DISPATCHES FROM MADRID
The Protests in Spain are Different Entrepreneurs Should Support Them
By Joe Haslam
Revolutions never come when or how they are expected. I certainly wasn’t anticipating anything so dramatic when I wrote (on these pages) last month of Spain´s growing youth unemployment problem and asked how long this could go on? Yet a relatively obscure march in opposition to a new intellectual property law and some heavy handed policework later and there were 100,000 people protesting in squares all over Spain.
Suddenly, the words Puerta del Sol in Madrid were being spoken in the same breath as Tahir Square in Cario and Austurvöllur in Reykjavik. The protesters have left these squares now, but the movement (known variously as the “indignados” or the “15M”) remains. In a recent poll, published in El País, 81% of people told the polling organisation Metroscopia that the protesters had a point. Even at a time of the year when “sol” for most people means “Sol y Playa”, there remains a steady steam of online activism and further protests are planned countrywide for the late July and early September.
The asymmetric nature of the threat has the political class confused. In private they admit (like a scene out of Jaws or Alien) that since they don´t know what 15M is, they don´t quite know how to kill it. Direct political confrontation (“we want to take power”) they can understand but polite requests for accountability (“we would like to hear your proposals on”) is just not something they know how to react to. Both of the two main parties are keenly aware that the indignados will be the key swing vote that decides whether the opposition Partido Popular will get an overall majority in the General Elections scheduled for March 2012. There have even been rumours that the ruling Socialist party will bring forward elections to this Autumn, point to the austerity programmes underway in Greece and Portugal and run on an orthodox left platform designed to channel the 15M anger into votes.
While the debate on electoral strategy goes on internally, youth disillusionment with politics is being treated as a microtrend rather than a macro one. Politics, on both sides, continues as usual with egregious examples of
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