ABSTRACT
As the campaign for local and regional elections that were to take place on May 22, 2011, neared its end, anyone paying attention to events in Spain could see the simultaneous occurrence of two recurrent features of modern democracies: first, the competition among political parties according to established rules, and second, the unexpected emergence of a movement calling for a rethinking of what democracy is and ought to be. Starting a week before election day, tens of thousands of (mostly) young people in dozens of Spanish cities camped in public spaces, organized themselves into committees, formulated dramatic slogans, expressed their disgust with established practices, set up websites, and debated among themselves what the “real democracy” they called for would look like. TV commentators on Spanish politics over the next few weeks were not only holding forth on such standard themes as the enormous electoral defeat of the Socialists but were also trying to understand who were the people occupying the squares, what they stood for, and why they carried out their actions at that particular moment. Newspaper readers were not only reading columns helpfully explaining the ways Spanish electoral rules shaped outcomes but were also encountering articles telling them how the occupation of plazas by the Indignados—the “Outraged”—was like or unlike the typical patterns of Spanish protest since the democratic transition, like or unlike protests against economic austerity elsewhere in Europe, like or unlike the wave of Arab revolts that had taken place just a few months earlier.
