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

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.