[Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, for I have been too long diving into our history. I know it is quite unusual, but I think that if you love your country you must know its history, because in order to change things you have to know our history and our reality (Iglesias Turrión, DS, 06/13/2017, p. 44)].

[He said about Cánovas that he caused great damage to the nation. It made him lose the faith that he had in the present and in the future. Few crimes are less excusable than that of the man who is at the head of a government without faith in his homeland. Cánovas was that kind of a politician: reluctant to act and much less to think about the future (Iglesias Turrión, DS, 06/13/2017, p. 41)].

[Have some democratic shame, why don´t you? and may you feel the same as the Spanish people feel, what Spanish men and women feel, that love their homeland, when we see you do what you do (Montero Gil, DS, 09/21/2017 , p. 26)].

After all the above, it is worth wondering if these attempts to appropriate the conceptual framework of homeland can bear fruit or not. There are reasons to think so, since the only way to change the mentality of voters in the long term is to establish new mental frames that offer an alternative perception of reality. There are also reasons to believe that it will not happen, due to the ingrained national symbolism in the conservative worldview and the reluctance of the progressive electorate to take on the nationalist discourse.

4. Conclusions

This article has analyzed the speech of Unidos Podemos throughout their first two years in the Spanish Parliament. Unidos Podemos has tried to give a new meaning to the concept of homeland, dissociating it from the conservative connotations that it has accumulated up to now. According to this approach, the true patriots are not those who elaborate a nationalist discourse, but those who defend the public services of the welfare state and the rights and freedoms of the citizens.

This notion is used in various debates and for different purposes: in the economic field, to accuse the oligarchic elites of their conduct and of their double standards regarding the homeland; in the territorial question, to defend the plurinational richness of the state and the right to self-determination of the nations that comprise it; in the populist view, to reinforce the opposition between the people, who embody the true values of the country, and “those from above”, those who betray it. Likewise, it is also used to criticize the corruption of the Partido Popular and the espionage maneuvers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or to make allegations in favor of the cultural and ecological heritage.

Although in most cases Unidos Podemos displays a constructive patriotism –that is, full of social content– in other cases the homeland exaltations are rather superficial or chauvinistic. They have attempted to differentiate their defense of the homeland from the conservative discourse by all means. Only time will tell if this appropriation has managed to establish a new conceptual framework or if patriotism continues to be understood as the political heritage of the Spanish right.