The nature of the current political (r)evolutions

One of the most striking pictures of 2012 is the one that shows the Spanish Parliament protected by a security fence and dozens of policemen.

The divide between politicians and citizens is larger than ever. There is a deep resentment about how they are dealing with the crisis and the unfairness of the adjustments - in Portugal, for example, the president has even submitted the latest budget to the courts because he has requested confirmation of its constitutionality.

Drastic pay cuts in the public sector - remember, not only the  employee at the ministry desk but also the doctor, the teacher and the tax fraud investigator- and privatisation of public services to a larger of lesser degree is also being questioned and it is raising concerns among all citizens, no matter who they voted for. The same is happening with pensions.

In addition, this is taking place in the context of a massive bailout of a large part of the financial system, which, no coincidence, in Spain was in their majority savings banks controlled by regional politicians.

To all this, we can add a strong nationalist push in Catalonia that is taking a lot of attention from the really relevant issues.

Without getting into whether there could have been other ways of tackling the crisis, the key question is the impact that these protests will have on our political system.


Manuel Castells, professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, considers them part of a larger global process towards more participative political systems and societies. In fact, looking around the world, we see that Spain is not alone. Demonstrations have taken place in many countries in the past few years: Arab and Magreb countries, Iceland, Greece, Portugal, the US, the UK, Mexico and more recently Brazil, just to name a few. Athough the context of all these protests differs, the overarching theme is a strong request for changes and more participation in their respective political systems.

Castells also talks about two models of revolution: the civil -Iceland- and the violent - see Magreb countries. Overall, both of them have been successful at changing the status quo: in the case of the Magreb, authoritarian regimes came were deposed and in the case of Iceland a new constitutional process is providing more voice to citizens.

However, not all processes of change are revolutionary. Some are based on incremental changes. These models arise due to either a weakening of the citizens' push for change -and therefore their revolutionary ambitions- or the existence of external constraints that limit the revolution. While the protests are not yet receding in Spain, there is one big constraint that applies: our belonging to the EU.

In practice, this is meaning that the reform agenda is designed outside our borders, prioritising short-term economic reform and to a large extent postponing key and essential structural political and economic reforms.

Therefore, we will not see a drastic change of the Spanish political system, neither big constitutional changes. However, this is probably what the country really needs and, while some of the reforms are radical, the most important underpinnings of our political system may still remain unchanged. To name a few: over-sized local and regional governments, the weak education system, the judiciary, the irrelevance of the senate, and the lack of incentives for consensus building in our political system.

We are not arguing that we would be better-off outside the EU -Free Thinking is a convinced pro-European, but it is certainly something that we should somehow keep on the back of our minds throughout the reform process. The urgent need to focus on economic measures -unfortunately most of them with a short-term vision- should not be used as an excuse to avoid addressing the huge political problems that Spain has.

The barricades, the drastic economic adjustments requested from Brussels, and the unequal impact of the measures on citizens reveal that the challenges are far from trivial. As of today,  we cannot imagine a violent revolution in Spain, but I did also not foresee how the Parliament is looking these days. And if the incremental political and economic changes do not equate to an actual civil revolutions because they are incomplete, watered- down or interrupted, we can expect more instability.