The American writer and journalist Vincent Bevins, author of If we burn (Captain Swing, 2025), has investigated the global cycle of protests of the 2010s, many of which he covered for Financial Times either Los Angeles TimesNow he has interviewed 200 activists in twelve countries to understand why that wave of change crashed against a wall. His diagnosis challenges the idea that massive, spontaneous, and leaderless mobilizations are enough to transform political systems. He warns that the pattern that derailed the great revolts of the last decade is also at work in Europe: mobilizations that destabilize governments but leave the future in the hands of elites or foreign powers because they are incapable of building an alternative to the established power.

Another case of police infiltration in social and political movements in the Catalan Countries, and this makes six. The latest research of The Direct, published this Tuesday, reveals that a National Police agent spent just over two years infiltrated activism in Lleida, around the pro-independence left. Under the false identity of Joan Llobet Garcia, and graduating from the Ávila Police School just a year before starting the espionage operation, the agent landed in the capital of Segrià in September 2019 and left in November 2021. During this time he was actively involved in the SANT protests against the Proceso sentence (2019) and those in support of the Lleida rapper Pablo Hasél.

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.

The social movements have lost today one of their most beloved - and respected - voices. Arcadi Oliveres (Barcelona, 1945), an economist by training and pacifist by conviction, has died at the age of 75. He played a significant role in the protests against the Afghan war, for dedicating 0.7% of GDP to developing countries and fiscal objection to military spending. Oliveres was also one of the voices that in 2011 stood most clearly alongside the Indignados movement, convinced that a more direct democracy was needed. He taught applied economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and for 13 years presided Justícia i Pau, an organisation that works for the defense of human rights, social justice and peace. He also chaired the Fundació Universitat Internacional de la Pau. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of January, he spent his last days at home, where he received many visits. "These days are happy days, I feel very loved," he told ARA in an interview.

There have now been four nights of protests against the imprisonment of Pablo Hasél, a rapper only known in minority circles until the Public Prosecutor's Office accused him of glorifying terrorism and his name was associated with freedom of expression. The demonstrations were called through Telegram channels and other social networks, which gives a clue that the attendees are mostly young people. "Very young", insist sources from the Mossos d'Esquadra, who explain that there are some who were already under surveillance and others who are new to these scenarios.