Indignados, 10 years later

A decade ago, in response to the harsh exit from the economic crisis resulting from the financial collapse of Lehman Brothers due to blind deregulation and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis, popular indignation took hold with a citizen protest that took to the streets. The movement of the indignados became an anti-establishment clamour that was joined by sectors of the middle classes: with the social cuts in the public sector, the malaise had reached far beyond ideologically aware circles. Social justice, non-violent disobedience, anti-capitalism and the demand for a more participatory democracy were the axes of a protest that overflowed the institutions, the political parties - including those of the classical left - and the trade unions. Together with old fighters of the alter-globalization of the 1990s and the "No to war" - the Iraq War of 2003 - many young people without a future signed up to a possibility of rupture with the vocation of transforming mentalities and organising change. Social networks gave wings to a new kind of citizen mobilization that wanted to channel the discomfort and struggles that had been fragmented until then: for housing, against corruption, against cuts in various sectors, against war, against climate change, for feminism... From the bottom to the top, turning squares -the Catalunya square in Barcelona; the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid- into assembly camps, for a few months the mirage of the birth of a new political, social and ideological time was produced.

Ten years later, the balance is bittersweet. The shake-up of the party system, with the emergence of the comuns and Podemos, has not managed to break the Spanish two-party system or transform institutional politics: the fact that the political end of Pablo Iglesias has coincided with the tenth anniversary of 15-M has a touch of poetic cruelty. As for Catalonia, independence, with a discourse that is also social and of democratic deepening, soon took over in the streets, monopolising the banner of change and leaving the heirs of 15-M in the background, and in some cases integrating them. In the end, both in Madrid and Barcelona, a decade later there has been a strong involution with the emergence of the ultra-right, now normalised in the institutions. Undoubtedly, this is not what the indignados imagined, whose main demands have not found effective answers: the electoral law has not been changed to improve the representativeness of those elected, repression against dissent has grown with a judiciary set up as a political arbiter, the legacy of Francoism has not only remained in the heart of the State, corruption processes are eternalised and, in many cases (especially in the PP), have not taken their toll on political formations, the cuts have been reversed very slowly, housing remains one of the great social problems, military spending continues to soar and the fight against climate change has fallen manifestly short. But the response to the pandemic, both here and at European and global level, is once again Keynesian. Perhaps, after all, that citizen outburst and its aftershocks did have some influence.