Do we like them?

Do we like Pablo Iglesias Turrión?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A record that backs LGBTQ+ rights, offset by a messy legal saga and a research trail thinner than we'd like.

Pablo Iglesias co-founded Podemos, the left party that grew out of Spain's 2010s anti-austerity protests, and led it until 2021. Profiles trace him from a university lecturer and TV commentator to Second Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition with the PSOE. He left government in 2021 to run in the Madrid regional election, then stepped back from front-line politics.

On the harm test, what we found points the right way. In April 2021 he and Irene Montero were pressing for Spain's trans and LGBTI laws to become reality, and he said in the Madrid campaign that Spain needed a trans law. Back in 2017 he put forward an LGBTI bill that drew a rebuke from the Catholic bishops.

The messiest legal saga was the so-called Dina case, a stolen-phone affair. In 2020 a judge asked the Supreme Court to investigate him, but in January 2021 the court declined to charge him and sent the case back to the National Court. Reports said the person at the centre forgave him, which ended the part of the case touching him. No court found against him in anything we could confirm.

He and Montero have also been on the receiving end of a fair bit. In July 2024 a Madrid judge acquitted a man over months of protests outside their home, and the pair said it was wrong that it went unpunished. That's the abuse aimed at them, and it counts for nothing against him either way.

Lately he's been running Canal Red, the media outlet he founded, which landed a Movistar Plus+ deal and set up a Latin American newsroom in Mexico. Nothing new on him turned up that we could confirm from this session, and we couldn't open the full articles, so treat this as a lean-yes on thin evidence rather than a settled verdict.