The recent rise of new political parties in Spain has resulted in the rapid transformation of both political discourse and campaign strategies in the media targeting popular support by reference to direct civil participation.

Until the current legislature, the Spanish parliament had been dominated by two opposing political forces, Partido Popular (right-wing) and PSOE (centre-left), alternating in power and leaving little space for other, smaller groups. Thus, some parties such as Izquierda Unida (left-wing) had remained relegated to the background, maintaining a meagre representation and thereby limiting their capacity for action and public visibility. This changed completely with the irruption of Podemos, a grassroots party born out of the popular discontent voiced by the 15-M movement (otherwise known as “the Spanish Revolution”); this achieved nationwide political projection in record time, becoming an unexpected third force in Parliament after just three years of existence. This chapter is intended to examine the discourse of Podemos, with the purpose of studying populist language in Spanish politics. More specifically, our aim is to detect and describe the party’s most remarkable discursive dynamics (rhetorical resources, conceptual frames, lexical richness and non-verbal language) as developed in their last congress (Vistalegre II), held in February 2017. To do so, this chapter compares its two most highprofile leaders, Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, insofar as they represent the organisation’s two main ideological approaches (ie populism vs. social democracy). Our starting point is the fact that left-wing political parties show discursive divergence in moments of tension or when they are plagued by internal division; this is manifested in the polarisation between the classical discourse of the left (ie communism), which is clearly more populist, and another one with a tendency towards moderation (ie socialism). This was the case of Podemos in 2016, when the party suffered a major crisis resulting in the victory of Pablo Iglesias’ political mainstream against the critical faction represented by Errejón, who would finally be relegated to almost ostracism when losing the party’s spokesperson role in the Lower Chamber.