Democracy, the Indignados and the Republican Tradition in Spain (original) (raw)

2017, Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies

The current economic crisis has had devastating effects in Spain, like an extremely high unemployment rate of 25% in 2014. And it came with another crisis: the crisis of the democratic political system. The indignados -as it was called the Spanish occupy movement- started their protests, sittings and camps in the main squares of Spain in 2011. And for some months they led the protest for a deep revolution in Spanish democracy. They were active citizens with high civic engagement, deep commitment to the common good, and a firm wish for more autonomy, more transparency, more political participation, more democratic deliberation, and more social consensus-building; and also for less social, economic and political hierarchy, less formal leadership, and less political manipulation. For months they ran a very remarkable and spontaneous experiment of public participation and deliberation. The claim of this paper is that such experiment, and the general social movement behind it, connects with a long tradition of republican thought and political protests in Spain that goes back at least to the Middle Ages and the Spanish Renaissance.