“ASK THE man on the horse,” one of the demonstrators in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol told a reporter from a live-streaming TV channel yesterday.
She had asked him what motivated the six-day sit-ins, in a dozen Spanish city centres, that have turned tomorrow’s local and regional elections into a new kind of test for Spain’s rather tarnished democratic institutions.
The man on the horse, King Charles III, is cast in bronze, a well-known Madrid landmark. There is more than an echo of the absurdist humour that brightened another May street uprising, in Paris in 1968, in Spain’s enigmatic new protest movement, which is already spreading to other countries. But its immediate message – “don’t vote for any of them” – is not being taken as a joke by Spain’s major parties, especially by the traditional left, including the Socialist Party (PSOE), currently in government.
The movement is known only as “15-M”, after the date of its first demonstration last Sunday, or simply as “the outraged”. This refers to Time for Outrage, a recent radical polemic on the ills of contemporary democracy by French writer Stéphane Hessel. The numbers that 15-M has put on the street are still relatively small – about 20,000 according to police – but their “occupation” of city centres confronts the PSOE government.
The courts have ruled that continued demonstrations would violate Spain’s “day of reflection” before the election, beginning at midnight last night. But it is likely that any attempt to remove 15-M supporters by force could rapidly swell their numbers, with unpredictable consequences.
The movement is already being compared to the “Saturday protests” that radicalised Iceland’s response to its economic meltdown, and to the Arab street revolutions. It certainly shares their use of the internet to mobilise new supporters.
Polls had indicated that the PSOE would lose several of its historic strongholds to the main opposition party, the deeply conservative Partido Popular (PP), long before 15-M emerged.
The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has presided over a boom-to-bust property bubble that has left one in five Spaniards unemployed.
He failed to take the first signs of crisis seriously, and then swung to harsh measures that hurt his own supporters most. Those measures have not worked: he still faces the humiliating prospect of an EU-IMF bailout.
His only chance of holding the opposition at bay has been to constantly remind voters that the PP has become a party of the hard right. The PSOE was betting that the historical memory of the Franco dictatorship would mobilise its disenchanted left constituency, as it often does.
But the 15-M protesters, ranging from the young unemployed to pensioners who have seen their welfare buckle in the economic crisis, are natural left voters.
Their spontaneous slogans – “Real Democracy Now” and “Bankers are Thieves” – suggest that they are very unlikely to have voted for the PP.
They are evidently angry at a two-party system that offers them only minor variations on a neo-liberal agenda, and where both big parties are routinely besmirched by corruption scandals.
El País, Spain’s newspaper of record, warned yesterday that 15-M offered no alternative to parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, “except perhaps a nostalgia for utopias that ended in tragedy”.
But the editorial felt obliged to conclude by conceding that the discontent that leads to revolution has been spawned by the poor performance of Spain’s democratic institutions.
If 15-M succeeds in stimulating abstention on the left, the PP will benefit, and be even better-placed than at present to defeat the PSOE in next year’s general elections. But it may find itself facing a novel opposition whose indignation is unlikely to evaporate under newly conservative local administrations.
Meanwhile, a much older radical movement looks poised for a major advance in the Basque Country in tomorrow’s poll. Earlier this month, the Constitutional Court voted
against banning Bildu, a pro-independence coalition that unites radical democrats and former supporters of Batasuna, the party long linked to the terrorist group Eta.
With Eta on ceasefire, and Bildu explicitly committed to a non-violent strategy, Madrid’s banning strategy has backfired and the coalition looks set to take nearly 20 per cent of the vote.