Madrid’s Puerta del Sol is once again an encampment, fifteen years after Spain’s Indignados occupied it. Paolo Gerbaudo argues that this time the organizing center is the tenants’ union, and the political language is explicitly about class and housing rather than citizens and austerity.
- The eviction of eighty-seven-year-old Maricarmen Abascal by an investment fund helped spark the September 26 protests.
- Unlike the more diffuse assemblies of 2011, today’s mobilization has union spokespeople and a coordinated strategy against evictions and speculation.
- Spain’s growth and record employment have not checked rent pressure; Gerbaudo says some tenants spend as much as 70 percent of earnings on rent.
- He sees the center-left government’s caution toward homeowners and investment funds as a limit on its housing reforms.
The comparison is less a claim that the new movement will win than an argument about what its organizers learned: electoral gains and rising GDP do not by themselves shift power from landlords to tenants. Its next test is whether sustained class organization can do what the previous political cycle could not.