• Slate led by Pablo Iglesias wins 60% of seats on Podemos ‘Consejo Ciudadano’
• Errejón slate eclipsed, members opt for left-leaning future, centralist structure
After a week of balloting that culminated in leadership elections at the weekend, Spain’s three-year-old anti-austerity party Podemos (We Can) has tied its future to the more left-leaning political program and centralized decision-making structure put forward by party leader Pablo Iglesias, whose slate won a resounding victory in the voting to select the members of the party’s Consejo Ciudadano executive council on Saturday.
Iglesias was returned to the party’s top position of general secretary with 89 percent of the vote and the slate he put forward won won 60 percent of the seats on the Consejo Ciudadano executive council. The slate presented by Íñigo Errejón, previously the number-two leader within Podemos, won just a third of the votes cast to net 40 percent of the seats on the 62-member executive council.
The future of Errejón within the party hierarchy remains unclear, as in addition to his slate’s having lost all the important votes on platform planks to the positions advanced by Iglesias’ slate, he also received fewer votes than did Pablo Echenique, formerly the third-ranked official within the Podemos leadership. The election results place Echenique, who ran on the Iglesias leadership slate, in a position to claim the mantle of number-two in the Podemos leadership hierarchy.
► Read More in Spanish at El Mundo, Público and El País …
► Read More in english at The Local and Spanish News Today …
