Image taken from the Podemos party's Facebook account. In a cluster of houses in the Galician hills, close to the old Roman city of Lugo, Spain, little appears to have changed in the last 40 years. Chickens wander freely in the streets, while farmers discuss tractor machinery at length by the roadside. Yet in this sleepy corner of Spain’s north-western province, a new political initiative is taking shape. Jago, a 48-year-old language teacher, is setting up a “circle”—a type of informal grassroots democratic and pluralistic assembly—in the hamlet that will act as the local face of the new political party Podemos. Meaning “we can” in Spanish, Podemos hopes to engage people who despair of conventional political approaches, and counter disillusionment with austerity measures by involving citizens in shaping policy from the bottom up. Plenty of parties across Europe, watching their membership figures sink, share the same ambitions. But Podemos backs up the talk about “making politics more relevant to the public” with results. Since beginning in March with an entirely crowdfunded campaign and a manifesto created using suggestions from the public, the party claimed 8 percent of the national vote in the European Parliament elections. Many of its supporters are likely to have been people who hadn’t voted in years. A recent poll suggested that Podemos would take third place if a general election were held tomorrow, and could even challenge for second. Circles: inclusive political spaces One of the factors behind Podemos’s promising start is its community organising system of “circles.” This is what Jago is aiming for. Circles are groups with no leaders or membership fees, run through open public assemblies where attendees debate whatever they feel is most relevant to their situation. “Assemblies allow people who aren't involved in the movement to express their feelings and see that there are others that feel the same,” Oscar Gonzalez, a Podemos circle spokesperson in the Galician port city of Vigo, explains. Circles have a strong local focus, covering areas from entire cities to districts, or form around special interests (for example, there are currently circles for psychoanalysis, music and nursing). The circles are growing fast. At the time of writing, there were more than 700 nationwide, an increase of almost 80 percent on the number recorded two months earlier. Attendance in assemblies has shot up: from an average of 20-30 people before the elections, Podemos Vigo claims that more than 300 turn up for each event. The idea of circles may work even in small cities, but things are different in rural Galicia. Hamlets like Jago's are rapidly emptying, with at least 1,400 in Galicia alone now completely deserted. There's little sign that they will regenerate on their own: the birth of a child is reported as a news item in the local paper, while the Galician regional government is spending 70 million euros (about 92 million US dollars) over the next three years in an attempt to improve the region's declining birth rates, which are the lowest in Spain. All this hardly seems fertile ground for a young movement whose election slogan was: “When was the last time you voted with hope?” It's hard to imagine a thriving circle in the rural corners of this conservative part of Spain. Former dictator Francisco Franco was a Galician, while the centre-right Popular Party that rules at national level still registers some of its strongest results in the region. In the hamlet's only bar (which doubles as the butcher's and greengrocer's), Jago points out one of the regulars, a balding man in his 50s: “We get along fine, of course. But one day when I asked him for a light, I realised that he still had a cigarette lighter with a picture of Franco on it.” Still, Jago remains undeterred. “I am a simple person, but I damn well know what discrimination and corruption is,” he says, citing his own difficulties in setting up a business and cataloguing a series of recent Galician graft cases. Like many Spaniards, Jago is struggling to pay his mortgage, having taken out a bank loan just before the crisis, a move he describes as his “single biggest mistake”. Podemos collecting tin in a cafe in Vigo, Spain. Photo by author Tom Walker. Still, he contributed five euros to Podemos's campaign fund for the European parliamentary elections. Considering that Podemos spent just over 12 euro cents for each of the 1.25 million votes it gained in May, his donation was in fact worth about 40 voters. While none of those 40 are likely to have come from Jago's hamlet, he remains on the lookout. “I believe that Podemos can be a haven for many others out there who never felt at home in another political party,” Jago says.