of all those who still stood up for a project I no longer believed in,” while omitting any mention that her party presented health issues as the reason for her departure.
In her closing remarks, she reflects that politics “should be just that: a stage, not a lifetime” and insists “everyone should have the chance to engage in it, at some point in their life.” This is the language of gap years and self-improvement programmes, not serious politics. Imagine saying this about any other collective endeavour that requires sustained commitment like a trade union, a cooperative, or a community organisation. Such projects require people who will stick around, who will do the unglamorous work when the cameras aren’t rolling, who won’t abandon ship the moment things get difficult or boring.
Politicians on the right tend to have a much clearer focus: it’s about getting, using and keeping power. Feelings are secondary. So does the Communist Party, whose most prominent figure is Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, at whom Verstrynge takes a couple of drive-by shots in the article, painting her as soft while she and her comrades stuck to their principles
Verstrynge’s diagnosis of what went wrong with Podemos is largely correct. The party was “fundamentally uninterested in structure,” obsessed with media coverage and airtime rather than organisation, failed to maintain contact with its base, and descended into paranoia and internal feuding. She rightly notes the fatal gap between winning power through clever media presence and governing effectively. All of this is accurate and important.
But there’s an omission in her account: she barely mentions the role of Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero’s monstrous egoism in destroying the party. She does say that Iglesias remained a “constant presence” even after his resignation, “anticipating the party’s official positions and effectively setting our agenda,” but she doesn’t confront what this actually meant, that he refused to let go, that he couldn’t conceive of Podemos existing without him at its centre, that his ego was more important than the party’s survival. He’s still the effective leader of the remains of the party today.
Similarly, she notes that Podemos insisted Montero must remain as Minister of Equality and that this became a “non-negotiable” demand that ultimately kept Podemos out of government entirely, but she doesn’t examine the staggering selfishness of this position. Montero and Iglesias, the party’s power couple, effectively held the entire project hostage to their own careers and egos. When the PSOE refused to keep Montero on, Podemos chose to exclude itself from government rather than accept her removal, a decision that prioritised one individual over the party’s entire political project and the interests of its supporters. And one that took no account of the disastrous and predicted consequences of her much-vaunted “only yes is yes” law: the early release and shortening of the sentences of dozens of sexual offenders, which made Montero politically toxic.
She also mentions in passing the dispute between Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón on electoral strategy. The latter was vindicated by results, yet he paid the price for daring to challenge the Great Leader. Errejón was forced out not because his ideas failed but because they worked, and because questioning Iglesias’s leadership was treated as an unforgivable betrayal. I wrote more about this dispute a couple of years ago.
This is central to understanding why so many of Podemos’s founder members left. They couldn’t stomach working under leaders who treated the party as their personal property, who demanded absolute loyalty while pursuing their own interests, who would rather see the entire project fail than accept any diminishment of their own power and status. The Iglesias–Montero duo’s egoism poisoned the organisation and drove away talented people.
But Verstrynge can’t quite bring herself to say this directly. Perhaps because she benefited from their patronage, it was Iglesias, after all, who called her back to Madrid and gave her the job that launched her political career.
There’s a profound irony in someone who treated politics as just another chapter in her personal journey lecturing others about what’s needed for political movements to succeed. Parties need organisational capacity and internal democracy, they need to maintain contact with their supporters, and they need to build something durable. But they also need people who will stick around to do that work, who won’t treat activism as a transient experience before moving on to something more comfortable.
Verstrynge concludes by saying she would only return to politics if she could “trust a project deeply enough to believe in it.” But the real question is whether any serious political project should trust people like her, who will participate enthusiastically while it’s exciting and new, who will benefit from the opportunities it provides, but who will ultimately prioritise their own comfort and career development over the hard work of building something that lasts.
The problem with Podemos wasn’t just that its leaders were egomaniacs or that it failed to build organisational capacity. It’s that too many of its participants, Verstrynge included, were political dilettantes who were never really committed to the long march of real politics..