Five new parties join Spain's Frente Amplio, from Batzarre to the Humanist Party

Frente Amplio adds five parties almost nobody has heard of, and the 5% threshold looks a long way off

In the run-up to Spain's November 29 elections, Frente Amplio has brought in five groups that, judging by the initial reaction, not even their own neighbours can identify: Batzarre, Iniciativa del Pueblo Andaluz, Somos Asturies, Recortes Cero and the Humanist Party. Far from generating enthusiasm, the announcement has exposed the murky history of each acronym and raised an uncomfortable question: how many votes can this conglomerate actually deliver? The conversation soon turned to the sectarian origins of some of these groups and to the financial viability of keeping political structures alive without electoral support.

Batzarre, Iniciativa del Pueblo Andaluz, Somos Asturies, Recortes Cero and the Humanist Party make up the quintet Frente Amplio has added to its project. None of them shows any significant polling support; in fact, some argue that together they might scrape 500 extra votes at best. Somos Asturies, it is noted, probably has "at most 100 members", and its only known institutional representation comes from a former Podemos MP who lost her seat. The Humanist Party, meanwhile, is described by several forum users as a cult with around 500 members across Spain, always ready to fish in left-wing alliances without anyone quite knowing what it stands for.

The case of Recortes Cero deserves its own section. According to one forum user, it is the Unificación Comunista de España (UCE), a Maoist organisation operating under a disguised name. The distinction matters: the PCPE are pro-Soviet, while the UCE is Maoist. Only someone with very little political instinct, the argument goes, would swap a historically resonant name like "Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España" for "Recortes Cero". The group has also been linked by one participant to a cult that preyed on drug addicts, picking them up off the street and detoxing them, adding an element of psychological control that does nothing for the coalition's image.

The Humanist Party does not fare well either. According to another forum user, it is the political arm of the Silo sect, also known as the Siloist Movement or Message of Silo, classified as a cult practising psychological control or a destructive one. Its track record includes swarming around left-wing alliances while nobody knows a thing about them except at the top. Irony about the term "humanist" applied to regimes like those of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao or Fidel Castro hangs over the conversation.

The financial viability of these groups is another key theme. Where do they get the money to keep going for so long when not even their own relatives vote for them? The question is not rhetorical: Spain has a huge number of political parties nobody has ever heard of that, nevertheless, keep operating. Some claim the whole thing is a setup to concentrate votes around the PSOE, and that leaders who fail to win a seat will be placed in institutional or European posts. Others, however, see it as great news: the left is fragmenting, and this new party will take votes from the rest.

The signature requirement to stand is another hurdle. To run in elections, these parties need a certain number of endorsements that, on the face of it, will not be easy to gather. Where they will get them from remains an open question.

The conflict with Podemos looms over Frente Amplio. The November 29 family photo, antiestéticaturing Urtasun, Martínez, Bustinduy, Delgado, Colau, Tesh Sidi and Valero, leaves out the purple party, which is read as an attempt to bury the hatchet. Podemos is dead as a party, it is claimed, and barring a last-minute fix, it may not even win a seat. The scruffy fringe parties will not do much better either: roughly 10 to 15 seats between them, all while knifing each other for a chair.

The conversation drifts to the use of "fascist" as an insult and to the Ceuta conflict, where Ceuta residents were accused of being fascists for not wanting to be overrun. These are the loose ends of a debate mixing politics, cults and wishful arithmetic. Meanwhile, Frente Amplio keeps adding acronyms that, as of this discussion, do not seem to add votes.