I never expected to retire in my thirties, 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 círculo, as they were known) in Paris, I was hired to work for these MPs. 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, on which we hoped to have an impact.

Over the next few years, Podemos continued to upturn 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 Sánchez, as a junior partner to the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE).

Shortly after that election, I got a call from Madrid: it was Pablo Iglesias Turrión, the charismatic political scientist and founder of Podemos, who was soon to be Spain’s second deputy prime minister and minister of social rights.

“I think you should come back to Madrid,” he said. He offered me a job in the social rights ministry, doing a lot of the same things I was doing for EU deputies: helping with speeches, communication and policy negotiations. Of course, I said yes.

We would have to learn almost everything from scratch, again. Some longstanding civil servants were already asking to be transferred because they didn’t want to work for these young radicals. But others told us with excitement that they had voted for us, that the government needed new blood. This, too, felt like real politics; it was one thing to say that the two-party system was broken, and another thing to figure out how to govern alongside them.

When I returned to Madrid, I was prepared for attacks from the right, charging that I had only got the job because of my father, Jorge Verstrynge, who had once helped lead Spain’s main post-Franco conservative party. (This was partly why I had spent so many years studying and working abroad.) But the right is always surprising.

Two weeks into the job, in March 2020 – while I was still looking for a flat to rent, having temporarily moved back into my childhood bedroom – I started to get texts asking if I’d been online that day. Overnight, there had been a blitz of headlines in the right-wing papers alleging that I had been hired at the Ministry of Social Rights because I was Iglesias’s lover. Never mind that I had barely met him in person. With half the country now glued to their computers during the pandemic’s first lockdown, the rumour was already everywhere.

My intuition had been essentially correct: for certain people, the only way a young woman could possibly have got that job was through a relationship with a man – albeit not my father, but my boss. The attack had a double strategy, because Iglesias’s domestic partner was Irene Montero, a longtime Podemos MP who had just been appointed as minister of equality in the new coalition government.

Colleagues, journalists and lawyers all advised me to ignore it. Only a few months later, when we had another election season on our hands, did we bother to publicly deny it. In any case, Podemos had long believed that fake news, at times, could be turned to its advantage. The party was obsessed with getting messages across through any medium possible, and saw television as a key arena of political struggle. In 2015, Iglesias had written: “People no longer engage politically through parties… but through the media.”

“You are known, and we can use that,” party leaders explained to me. Once the dust settled, I vividly experienced a vindication of the idea that there is no such thing as bad press. Basically, the attack backfired. Not long afterwards, I was added to the slate for the regional elections in Madrid, and was placed at number 14 – high enough to have a real chance of winning a seat. I was 29.

I was born in 1992 in Madrid. My father was born to a ruined Belgian businessman in the Tangier International Zone, declared himself a fascist as a teenager, became secretary-general of the Alianza Popular (AP) – the predecessor to today’s main conservative party – and was purged from the party by age 40. Today he votes on the left, and teaches at a public university. He met my mother, a journalist turned housing rights activist, in the AP’s youth organisation. She left the party first. I grew up with the ambient understanding that people change, ideas evolve, and collective struggle is worthwhile.

I was the third of their four children, and the only daughter. At home, everybody talked about politics, and both my parents were critical of the two main parties’ chokehold. But I initially resisted politics. In 2011, I was studying history and international relations at the University of Paris when the 15-M movement broke out across Spain. Economic pressure was suffocating millions. A generation that had grown up being encouraged to study, train, learn languages and prepare for a promising future now saw its expectations shattered by the financial crisis. From my student flat, I watched as every news outlet was flooded with images of austerity and poverty – young people without jobs, ever more homeless people, families and elderly people being evicted.

Spaniards do not typically engage in such explosions of popular sentiment as the one that happened on 15 May 2011. More than 50,000 protesters converged in the Puerta del Sol, one of Madrid’s main public squares, and thousands more marched across Barcelona, Granada, Santiago de Compostela and beyond. For young people, politics had become urgent and personal overnight.

A few days after 15-M, I flew back to Madrid. A lot of my friends were camping in the square, and I slept in the streets with them for two nights. There were people of all ages, many of whom had no prior ideology or history of political involvement. This raw vein of populist sentiment left a huge impression on me. It seemed as if Spain’s calcified political system might be cracked open through sheer collective will. The energy was intoxicating, as strangers debated late into the night about how to rebuild democracy from the ground up. I skipped some of my classes for the rest of the term. But eventually, I had to return to my studies.

The protesters started to organise in different sectors, defending public health, housing, and labour. My mum was so affected by images of evictions that she started attending housing reform meetings. My dad, meanwhile, told me that some of the professors at his university were whispering about building a new party that could bring 15-M’s ideas to the ballot box. In January 2014, Iglesias founded Podemos, and I joined immediately. In a practical sense, that meant joining a satellite Podemos círculo in Paris. There were about 50 of us, including some older Spanish exiles, young people from both Spain and France, as well as French journalists and activists. We would meet in a bar on the Left Bank.

The romance of Podemos was that so many young people were suddenly engaged in politics, because its messaging felt less like jargon and more like common sense. We suddenly believed that we had a stake in the future. Before this, the Spanish left had been defined in opposition to Franco-ism – but Iglesias used to say we shouldn’t even talk about left or right. He spoke instead about the people and the economic elites – and insisted that public health and guaranteed housing weren’t radical ideas. There was no one like us in Europe in this era – before Syriza came into power in Greece, before La France Insoumise. In May 2014, the party shocked everyone by winning five out of 54 seats in the European Parliament.

That summer I became a técnico, or advisor, for two of those deputies in Brussels. Before my first day, Podemos, surpassing any parody of leftist splintering, had already broken down the middle over questions of political strategy. Should we differentiate ourselves from the Socialists, or try to reach agreements with them? Two major factions emerged: one, under Iglesias, argued that Podemos should ally with the traditional left, while the other, under Íñigo Errejón, the party’s first campaign manager, pushed for a “populist” approach that didn’t ally with any traditional workers’ party. Our MPs were from both sides, and some partisan staffers wouldn’t even talk to each other at the canteen.

I spent hours poring over reports on topics ranging from medical marijuana and geopolitics to agricultural pests in southern Europe. We were a young, inexperienced group, but eager to do things right. Like most people our age, we had never had “real jobs” or owned houses, but were suddenly working side by side with veteran statesmen. We would enter Parliament when its doors opened at 8:30 AM, and leave well past midnight, after reviewing the hundreds of amendments that we submitted to every report that passed through our hands. We vacillated wildly between feeling godlike and realising how little we knew about getting things done at the EU’s only directly elected institution.

Few of our colleagues in Brussels had entered politics the way we had – knocking on doors, stumping, protesting – but many were clearly well informed, and we had a lot to learn from them. One of those was the fact that you start doing politics with emotions, but you must transform those into action.

Iglesias, the young, ponytailed professor who became a household name through television debates, was a totally new kind of Spanish politician. He combined sophisticated strategic thinking with an intuition for connecting with the masses who had become indignant – “Indignados” was another name for 15-M – about inequality and austerity. His hyperleadership of Podemos became both the condition and the limitation of our project.

About a year after I returned to Spain, in March 2021, Iglesias abruptly resigned as second deputy prime minister, after concluding that it was vital for him to secure the party’s survival in Madrid’s regional elections. He declared that a left-wing alliance could finally end decades of rule in the region by the conservative Popular Party. His gamble was largely a failure: he managed to increase the party’s seats in Madrid, but with only 7% of the vote, he fell far short of his goal of bringing the left to power. As a result, he also stepped down from Podemos leadership, having proposed that our left coalition continue under the direction of labour minister Yolanda Díaz. Despite being a card-carrying Communist since her youth, Díaz was less hardline and more willing to negotiate than Iglesias, which she had shown by enacting worker protections during the pandemic. Podemos was entering a new era.

In June 2021, secretary-general Ione Belarra selected me to be secretary of organisation – effectively the number-three position in Podemos. I was now the one negotiating the lists of people we presented at elections, as well as managing our never-dull relations with other political organisations and the media.

My new job required me to connect our fractured regional branches with the national leadership. But what Podemos valued far more than organisation was communication – or perhaps “airtime” would be more accurate. Our leaders, like those of Syriza, were deeply influenced by the Argentinian political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who argued that populist movements could bypass traditional party structures through the canny use of media. This idea was obviously seductive: why invest in the slow work of organising when you could reach millions through television? But there was a pitfall we didn’t really see at the time: you could win power through airtime, but you couldn’t govern with it. And perhaps our own change in status, from upstarts into people in power, had happened too fast for our leaders to internalise our success.

Shortly after starting my new post, a party operative suggested to me that we could simply close every local delegation and turn Podemos into a party with just 10 strong national leaders. This was not at all viable, and I could hardly believe someone so high up in Podemos actually advocated this, but his attitude was typical of a party that was fundamentally uninterested in structure – in the tedious work of building local chapters, training organisers, holding regular meetings and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps a party alive between election cycles.

We also hadn’t clocked how our base was changing. The initial strength of Podemos was that it brought hundreds of thousands of people out of apathy, and even attracted supporters in other countries. But by the 2020s, the major experience of working in Podemos was of dwindling political debate and growing internal paranoia.

In July 2022, I joined the Ministry of Social Affairs as secretary of state for the 2030 Agenda. But Podemos was beginning to collapse. Though Iglesias had hoped that Yolanda Díaz would take over Unidas Podemos, our broader left coalition, she had other ideas. The same month I joined the ministry, she launched a new progressive coalition called Sumar to present a fresh face to voters, without the now-considerable baggage of Podemos. This was pitched as a way to preserve a left presence in government, but it risked making Podemos irrelevant. The threat seemed to galvanise Iglesias, despite his nominal resignation as Podemos leader in 2021. (In reality, he remained a constant presence in the Spanish media, offering almost daily political commentary on radio and TV programmes, often anticipating the party’s official positions and effectively setting our agenda – which is to say nothing about his ubiquity in the group chats.)

A few months later, he decided to give a speech opposing Díaz’s new alliance, and asked if I could round up a crowd of 40,000. That was impossible. By that point, we might have been able to activate 2,000, if the weather was perfect. How could he not comprehend that Podemos was no longer a party that could turn out 40,000 people to any event, let alone one that was about a further leftist split?

Outside criticism bruised us, too. In just a few years, Podemos had faced so many false attacks – charges of corruption, using accounts in tax havens, receiving money from Iran and Venezuela – that many members lost their initial idealism. The combative attitude that had once turned my tabloid scandal into electoral fuel had its limits. Almost every major Podemos figure soon had some kind of judicial case open against them – many of them trumped up and fake, but tiring all the same. Several years straight of doing politics in a state of permanent alert slid us toward the traditional comfort zone of the left: victimhood.

By the spring of 2023, it was clear that Podemos was no longer steering Unidas Podemos, which had formed a coalition government with PSOE back in 2019, and we were forced to negotiate with Yolanda Díaz. In June, Podemos accepted a deal that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, and joined the Sumar coalition. The new balance of power was painful, and our candidates were further down the list than anyone had anticipated. Despite my growing disillusion, I focused on finishing every task handed to me. And when Podemos managed to win five of Sumar’s 31 seats in the July 2023 election, one of them was mine.

When the time came to form his third government, Pedro Sánchez had to build a coalition with Sumar, not with Podemos. The general perception was that Podemos no longer brought in votes, so its presence should be reduced. Despite this, there were attempted olive branches, such as offers to include some Podemos members, including Nacho Álvarez or Ione Belarra, in the new cabinet. Podemos, however, had decided that our non-negotiable appointment was Irene Montero, and that she should stay on as minister of equality. The 35-year-old was arguably the party’s most visible figure, despite the dustup over a 2022 affirmative consent law that she spearheaded, and had also become our de facto leader. The PSOE refused to keep her on, and Podemos was left out of the new cabinet altogether. It was the turning point that consolidated our new strategy of opposition. A few months later, we would break away from Sumar, too.

Both Ione Belarra and Irene Montero had to leave their ministerial posts, and they both gave angry, candid speeches: Podemos colleagues had acted in a “distressing and despicable” manner, said Montero, while Belarra said that our opponents had “tried to destroy us, but they couldn’t, and all they’ve achieved is making us stronger”. This party line now rang hollow. In less than a decade, Podemos had become a party that feared the world, and indeed one that feared its own country. How?

We had stopped talking to people. Instead of demonstrating to voters that Podemos could still do politics – by fighting for the interests of our constituents – we decided that we would vote against, or threaten to vote against, everything that Sanchez’s government proposed. This included ostensibly core party issues such as rights for unemployed people. And even that might have worked, if we had explained to voters that we were stonewalling on purpose, with a plan – but we didn’t.

We had started talking to ghosts. The constant, threatening presence of fascism and the search for internal enemies turned politics into an exercise in blind loyalty. Conspiracy was widespread, and we indiscriminately blamed journalists and the media, to the point of openly stating that it was better to have voters who did not read the news at all. The media was no longer a tool, but an enemy.

During our short time in power, we did rack up some tangible policy and legislative successes, including a better minimum wage, a progressive law on euthanasia, improved abortion access and labour rights, and a domestic violence hotline. But I felt that the manner of our departure overshadowed these victories.

Perhaps the simplest way to describe what happened during those final months is that I fell out of love. Suddenly, the last nine years felt very long; I felt much older than my friends, even though I was one of the only ones still unmarried and without children. Though I had learnt so much in an organisation that had helped to redefine Europe after the financial crisis, I had also become hardened and more cynical, and had come to feel a certain anticipatory political orphanhood.

But politics does not belong to us. It belongs to all those whose lives are shaped by it. And I knew one thing for certain: no one should stay in politics merely out of fear of losing their place.

And so, in January 2024, at the age of 31, I announced my retirement. My entire statement was posted on X: “Farewells are difficult and sad. I am leaving my political responsibilities and also my seat as a deputy. A thousand thanks to the Podemos activists and to the people who have trusted me over these years.”

I kept it brief, thinking of all those who still stood up for a project I no longer believed in. I thought, perhaps naively, that my silence –about the infighting, the personality conflicts, the ways we had betrayed some of our founding principles – would protect them. But nearly two years later, it’s possible to reflect with some distance, and I believe it’s important to do so, if only to leave a record for future political upstarts.

Looking back, it seems clear that Podemos never really wanted to be a party, let alone a better kind of party. From the beginning, its leaders believed that parties were outdated, and that social movements were the true engine of political transformation. Working under those premises, the best we managed to create was an online party – one that sounded new, but inherited many old vices, and failed to introduce any meaningful organisational innovation. Still, I wish we had tried harder – or perhaps that we could try again, knowing what we know now.

I have no plans to return to politics. To do so, I would need to be sure that I had learned enough to do things better – and that I could once again trust a project deeply enough to believe in it. Neither of those conditions is met today.

Party politics is imperfect and demanding, but I still believe that parties are the lifeblood of parliamentary democracies. Newer projects like Your Party in the UK are seeking to spark similar left-populist insurgencies against the ossified establishments in their countries. But if they don’t build the organisational capacity and internal democracy that we neglected, I don’t see much of a future for them. And they must never stop talking to their supporters. When people stop feeling that their participation matters, they drift away. Podemos transformed Spain’s two-party system – that’s undeniable. But real politics is about creating something durable enough to outlast your own moment of insurgency.

My life is much quieter now. I read, write and teach international relations theory at Sciences Po in Paris. I don’t teach anything drawn from my personal experience, though many students are curious about Podemos’s early years. When people ask me what happened with the party, I usually say that its leaders have other interests. After resigning in 2021, Iglesias launched a media outlet that became the main arm of his activism – though it would not have made sense without Podemos in the first place. He also opened a bar in Madrid. He asked for crowdfunded voter donations for the bar, which was, he claimed, a place to fight against fascism. Íñigo Errejón became Sumar’s spokesperson, but left politics in October 2024, after accusations of sexual assault.

When I told people close to me that I planned to resign, some of them urged me not to do it. My father kept repeating the same line: “Once you leave politics, they never let you come back.”

I have no doubt this was true in his time. In some ways, it was a classic generational disagreement about gaps in one’s résumé. But it also reflects how, for his contemporaries, politics was almost a religion. I believe things should be different now. I know my father was trying to protect me. But I also remembered that, beyond the vertigo of such a decision, it was at home that I first learnt that institutional politics is a place of transit, not a destination. I still believe everyone should have the chance to engage in it, at some point in their life. But politics should be just that: a stage, not a lifetime. We must know when we can still contribute – and when it’s time to let others lead.