The Spanish Indignados and Israel's Social Justice Movement

The 15M movement in Spain (15 May 2011) is widely regarded as the vanguard of the “networks of outrage and hope” or “occupy social movements” that swept several southern European states (Castells 2012; Tejerina et al. 2013b) ¹ . Unlike Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados featured not only encampments and assemblies of the young but also very large protest events and wide public support. The mass demonstrations that occurred in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and elsewhere mobilized participants with social and political profiles quite different from previous protest events and social movements (Anduiza et al. 2013). Polls carried out by the Center for Sociological Research indicate that in early June a majority (54 per cent) of the adult population supported the protests, and in a later poll following the November elections, one in ten reported they had actively participated in 15M protest activities. ² Similar broad-spectrum mobilization and support was also a feature of the protests that occurred around the same time in Portugal and Greece. In all three countries, a profound political-economic crisis had been set in train by the financial crisis. What distinguishes Spain from these two European countries, and thus makes it a particularly interesting case for analysis, is that while events in Madrid remained at the center of media and public attention, the movement also spread to Spanish peripheral regions with long-lasting anti-centralist stances. The Spanish 15M movement thus seemed to successfully surmount the profound social and politico-ideological divisions that have traditionally cut across Spanish politics: the left-right continuum, and the tension between centralism and regionalism.