These days are commemorating the first anniversary of the 15M movement. Emerged in May of last year (see entries from 04/04/2011 and 05/21/2011) it aroused the interest of both social science scholars and a population overwhelmed by the political and economic situation of Spain at that time . It became the expression of a malaise that ran through all developed societies and that was not reflected in the traditional instruments of popular representation:parties, unions,... From Spain it spread to the world and parallels were found with other social movements such as the movement anti-globalization or the so-called Arab spring. Indeed, all of them have a common value:to demonstrate that many people do not accept certain political or economic structures as unquestionable.
What has happened this year? We can set some elements:
- The 15M continues to be a movement without a hierarchical or institutionalized structure. It moves through the easy communication that the Internet and mobile telephony allow today. And there are no permanent leaders.
- It has managed to incorporate into the public and political debate issues that were previously outside of it:the human consequences of mortgage evictions and the issue of dation as a solution, the representativeness of political institutions, the abuses of political and economic elites .
- It has kept alive, in a social context of demobilization and disenchantment, some social, political and economic demands.
- It is no longer only made up of groups of young people, but it has been joined by people of all ages, as well as from very diverse social and cultural situations.
Its request for global changes, its form of organization and its actions, devoid of violence, place it as a movement more typical of post-industrial societies in which the forms of political representation and economic action must necessarily be different from those created during the industrializations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
However, we cannot forget that this is a phenomenon closely related to the current economic crisis. It is one of the social responses that the current recession is producing; the other is the rise of extreme right-wing movements that raise the banner of xenophobia. Although they are by no means comparable phenomena, they do imply, both, a questioning of the current democratic systems.
The following documentary presents an interesting state of the question of this topic. It could be seen in the RTVE Weekly Report program on 05/12/2012.