The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street

Faced with an economic crisis, people took to the streets and camped in urban plazas throughout Spain in May 2011. Many people were successfully mobilized by a generalized sense of frustration, indignation and impotency in the face of coming elections where many citizens felt there were no real alternative economic and social policies offered, nor the possibility to vote for government programmes that would deal with the crisis in a way that prioritized the concerns of the population. In online discussions, concerned proactive participants called for ‘A Real Democracy Now’ that represented the concerns and priorities of regular Spanish citizens. In order to make their discontent visible, they called for people to camp and ‘occupy’ public spaces together in order to force politicians and elites to face the generalized discontent with the dire economic prospects. This paper builds on non-participant observation of the Indignados movement in Barcelona, Spain, conducted in the summer of 2011. It looks at the consolidation of the ‘occupy’ contentious performance to protest income inequality and economic policy. It argues that this movement is a direct precedent to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The 15 May movement showed that not only people in North Africa had reasons to take the streets and engage in collective action, but many citizens in the developed world also had reasons to take public squares and show their dissatisfaction with the economic and political status quo.