1. Source: Eurostat. Compare Capgemini y Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management; and Report 2014 from the Spanish Economic and Social Council (Consejo Económico y Social).
2. In the Spanish case based not just on the exponential increment of financial products, but mostly on housing construction.
3. Other official documents, such as the “Report from the commission to the council and the European Parliament” (EU ANTI-CORRUPTION REPORT – Brussels, 3.2.2014, COM (2014) 38 final), shows how “95 percent of Spaniards see corruption as institutionalized,” not a surprising figure considering that Spain drops ten places in Transparency International 2013 corruption index. See: http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/02/03/inenglish/1391426403_653818.html
4. While in 2006 the youth unemployment rate in Spain was approximately 17% among those under 25 years old, in 2012 it represented over 50%, being among the highest of the European Union (along with Greece, Portugal, and Italy). Moreover, the unemployment rate among immigrants in 2012 is around 35%, while in 2006 it was just over 12%. Sources: National Statistics and Eurostat.
5. According to the National Statistics Institute (INE), the most vulnerable groups are, in this order, the unemployed (in particular, the long-term unemployed), immigrants, middle-aged Spanish professionals between 41 and 65 years old highly qualified and with work experience, children and young people aged between 18 and 35 years old. Also there are women with dependents under their care (either children or people with disabilities of various kinds, in most cases divorced women with children). And then there are people on retirement pensions, as well as people living alone – like the elderly, although the latter appear to be showing more resilience to the crisis, at least for the moment. Under this profile, we pay specific attention the group known as the “NEETs” (youth not working or receiving any training), who represent in the European Union approximately 15.4% of the youth, and in Bulgaria, Italy, Ireland, and Spain account for more than one in five young. Source: Eurofound.
6. Since the beginning of the crisis, during the third to the fourth quarter of each year, tens of thousands of public sector jobs have been lost, including 84,000 in 2011 and 36.000 in 2009, while the private sector layoffs have eased.
7. The term “market” has acquired a bad reputation in the media and among the general public. Given the difficulties in identifying the cause or causes of what is happening in the current economic crisis, we can say that this is a bonding concept.
8. Ultimately we are talking about a lack of trust in politicians, democratic institutions, and electoral processes, a rift that is not new, but under current socio-economic conditions we can say that the population has made it explicit. In that sense, actions such as rodea el congreso (surround the Congress) intended to make members of Congress feel popular pressure at key moments (such as the approval of the general state budget), but not occupancy of the Congress, an area protected by the Spanish Constitution. In this sense, we could say that with the initiative rodea el congreso the Indignados movement defines clear limits on what is to be occupied and not surrounded (the squares and streets), and what is to be surrounded and not occupied (the Congress).
9. With former Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government 110.000 million euros were provided to private banks between the years 2008 (when the crisis started) and 2011, whereas in 2012 alone the conservative Partido Popular, currently in power, added 50 billion euros to this figure. Among the arguments justifying these decisions are the need to facilitate the granting of loans to the financial sector (essential for economic recovery), and the threat of an Argentinean corralito (December 2001).
10. One of the most tangible achievements of the Indignados movement has been to change the law on mortgages in Spain, even when it’s been done only partially.
11. http://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/Entrevista-Ada_Colau-Plataforma_de_Afectados_por_la_Hipoteca-desahucios-ILP_hipotecaria_0_69643131.html
12. It is noteworthy that although the economic crisis has initially struck the low-skilled working class as far as unemployment is concerned (the construction sector and the sectors that depend on it have been the main exponent), this social group is not especially concerned by social demonstrations in the streets and squares of the country.
13. In the context of societies with settled social democratic values, we can talk of a pattern applicable to many other social causes that relate to basic and general rights, with action or activism as something more common among young people or people directly affected by an injustice bounded in time, space, and theme, while larger groups of people can show sympathy or moral support for these causes.
14. One of the platforms structuring the outrage and protests on the Internet is Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now), along with many others, such as Anonymous, Jóvenes sin Futuro (Youth without a Future), No Les Votes (Don’t Vote for Them), and Estado de Malestar (Badfare State).
15. The most active and organized group among older people is known as yayoflautas, and given their advanced age, their activism has had high notoriety in the media.
16. In the sociological barometers from the Spanish Sociological Research Center politicians appear as the third problem faced by the country. Accessible in: http://www.cis.es/cis/opencm/ES/11_barometros/index.jsp (consulted 3/1/2013)
17. It has been especially relevant in the assemblies that took place at Puerta del Sol Assembly (Madrid’s central square and one of the main symbols of the city), where proposals resulting from the various district assemblies of the city were discussed and approved.
18. It is relevant to note that this public participation process would hardly be carried out without the application of specific methodologies. This is a specialized knowledge, and only people with experience in this type of technique have been responsible for introducing and consolidating public assemblies in the Indignados movement (usually people with experience in political activism, with leftist or anarchist ideological orientation). Similarly, we can say that this methodology has served as an educational and training implement for the population who mostly didn’t have experience with public assemblies. In that sense, it seems like public deliberation methodologies have been “exported” to the US Occupy Wall Street movement. In both cases, we could think of public assemblies as knowledge transfer and collaboration through mutual learning.
19. The indexes of political trust, trust in government, and perceptions of the economy are calculated by translating the rating scale of respondents’ answers with the categories “very good,” “good,” “fair,” “poor,” or “very poor” to a single percentage value.
20. It is worth noting that even during the years of the so-called “Spanish economic miracle” – José María Aznar’s mandate from 1996 to 2004, and Rodrigo Rato as Minister of Economy – trust indexes show a decreasing tendency. This illustrates that citizens’ institutional trust does not rely on the country’s macro-economic performance (or not mainly) but on a more complex set of interrelated variables and sociopolitical processes.
21. It is noteworthy that in the Spanish case, the D’Hondt law is the formula applied to translate votes into seats in the Parliament, favoring the most voted-for parties, and thus not favoring the less voted-for parties. While it was considered a good way to strengthen institutional stability right after the transition to democracy in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, almost 40 years later it is highly criticized, and a demand for its change has been made by the Indignados movement.
22. In the case of Spain, unlike other central and north European countries, society has interpreted that alternatives are not right-wing, xenophobic parties, or anti-Europe, at least for the moment, but political parties with different but not extremist political proposals: the Communist Party and UPyD, who have taken advantage of the current crisis of bipartisanship, gaining a relevant position in the political scene. In the recently held elections for the European Parliament, overall one out of four votes were for extreme right parties and/or anti-Europeanist.
23. With Rajoy’s Government some corruption affairs coming to light created great social scandal, such as the possible illegal financing of the Partido Popular, or corruption linked to the Royal Family, as well as multiple cases of corruption in the municipal and regional governments across the country. Traditionally, in not a few Spanish towns, mayors were reelected despite ongoing judicial investigations for alleged corruption. The behavior of politicians, or mostly the election of representatives, is a reflection of society, and the culture of corruption is, with different degrees of intensity, present in all social layers. In times of economic crisis and high unemployment, the population is much less tolerant of political corruption.
24. Issues such as the economic crisis, its causes, consequences, and solutions, the responsibility of politicians and political parties, the financial sector and the way it functions, the global economy as well as issues of national scope, or the responsibilities of citizens (with the question of whether the population has lived beyond their means) soon came to be discussed for hours and hours in the halls of households through television, pages in the press, and of course the Internet. From one day to another, people wanted to know what was happening, how the world and the economy work, and certainly citizens came to acquire more information and knowledge than before the rise of the movement, and most importantly, to have an interest in and concern for public issues.
25. A small achievement to highlight is the change of the aforementioned Mortgage Law, which takes place just when suicides of people losing their homes occur. While evictions are put into effect punctually, they do not occur in a massive way. However, they do take place with high media coverage and high social impact. Note that this change in law has been widely criticized since it addresses a very small group of people – those assumed to be in a more delicate situation of social exclusion, thus it is seen as a purely cosmetic change.
26. This is what Bourdieu calls “the left hand of the state,” in which women play a foremost part. Thought it is not a central part of this book, we can pose as hypotheses the special relevance women are having overall in these protests, and its gender-analytical side. Women are one of the social groups most affected by the economic crisis and the austerity measures, not just considering the just-mentioned protest of movements, but for example measures such as cuts in the public financial aids to dependency (women are mostly the ones in charge of the elderly or disabled), or in pensions for retirement (there is a higher percentage of elderly women than men).
27. See locations in the map: https://www.google.com/maps/s?msid=216821199477114130347.00047e05cbd4ac3d080be&msa=0&ll=41.14557,1.713867&spn=10.502047,19.907227
28. Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), Research #3028 – May–June 2014.
29. Source: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), Research #3033 – July 2014.
30. At this moment IU concurs by on its own to the 20-D general elections under the Ahora en Común label and with barely any representation or financial resources. According to the CIS’s regular surveys on voting intentions, in April and July 2015, 37.4% and 45.8% of IU voters do respectively manifest their intention of shifting their vote to Podemos for the next general election, an enormous transfer of votes in just three months.
31. Close examples are Greece and Italy, but with different genesis and outcomes to the Spanish case. In Greece, protesters reached their political representation in the institutional framework with Syriza, a formal, structured, and historic party. In Italy, the most notorious experience is Beppe Grillo and the Five Stars Movement, in the mid-term showing low constancy and being a staging/occasional/fugitive/reactive option rather than proactive.
32. In the May 2015 local elections Manuela Carmena (Ahora Madrid) and Ada Colau (Barcelona en Comú) have been elected as the city mayors of Madrid and Barcelona respectively, while in the city of Valencia (the third largest city in the country) and its region Mónica Oltra (Compromís) is the main reference leading social and democratic change.