Podemos and the Spanish political crisis

15 May 2011 marked the beginning of a major political and regime crisis in Spain. It has since passed through different stages – the last being the emergence of Podemos, which has become a major player in Spanish politics. The crisis of traditional mechanisms of political representation has become a crisis of hegemony of the ruling class, in the Gramscian sense of the term. The mass support for the ruling class and its traditional form of political representation has been withdrawn. This has led to an open situation with no clear outcome that can be read in terms of Walter Benjamin’s non-linear and deterministic sense of political and historical time.