SIXTEENTH-CENTURY castles and contemporary Socialists make an odd mix. But Elvira García, mayor of Alaquàs, is bursting with pride as she walks around the structure that dominates the heart of this quiet Spanish town near Valencia. In the castle’s heyday, she marvels, the noblemen who inhabited its upper levels built a passage to the adjoining church to avoid mingling with the crowd below. But four years ago, when Spain’s young indignados erupted in anger against the elites, she invited the protestersto assemble in the castle’s courtyard.
Ms García is no bandwagon-jumper. On taking office in 2009 she made a point of personally meeting all 4,000 people on Alaquàs’s unemployment rolls. But politicians all over Spain have lately found themselves groping for a touch like hers, for the three-decade duopoly of the Socialists and the ruling centre-right People’s Party (PP) appears to be expiring fast.
The first rival to emerge was Podemos, a leftist populist party that fuses the theories of Marxists with the energy of the indignados. It was followed by Ciudadanos, a party formed in 2006 to…
