JMA

The 15-M movement was a turning point in the Spanish political and social trajectory.

Even though 15-M soon dispersed and ceased to exist as an articulated social movement, it transformed into myriad initiatives that together constitute a sort of “15-M galaxy” that draws inspiration from the movement.

The indignados rebellion put the financial and political elite at the center of its critique — and adopted “democracy” as its banner, but with the meaningful adjective of “real.” It expressed a reaction against the subjugation of the whole of society to the interest of a tiny financial minority — with the crumbling middle class playing an important role.

The movement’s emblematic figure was the young person, especially the graduated youth whose professional prospects were blocked and whose only trajectory appeared to be downwards. But the movement went beyond this base of middle-class youth, also reaching working-class neighborhoods and becoming more diverse in terms of generational and class composition.

The movement emerged outside the traditional militant millieu, in a context of real helplessness on the Left, to successfully confront the financial dictatorship.

15-M not only opposed the political system and financial powers, but also a left that had either been an accomplice to the neoliberal project or proven unable to successfully fight it.

At the same time, 15-M deployed itself on the basis of the values historically associated with the Left — values that have nevertheless been in permanent tension and sometimes contradiction with the very practice of the Left itself.

In this sense, the “15-M event” modified the terms of the political debate and the political landscape by putting the elites on the defensive. The passivity, apathy, and resignation that until then were overwhelming gave way to a period of greater politicization, although this politicization was partial and contradictory. In other words, 15-M helped to modify the hegemonic “common sense” (in the Gramscian sense of the term).

15-M put some unsolved strategic questions on the table, to which the movement itself had no answers, and that actually went beyond what the movement could have offered.

The birth of Podemos in January 2014 marked a significant strategic shift — a leap towards electoral activity.

A real paradigm change gradually took place between 2012 and 2014, thanks to three factors: the worsening of the financial crisis in summer 2012 because of the Bankia bankruptcy and the bailout to the banking system; the rise of Syriza in the elections of May and June 2012; and the verification of the limits of social resistance.

The strategic hypotheses prevalent in the 1990s and the 2000s — changing the world without taking the power, creating free spaces, engaging in social activism while ignoring party and electoral politics, engaging in NGO institutional lobbying — simply got suddenly old.

These strategies proved insufficient to providing an answer to the political crisis. Step by step, the idea that it was also necessary to participate in the electoral arena began to gain strength, albeit still in a vague way.

It is necessary to point out that Podemos is not the party of 15-M and has never claimed to be. It is neither an organic emanation of the movement nor an inevitable consequence of it.

Rather, it is the product of the specific political choices of a certain group of people — Anticapitalistas (then named “Izquierda Anticapitalista,” or Anticapitalist Left) and a bunch of activists around Pablo Iglesias, strongly influenced by “Bolivarian” Latin American experiences.

Both had the sense to propose something besides dealing with the crisis in a routine way, as if it was business as usual, and recognized the crisis as a potentially vital moment of rupture.

Nevertheless, without 15-M Podemos would have not existed. It was 15-M and the struggles against austerity that came in 2012 and 2013 that created the conditions for the development of a project like Podemos — an initiative that, anyway, would have not existed without the strategic good move of its founders.