Willy Toledo responds to attacks for slamming Podemos

Actor and Activist Willy Toledo

By James Tweedie in Tenerife

Spanish actor and veteran left-wing political campaigner Guillermo 'Willy' Toledo has responded to 'insults' hurled at him after he criticised new political party Podemos.

Podemos,which translates as 'we can', is an ostensibly left-wing party led by charismatic academic Pablo Iglesias. Although only formed in January, Podemos has enjoyed close media coverage and won eight per cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections in May, gaining five seats. Podemos came fourth behind the Conservative Peoples' Party (PP), the centre-left Socialist Worker's Party of Spain (PSOE) and the Plural Left (IP) alliance, which includes the Spanish Communist Party.

Mr Toledo was variously disparaged as the middle class son of a doctor and a drunkard, after publicly criticising Podemos on Tuesday as being "devoid of content and ideology", "lacking power and effectiveness" and for the "cynicism" of its leaders. He also compared Podemos to the PSOE, which lost power in the 2011 general election amid widespread disillusionment among its core voters.

Podemos has already been criticised for lacking internal democracy.

Coincidentally, Podemos is also the name of a Venezuelan social-democratic party formed in 2002 by a split from a party that itself split from the Venezuelan Communist Party, and which has vacillated in its support for the United Socialist Party of presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.

Mr Toledo's statement, published on the website of the left-wing newspaper La Republica, is translated into English here:

"The insults, the dismissal, the stupidity, 'his father was a doctor, a communist, yes, but a doctor', the lynching, the reaction to contrary opinions without giving a single answer to these opinions, the unbearable condescension of those who think they are above others... the reactionary hordes of Podemos, as reactionary as the worst right-winger, confirming my suspicions.

"I have been and am at the side of the oppressed for 17 years, long before 'having drunk too much Dimple or Cardhu'. I have trodden the streets and the farms of the landowners where the labourers are exploited. I have walked in Palestine, suffering the assaults of the Zionist Nazis, I have gambled with my life, embarking with the [Gaza] Freedom Flotilla, I have shared ten years of struggle with the Sahrawi people, I have suffered a beating at the hands of their occupiers, I have struggled alongside the street hawkers, I have consciously thrown away my profession and my career, when it was going very well and I was making a lot of money, because of my anti-capitalist views and my activism in the actors' union against the management of the sector in the general strikes, I have been wrongfully arrested twice, been through the cells and the trials... I think there is no need to go on.

"Now you, who I neither know who you are nor give a shit, come to lecture me from your couch, and call me a 'presumptuous brat'. You, 'sir', do not come up to the soles of my shoes, toughened by a thousand struggles and battles in all the ways of the world. You wish you did. I hope you can live with your ethical turpitude and your foolishness. Guillermo Toledo, son of a communist. A doctor, yes, and among the best in the world in his field, but a communist. And a campaigner, an eternal defender of public healthcare. You have no more shame than to insult a single minute of his life, his dignity and his humanity, which far exceed what you can offer in your whole life."

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