chartering planes, expensive dining, fleets of drivers and multimillion pension payouts. While the protesters gather in town squares to debate issues such as the end of the debt fuelled western way of life, the take over of the European project by elites and the future of democracy, there is no debate whatsoever about any of these issues in the Cortes, the national parliament.


I cannot say I had ever read anything in the academic journal The New Left Review before but after several people had sent me a link to an article in the May-June 2011 issue entitled “The Spanish Model” by Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez, I decided I´d better take a look. Turns out it is well worth a read by anyone with an interest in recent Spanish Economic History. I was struck particularly by their argument that there was very little difference between the policies of Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González from 1982–96 andthe so called modernization programme of the Franco dictatorship. The policy of mass-market tourism from northern Europe and an expansion of private home-ownership which had begun in the 1950s has continued right up to the present day. The cry that Spain needs a new economic model is one that I had heard before, but I hadn’t realised just how far back the current one went.


The situation is somewhat similar in the economies across southern Europe. They are all in need of big structural reforms. As he departed the Bank of Italy for his new job as head of the European Central Bank, Governor Mario Draghi gave a speech entitled “Overview of Economic and Financial Developments in Italy” where he highlighted issues such as stagnant productivity, delays in the civil-justice system, poor universities, a lack of competition in public and private services and a two-tier labour market consisting of protected insiders and exposed outsiders. There is a rule of thumb known as Schramm’s Law which states “The single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth is the number of start-ups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years.” Simply put, Spain’s current economic model does not create enough jobs as it has too few big firms.


So where should Entrepreneurs stand on the protests? It is not as clear as you might think. The protesters are by no means a homogeneous group but what they do seem to be looking for is clearly along left (or interventionist) lines. Then again, they also want to reduce the power of the trade union movement whom they suggest “collaborate with the exploitation of employees by businesses” (a comment I read on a forum). But if they see the right as offering nothing but more austerity and the left as just slaves to the markets, is what they want along the lines of entrepreneurial values such as transparency, meritocracy and accountability?


One of the things I like about speaking in the Spanish language is that the words empresario and emprenedor are clearly understood to mean two different things. Someone like Sir Richard Branson is an emprenedor with all the associations of someone on the side of the customer, who invests his own money and therefore deserves a reward. This is very different from a businessman like Peter Sutherland of BP, Royal Bank of Scotland and Goldman Sachs International who in Spanish would be called an empresario.


48 entrepreneurcountry 60,000 protestors many of


them under the age of 30 joined nationwide campaigns to highlight the growing problem of youth unemployment in Spain.


Many of the participants have drawn parallels between their actions and prodemocracy protests in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world.


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