Spain before and after the 15th of May Movement

(My mum)

Manuela Alonso Morgado is a civil servant in the regional administration of Extremadura, in the South East of Spain. She was born in 1959 still under Franco's dictatorship. In 1975 she became politically active in the Union of Communist Youths of Spain, she was part of the provincial committee. That year the dictator died, when the party was still illegal. The transition to democracy was peaceful but not ideal, as it was said at the time. In 1977, she spent three days in the provincial jail of Badajoz, accused of calling for a general strike. She was held incommunicado as the authorities used the state of exception as an excuse. In the 1980s she gave up the communist militancy, but not the protests. She participated in demonstrations against the Iraq war and more recently against the Israeli attacks on Palestine,against the repression of the Western Sahara peoples and against certain immigration laws. Since the 15th of May she is part of the "Indignant" Movement.

In Spain we had started to forget what democracy meant. Politicians were forgetting
as they had created a beneficial system for themselves, and citizens were forgetting
because they thought all they had to do was vote every four years. This degeneration of
the democratic system was accelerated due to several reasons: a clearly unfair electoral
law that benefits the two party system and that allows for a vote not to have the same
value depending on where the vote is cast.

The two main parties, continuously antagonizing each other in the Congress thus
neglecting their responsibilities, have shielded themselves voting favorable laws and
thus protecting their priviledges. This in turn has perpetuated their feuds and has
degenerated into an intolerable level of corruption, gone unpunished until now. The loot
of their misdeeds has been systematically concealed in tax havens whose existence is
still not contested by the government.

In addition to this, the judiciary is not in that much of good democratic health, as the
long-awaited segregation of powers has not been achieved, which sometimes provokes
the collapse of the application of the law.

All of these shortages of our democracy have been made more obvious when the
actual economic crisis was thrown over us. Also called fraud by the indignants of the
15M movement. PSOE (Socialist Workers Party of Spain) stands as the head of a
government who has not managed the crisis as a so-called workers party, but as a party
carrying out the same politics as PP (Popular Party) would do, a right-wing politics that
reflects the opposition’s discourse, pure neo-liberalism. All the social politics that had
been the base of the socialists were in danger then due to the reforms that the financial
markets demanded. Most of the rights acquired after many years of trade union struggle
have been systematically erased from the collective agreements as we were under the
scrutiny of the credit rating agencies and the banks, the real governing bodies of this
country.

The trade unions, comfortably established and in a lethargic state, timidly called for a
general strike that did not have much repercussion.

Spain added its own imprint in the global financial crisis: the real estate bubble that
burst on our faces, even when we had known all along it would end this way. Thus, in
the economically stronger years, the majority of Spanish families bought properties at
inflated prices, well beyond their means, instigated by the banks that were handing out
credit without making sure or guaranteeing their debts would be repaid.

Many construction workers are now filling up the neverending queues of unemployment
in all of the country’s autonomies. Thus, we encounter the real victims of all this
process: more than 4.000.000 unemployed citizens. Many survive thanks to an
underground economy that the government wants to get rid of though this still does
not explain how people have not gone out to the streets to protest. Aggravated by the
fact that the thousands of mortgages have not been paid by the now jobless mortgage
owners, the banks were seizing their properties and demanding high interests payments
from them.

Considering this social and economic landscape, the real surprise is that there had not
been a strong contestation before in the shape of citizen movement in the streets.

And in the middle of all this the 15th of May arrived.

Indignation was made public: spontaneously and without endorsing any party, as a
citizen-led and social movement that emerged due to different causes, even though
some sources associate it to antecendents such as the book by an old French militant,
Stephan Hessel, that called for the youth to react in the face of such an unjust crisis;
others saw the origin of the revolt in the revolutions sweeping the Arab world since
spring; or in a civil movement that covertly developed. Evidently, the number of
reasons are abundant.

It was called for and it had the success hoped for, it even exceeded expectations. The
camping initiatives stemmed from this, they started in Madrid and expanded to almost
all the provinces. The assemblies determined and grouped the revindications in three
items:
1. Real and participatory democracy.
2. Control of the political class, end of their priviledges and transparency in their
management.
3. End to corruption in society: reasonable property prices, responsible consumption,
bigger control of the Banks, no more unjustified pre-retirements to workers of big
companies.

The politicians’ reactions to this indignation have been of different nature: they
have gone from looking down on the demonstrators calling them anti-system
and “perroflauta” (young homeless marginal people), asking for them to be forcibly
evicted from the squares (which has happened in two or three cases and with
gratuitous violence), and so on. Not one person from the political class has felt that
this indignation was directed towards them, or has shown any sensibility until now.
Consequently, this movement has a long and arduous job ahead. They are young,
without future, without home, without work and WITHOUT FEAR, as it was read on
many of the banners in the squares.

On the 12th of June the camps were dismantled by the protesters after assisting to the
inaugural acts of the new municipal corporations, voted in the recent municipal and
regional elections, and shouting You don’t represent us! But the movement does not
stop here, as they say, it has just started. Now it will spread to the neighbourhoods and
of course through internet. The social networks have been a fundamental tool for this
intitiative, in order to announce it and spread it widely.

Luckily, it seems part of the citizenry has woken up and wants to defend itself. The
15M has arrived to stay.

The indignants are mainly young students or graduate unemployed students. Professors,
lawyers, doctors, civil servants, young fathers and mothers with their children, elderly
men and women who have had their pensions frozen, unemployed middle age women,
mothers that were bringing food to their camping children, musicians and dancers that
came along to show solidarity, citizens that came to bring breakfast to the indignants,
inmigrants that felt supported, this is what I have seen in the assemblies. I have also

seen solidarity, respect, tolerance, generosity, citizen consciousness, rebellion, critical
spirit... human concepts that were about to become endangered species.