PODEMOS has become the focal point of Spanish politics. There is no party of the establishment that is not panicking about the dangers of ‘populism’. We publish here a recent editorial from the paper of the Spanish Marxists, Lucha de Clases, which looks at the rise of this new electoral force in Spanish politics and the task facing the masses in Spain: to kick out the rotten regime and take power into their own hands.

On Sunday 9th November, over 2.3 million Catalans mobilised to vote in a “consultation” over their future status in Spain defying Rajoy’s government which had twice banned the vote. Of those who voted, 80% or 1.8 million said they wanted Catalonia to be an independent state. For many, the vote was a way of expressing their defiance against the hated Rajoy government.

What if they held an election and nobody came? In some ways, the 2014 midterm elections in the USA were very much like this. Just 36.6 percent voted. The main capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—do not deal with real issues related to the lives of the overwhelming majority of the population. This is true bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the top 1% or 2%, but not for the rest of us!