2011-05-20 Assembly decides #spanishrevolution will continue as Spain chooses the conservatives in elections

Election day has ended in Spain after last night the protest that started at 8:00 pm, planned as the most important yet, managed to occupy most of the squares and streets in around Sol. Many of them went with there families and many others came in from neighbouring towns and cities. The result of the elections, however, is a very pronounced swing to the right. Partido Popular (PP) has claimed victory in most of Spain’s autonomous communities and provinces, with 37.54% of votes, over the 27.80% obtained by PSOE (leading center-left party and currently in Government). Esperanza Aguirre, winning PP candidate in Madrid for the third time in a row, made her majority even bigger, and shortly after claimed that the Government should call for anticipated elections so that they would not “prolongue the agony of the country”. These results were expected by most analyists, who concurred that on top of the effects of the economic recession, the 15M movement had divided the mass of left wing voters.

The thousands of people in Sol, however, remain intentionally oblivious to the results, because, in their own words “they don’t represent us”. his means that their intentions lie not only ahead, in the future, but also outside the current electoral system. Because the movement, so heterogenous, is finding solutions from inside itself, nobody has been told what to do with there vote. In fact, without any central organization, people printed out small leaflets explaining the possible ways to vote. In them was an unbiased dissection of the aspects of abstention or voting for a minor party. The movement continues to refuse participating because they feel they would lose their idendity in the process, so over the day acts of silence have been carried out to demonstrate, according to one spokesperson, “the unity of the movement in times of adversity”. Therefore, they plan to continue, providing the space for the birth of a true participatory democracy until a point where politicians will be forced to listen. It is important to take this into account because the movement is highly uncentralized. Even though the camp in Sol is the biggest and most organized, there are hundreds of them around the world, made up of Spanish and non-Spanish citizens, and in them the same process of debate is going on. These will be merging very slowly on the web over the following months, as new sites and more volunteers are showing up.

This plan (already approved- see interview in http://wlcentral.org/node/1794) took another step forward during today’s General Assembly: a consensus was reached and the camp will go on for another week with the explicit objective of exporting the model growing there to the neighborhoods of Madrid and to the local councils of smaller towns in the area. They also recorded a set of official political proposals, that they insisted should be broadcasted worldwide in an effort to communicate the results of the process. There has been no official reaction to these assertions from the authorities and the possible retaliation by the police is yet to be known.

Example of an assembly held at Puerta Sol: