Echenique’s kamikaze trip: love, disability, the end of the first Podemos and the coalition

To begin telling his story, Pablo Echenique Robba (Rosario, Argentina, 1978) chooses an illustrative anecdote: a ten-year-old boy flying at 50 kilometers per hour down the road, in his wheelchair, with a friend on top of him. . A vertiginous leap from the top of a street in the port city where he lived until he was thirteen years old, which serves as a metaphor for the way in which he has faced his vital decisions since then and that has brought this doctorate in physics to the forefront politics despite the spinal muscular atrophy that has marked him since he was born.

Echenique tells this story and many others in the autobiography she has just published, Memoirs of a Fighter Pilot (Harp), a succession of chapters that work in two directions. They serve to delve into the day-to-day life of a cascaoas defined a decade ago in the De retrones y hombres blog, the life of a person who moves thanks to an electric wheelchair, who is unable to lift a glass of water, smoke a cigarette without help or, he admits , to wipe his ass, but with an IQ well above average, he got a doctorate in theoretical physics and a place at the CSIC before jumping into politics.

The book also serves to learn first-hand about some of the most important moments in the history of Podemos and, by extension, in the recent political history of Spain. The irruption of the political party that broke the bipartisanship and that reached the first coalition government of modern democracy. As is logical, the reader will come across a one-sided story, with the subjectivity of the first person, but it will be difficult, yes, to run into large doses of political self-criticism.

Although she was born in Argentina –in the middle of the military dictatorship of Videla, Galtieri and Viola–, and spent her childhood there, Echenique emigrated to Spain at the age of 13, thanks to a small network that her family had in Zaragoza, around El Mangrullo, the restaurant that his uncle had founded there a few years earlier after narrowly escaping from the clutches of the Military Juntas. Despite his uncle’s past and the context in which he was born, Echenique acknowledges that he was “a political idiot” until he was 30 years old. “Someone who is not interested in politics has a great probability of ending up – therefore – thinking politically about what is said on television”, he reasons.

Echenique speaks of idiocy despite her 150 IQ which allowed her, among other things, to obtain a doctorate in theoretical physics in those years and obtain a place at the CSIC. All this without giving up partying and drunkenness, which he details in an extremely personal chapter about his youth, his relationships with his friends and also about love and sex. “During those years I began to understand that the real blocking factor that prevented me from having relationships was a fabulous fear of rejection, which did not let me even take the first steps,” he says as an appetizer of a small essay on affections.

His political “idiocy” led him to join Ciudadanos between 2008 and 2009, but he was disenchanted when he observed that the party had no vocation for victory. The now spokesperson for Unidas Podemos takes advantage of anecdotes like this in his lines to analyze, for example, the reasons that fuel the growth of the ultra-right in Spain – anti-nationalism, the demonization of Podemos in recent years and more recently, he says, anti-feminism –. Also to explain how in 2014, when he had ceased to be, he says, that political idiot, he was seduced -or “abducted”- by what happens in the Teatro del Barrio de Lavapiés on January 17.

A few days later, Pablo Iglesias would visit Zaragoza as the first stop on his route to build the party. After the event, he wrote a message to Miguel Urbán on Twitter: “I think what you are doing is very worthwhile and I want to help. I know science and I know disability. Use me”. Although he did not know it, he tells him, he was again about to drop his chair at electric speed from the top of Tucumán de Rosario street.

The story from here is more or less known. Echenique turns to the Zaragoza circle, which gives him enough relevance for the team that organizes the match in Madrid to summon him to some events. In the political work in his city he verifies that the anticapis, Izquierda Anticapitalista, which at that time were the only ones already organized, had the upper hand and, out of inertia, stuck to them until they stood up to Iglesias months later, in the party’s first citizen assembly, known as Vistalegre I.

“I don’t know if today I would participate in an operation like that, in which the implicit leadership is in the hands of a specific political organization with its own interests and in which I was not even a member,” he points out. In addition to his work in circles, which distanced him from the verticality that the founding team of Podemos wanted to impose, Echenique had relied on the Anticapitalist Left because they put “the greatest interest” in mounting a “democratic insurrection” against Iglesias.

That opposition, sheltered under the paradoxical name – looked at with the eyes of 2023 – of Sumando Podemos, was defeated against the founding team of Iglesias, Iñigo Errejón, Carolina Bescansa, Juan Carlos Monedero and company, but it served Echenique for two things. First to accumulate public and media relevance that would later help him win the primaries for the general secretary of Podemos Aragón against the candidate sponsored by Iglesias. And second to acquire a teaching. “With everything I know today, I believe that our organizational document would not have allowed the organization to function smoothly and therefore the fulfillment of the electoral milestones that were achieved at the end of 205 and mid-2016,” he admits.

In those wild, fast years, depending on the biography that tells them, Echenique is adding political challenges to the obstacles that her disability opposes her every day. Barely a few months after the birth of Podemos, he was elected as an MEP and had to face “the torture of flying”. Due to the lack of accessibility of the planes, they forced him, for example, to check in his chair and leave it in the hold of the plane, with the risk (accomplished) that a very expensive device would break. This also implies that the assistance personnel must carry the person on the air from the chair to the seat of the plane, with the complexities that this process entails. Once in Brussels, he laments, mobility was also very difficult for him as it was a very inaccessible city, with cobblestone sidewalks, for example, and with a tiny fleet of adapted taxis.

The party within the party of Errejón

Echenique takes advantage of this review of her personal and political life to settle some accounts. In his analysis, he establishes that to take care of any political project, loyalty to the person who assumes leadership is necessary, not as an exercise in irrational follow-through but as a “pragmatic, effective and intelligent” strategy. Iglesias asks the then general secretary of Podemos Aragón to assume the organization secretary of the party at the national level at the beginning of 2016, after the dismissal of Sergio Pascual. Echenique realized when he arrived in Madrid that in Podemos there is nothing less than a “party within a party” created during the absence of Iglesias during his time as an MEP.

“[Errejón] he was concerned and worried about filling the party apparatus with people related to him, ”says Echenique. People who, however, were clear that his loyalty was not to Iglesias or to Podemos but to Íñigo Errejón. “As they themselves bragged then in their internal chats, they created, during those years and through that mechanism. a party within the party. That’s what they called it, ”he says.

A curious detail that comes from reading this book is that Echenique takes responsibility for the introduction of the Telegram messaging platform at the beginning of Podemos and through which its first major crisis was conceived, which culminated in the departure of the errejonism and the creation of Más Madrid first and Más País later. That dispute that split the organization in two was not a battle of ideas as they wanted to sell, says Echenique, it was the “lack of ethics in the political praxis of one of the two parties.”

The almost definitive break with Podemos occurred during Vistalegre II. The new Secretary of Organization had gone from being Iglesias’s main rival in the first assembly to his lieutenant in the second. Errejón, who intends to lead the ideological project but leave the visible leadership in the hands of Iglesias, is defeated. Echenique includes an anecdote in the book to support his theory that the rival had been promoted, like him in the first assembly, by the media. “Several journalists were seen crying in the assembly hall when they learned of the defeat of what was clearly their candidate,” he recounts.

The negotiation of the coalition government

After the blow of the definitive exit of the errejonismTwo years later, Podemos is experiencing some very delicate moments. Echenique completes with his perspective what Pablo Iglesias recounted in ‘Verdades a la cara’: his offer to be a candidate in the Madrid Community elections prevented the party leader from resigning. “It’s the most important thing I’ve done for Podemos,” he now admits. Without that message, he says, the first democracy coalition government that he tried to negotiate without success first in the summer of 2019 and with more luck after the November repeat election would surely not have been possible.

From those sessions with Ione Belarra and with Carmen Calvo at the table opposite, Echenique blames the bad arts of the socialists for the fact that a document with their proposals was leaked, changing its title to “Demands of Podemos”. And he draws a conclusion that could well hold by the time this book comes out. “The first requirement for a negotiation to go well is that all parties want to reach an agreement,” he says. He also remembers the tears that he shed together with the other Pablo when they embraced in Congress on the day of the inauguration.

In his final chapter, Echenique addresses the resignation that finally was after the first match point of 2019 in which he says, “he saved Spain”. “Most of the people Pablo left suddenly. But it went away for me in phases, ”he says. In fact, he explains that in 2020, months before he made the final decision, when he chose the right moment, Iglesias told him that he would leave institutional politics. That happened months later, after the electoral results in Madrid in which he had presented himself as a candidate to prevent United We Can from disappearing from the regional Assembly. Echenique was not even present at the farewell speech, because, according to what she says, she had already cried her goodbye many times: “I wanted to put that guy in charge of my country (…) so, that day, he couldn’t get me out the feeling on my chest that this country that I love so much had lost its best opportunity”.

Echenique closes the book with a message for the future. “It is an honor for me to continue to put my sword and shield at the service of the project and – now – at the service of Ione as long as she thinks I can continue to be useful by supporting her in rugby when she zigzags,” she says.