This is The Guardian.

This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art.

Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

Inside the rise and fall of Podemos, we believed we had a stake in the future by Lilith Festringe, read by Nora Lopez Holden.

I never expected to retire in my 30s, but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible,

what it promises, what it extracts. A decade at the heart of Spain's boldest modern political

experiment aged me in ways I've only just begun to fathom. In May 2014, just four months after it was founded, the left-wing Spanish Party

Podemos, we can, won five seats in the European Parliament. As a recent university graduate

who had been part of a local Podemos group, or Circulo, as they were known, in Paris,

I was hired to work for these MEPs.

We arrived in Brussels as complete Tyros and had to learn everything on the job,

but we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call real politics.

That is to say, not the internal

power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement, which were always abundant,

but the actual issues such as gender discrimination and unemployment. Over the next few years,

Boredemos continued to disrupt Spain's sclerotic two-party system.

In the November 2019 general elections, we won enough seats to join Spain's first ever governing

coalition under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as a junior partner to the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party,

Pesoi.

Shortly after that election, I got a call from Madrid.

It was Pablo Iglesias Turion, the charismatic political scientist and founder of Podemos,

...