The New Spanish Revolutions: A Rebellious Journey Across a Changing Spain 9781786997098, 9781786994837, 9781350225565, 9781786994844

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N E W S PANI SH REVOLUTIONS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Finnigan worked for three years as a freelance journalist in Barcelona, during which time he wrote for the magazine Barcelona Metropolitan and blogged for El País’s English website. His work has also appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman and the Independent.

NEW SPAN IS H REVOLUTIONS A R E B E L L IOU S J O U R N E Y A CR O S S A C H A N G I N G S PAIN

C H R I S T O PH ER FINNIGAN

New Spanish Revolutions: A rebellious journey across a changing Spain was first published in 2020 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK. www.zedbooks.net Copyright © Christopher Finnigan, 2020 The right of Christopher Finnigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Haarlemmer by seagulls.net Index by Sally Osborn Cover illustration and design by Steve Marsden Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78699-709-8 hb ISBN 978-1-78699-483-7 pb ISBN 978-1-78699-484-4 pdf ISBN 978-1-78699-485-1 epub ISBN 978-1-78699-486-8 mobi

For my parents and Meela

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

CH APT E R 1 : Madrid: occupation, gentrification



and the politics of the street

CH APT E R 2 : From the plaza to parliament:



Notes

133

the long road to Catalan independence

CH APT E R 5 : Three times a rebel:



99

Franco’s ghost and ‘España profunda’

CH APT E R 4 : Fear of the night:



62

Podemos and the new generation

CH APT E R 3 : The Valley of the Fallen:



21

165

creating and defending the republic

191

Further Reading 199

Index

201

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book simply wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the kindness and support of such a large number of people. Many of them welcomed me into their homes, some into their lives. They have generously shared their stories and experiences with me and I’m grateful to all of them. Thank you to Ken Barlow for not only seeing potential in my proposal but for having the vision to expand its focus. I was extremely lucky to have a supportive and patient editor at Zed Books in Kim Walker, and while James Attlee came to the project late, his instincts for the manuscript allowed it to gain a balance previously missing. The depth of his historical knowledge was crucial to several passages and his sense of the bigger picture invaluable. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive generous advice from many people at different times. In particular, thank you to Owen Jones for his guidance on the industry and the first steps a writer must take. Thank you also to Dan Hancox for providing some essential writing advice early on. To all my friends, who, while they may not know, have provided inspiration, support and advice from beginning to end. There are too many to mention here but those I must thank are: Cristian Aldariz, Mireia Bongard and her wonderful family, Andrew Gilbert, Teresa Tiburcio and Oriol Dotras. Nicky Armstrong, Martin Kelly, Jonathan Sherry, Edgar Iglesias Vidal and Laura Lorenzi and so many others from Barcelona who helped shape my understanding of events ix

acknow l edgem ent s

across Spain. I’m especially grateful to Dorian Martinez and James Hunt for their friendship. My family have been such help through the researching and writing of this book. My siblings have provided words of encouragement and sympathy when I needed them most. If it wasn’t for the support of my dad, Kevin Finnigan, I wouldn’t even be able to think about putting pen to paper. My mum, Lynne Finnigan, has been a constant source of reassurance. Thank you both for your love and unfailing confidence in me, no matter what. And, of course, Meela. I can’t express how grateful I am for all the love and support you have given me. I owe you more than you ever will know.

x

INTRODUCTION

I In May 2013, when I was twenty-five years old, I moved from London to Barcelona. My girlfriend joined me two months later and in August of that year we moved into a tiny apartment in a six-storey building on a busy road in the centre of the city. Downstairs was a Galician fish restaurant, opposite us a school, and on the corner a bakery and supermarket. The road’s four lanes pointed to the beach, and taxis, motorbikes and delivery trucks thundered down it day and night, rattling the thin glass of our old, second-floor windows. Late one afternoon during the first week in the apartment the noise of the traffic stopped. The silence was quickly replaced by another sound, at first seemingly far away but suddenly as deafening as the roar of the traffic. I went to the window and looked down: two police cars, blue and red lights flashing, were crawling up the road; behind them followed unbroken rows of people carrying placards and banners, marching in step to the beat of a drum somewhere in the middle of a crowd so enormous that the hot tarmac had disappeared beneath their feet. The marchers repeated the words thrown out with a metallic echo by a megaphone at the back. The street’s stone walls amplified every word, reflecting them forwards and up into the kitchen. 3

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It was from this apartment in the centre of Barcelona that I heard a new sound of the city, a sound that revealed the anger, discontentment and deep desire for political change in a country that, between 2010 and 2020, experienced two of the biggest political crises it has faced since its return to democracy in 1977: the breaking of the two-party system system, at first from pressure from the radical left, later from the far right, and the attempted break away of Catalonia from Spain. That sound from the street below was at first a novelty and soon became as reliable and as frequent as the one-way traffic. It was then that I discovered that our apartment was located not just on a busy road, but on one of several of the city’s official routes for political protest. On weekday afternoons and late weekend mornings for the next twelve months I came face to face with the huge numbers of people expressing their public opposition to corruption cases, to the refusal for Catalans to be granted a referendum, to proposed changes to abortion law, to public sector cuts, to the continued legacy of General Franco, to fascism, to evictions, to unemployment and much more. But I hadn’t just moved to a city of engaged, active, politicised citizens; I had moved to a country full of them. In 2016, two academics from the University of Salamanca studied the data on demonstrations around Europe and concluded that ‘the propensity to participate in street protest activities is much higher in Spain than in other European countries’. According to their data,1 the Spanish protest more than any other Europeans – a social norm even before the 2008 financial crisis, that profoundly destabilised Spanish levels of 4

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unemployment and income. In 2006, the percentage of people who participated in a demonstration was higher in Spain than in Germany, France, Portugal or Switzerland. In 2012 and 2013 the number of protests in Spain reached a staggering 45,000, meaning that 25 per cent of the population had participated in at least one demonstration that year. The huge number of protests occurring were, of course, not limited to the ones we saw from our window in Barcelona. In the capital city of Madrid in 2013 there were 4,500 registered demonstrations – around twelve demonstrations per day. To compare that figure with another European country – say, with the one I had just left – the same research data revealed that there were just ninety-two recorded demonstrations that year. Trade unions organised around half of all these demonstrations. Spain has three major unions that all have deep, historic roots across the country. They are unions that have organised armies for war, clandestine resistance to dictatorship and strikes against the expansion of neoliberalism. But organised labour alone didn’t plan the thousands of other demonstrations across Spain. These were coordinated by groups unaffiliated with this more traditional form of political activism. Free from institutional traditions and arrangements, they emerged from local neighbourhoods, plazas and squares across Spain, some in the form of neighbourhood associations, others as single-issue campaign groups or collectives. Defined loosely as ‘social and grassroots movements’, they enabled people across Spain to make sure that their voices were heard outside the traditional established structures. 5

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Their presence would be so powerful that their activism would set the country’s political agenda for the coming years. Spain, the Salamancan academics concluded, is nothing less than a ‘country of street protesters’. Our new Barcelona neighbourhood was the Eixample (Catalan for the Enlargement), a district unfamiliar to both of us. From the plane it presents itself as a rectangular carpet of octagonal blocks that sits between the old, medieval centre and the point where the city floor begins to rise until it reaches the arid forest of Collserola. The neighbourhood’s geometry is angular and precise, a direct contrast to the twisting lanes and cobblestone alleyways found in the heart of the city more familiar to tourists. Designed in the mid-nineteenth century by Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà, the Eixample was built to solve the problems created by Barcelona’s rapid industrialisation: overcrowded housing, Dickensian working conditions and vast inequalities of health, wealth and income, as well as an unsanitary, disease-spreading sewage system. Every one of these social and economic problems had been exacerbated and had reached intolerable levels as new factories threading cotton and weaving silk transported their goods from the Catalan countryside to Barcelona’s harbour and beyond. Cerdà’s vision for a new Barcelona was egalitarian and his plans for building it were scientific. He mapped out a new city of affordable apartments around inner gardens on large blocks whose edges had been clipped to allow clean air to circulate around the densely packed city. He calculated the exact volume of fresh air required to flow around the massive urban development in relation to 6

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the strength of the coastal winds blowing in from the east. He evenly measured the location of new schools, libraries, markets and hospitals to distribute key public services in a equitable manner. While one side of the Eixample was designed to be more upmarket than the other, residents of all classes began to live next to, on top of and under one another throughout the city’s enormous grid of new apartments. Cerdà reduced inequality and rid Barcelona of its urban squalor through the revolutionary power of architecture: the project was so radical that it gave the world the term ‘urbanisation’. These nineteenth-century apartment blocks still possess a particular romance. Our apartment’s entrance featured a large glass door framed with intricately moulded iron; in the lobby sat a wooden lift with a glass door; and next to the lift, on the ground floor, a tiny closet with a single bare bulb for a portero, who, in his cigarette-scented blue jacket, still signed for your post and washed the same patch of pavement outside the building each morning. Cerdà had designed apartments in buildings like ours with families in mind. Their long, thin corridors had space for four bedrooms and two sets of large French windows at either end: one overlooking the street outside, the other overlooking a hidden interior garden. We were on the third floor on the left of our Eixample building and a property developer had recently sliced our apartment in two, leaving us with a view only of the road. Despite the grid layout, Cerdà’s Barcelona is easy to get lost in. We found our bearings by furnishing our new home with what we found on the street. The apartment came with 7

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only two beds and we had heard that the council offered a free evening collection service for any unwanted household items: Dia de los Trastos (Junk Day). Once a week, among the old kitchen fittings, toilet seats and dirty sofas, there were mahogany tables, terracotta flower pots and tatty wicker chairs. In just two weeks, we had found our bearings, as well as furnishing our home. There were reference points in the city, however, impossible to miss, that expressed a much harsher underbelly of Barcelona – not too dissimilar to the medieval injustices that the Eixample was built to help banish. Now they were caused by globalisation, not the industrial revolution. It was subprime mortgages, financial market crashes, austerity, an age of boom and bust and bankruptcy – all of which left the city, the region and the country in a permanent state of crisis. Looking at just the area immediately neighbouring our apartment, at least one person slept every night in the twenty-four-hour ATM in the bank on the corner; two apartments lay empty with bricked-up windows next to a five-star hotel a few doors down; people sat begging outside the supermarket and bakery in shifts; and one day a few blocks away a forty-year-old man took his own life on the day bailiffs came to repossess his home after he defaulted on his mortgage. This, too, was Barcelona. After a year, we left the Eixample for an apartment in the quieter district of Gràcia. Once an affluent suburb of nineteenth-century Barcelona, Gràcia was absorbed into the city when the Eixample was complete. The neighbourhood’s narrow streets, lined with orange trees and jasmine bushes, still leave it feeling more like a village than a district of a busy 8

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city. The squares of Gràcia are the epicentre of the barrio: elderly people dressed in their finest clothes and sitting on low benches fall into conversation with strangers as easily as if they were seated at a bar; teenagers with sandwiches wrapped in foil sit in a circle on the floor for hours; young children run around as parents chat at a table on the terrace of a café. There is always at least one sticky puddle of dog piss drying on the pavement, along with the odd cockroach scuttling under a bin. With the arrival of spring, barbecues and swing classes appear in the squares and for one week in the summer residents from different neighbourhood associations compete to design the biggest, most elaborate street carnival. When we moved to the neighbourhood the festival was in its 198th year. Gràcia has long been one of the areas in Barcelona most likely to vote both in favour of a secessionist or at least a pro-devolution party, and for a radical left-wing party, two facts that encouraged our Catalan friends to tell us we were moving not to any old neighbourhood but to the ‘Independent Republic of Gràcia’. Of course, the very reason why Gràcia is so unique is the reason why an unrelenting wave of gentrification was taking place, of which we were very much part. Combined with an out-of-control, unregulated tourism sector, this meant that the neighbourhood was changing rapidly. Following the 1992 Olympics and the remaking of large parts of the city’s infrastructure, including the creation of the beach, Barcelona became one of the continent’s most popular tourist destinations. Today it is the jewel in the crown of Ryanair’s Europe: in 2016, eight million tourists visited a city that has a permanent population of only 1.6 million. Barcelona has 9

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become as overrun with tourists as Venice, and the graffiti in Gràcia when we lived there included signs written in English, such as ‘Tourists Go Home’ and ‘Gaudí hates you and spits in your beer! Tourists Fuck Off.’ Gràcia was on the front line of the battle against these pressures bearing down on Barcelona, a fact made evident when a community social centre, known as Banc Expropriat, was closed by the police. Local activists had occupied the abandoned building for five years and it had been one of the key political centres in the area, where the two main grassroots movements – anti-austerity and pro-independence – had organised under the same roof. The building, on the corner of a market, had once housed a bank that closed after the financial crash. In 2015, a deal made by the ex-conservative mayor to pay the owner rent and avoid moving the activists had expired. It was now the job of the police, working for the newly elected left-wing mayor Ada Colau, an ex-housing activist and former ‘occupier’ herself, to end the occupation. I remember the euphoria when Colau was elected. I received a flurry of WhatsApp messages from Catalan friends of a photo of her being escorted out of a bank by police after occupying its shop floor. Their messages proudly read: ‘This is your new mayor.’ During Colau’s first term in office as mayor of Barcelona and head of the grassroots municipal coalition En Comú Podem, she cracked down on the unregulated activities of Uber and Airbnb in the city, increased the council’s social housing portfolio and ensured that all new builds would contain at least 30 per cent affordable sales or rentals. She led a campaign to ‘feminise politics’ and fight gender-based 10

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violence while increasing funding for the city’s budget for housing victims of gendered violence. She ran a campaign for Spain to take more action to house migrants coming to Europe and ensured that the city assisted more refugees than in previous years. The week-long riot over the community centre revealed many things about Barcelona and many things about our place in it. I didn’t hear the resistance to the eviction the first night, but when the bins along our street were set on fire and the shop windows of a newly opened Decathlon sports shop were smashed, it was impossible not to notice what was taking place. For nearly a week activists attempted to re-enter the building, forcing the police to solder its doors and windows shut. Each night until the early hours, a police helicopter hovered low in the sky as groups from across the city gathered in Plaça de la Revolució until the square was so full that someone sent a bottle flying through the air towards the wall of police guarding the building. The police then charged the square in an attempt to disperse the crowd. As they chased groups of protestors around the neighbourhood, local residents didn’t make their task any easier: I remember seeing residents drop empty glass bottles from balconies at baton-wielding riot police as they chased protesters. For the next few months, flowers placed by residents hung from the sealed, empty building. Returning a few years later, I found the building had become a health food store run by the French supermarket chain Carrefour. The riot was as much about gentrification as it was about an eviction. But it did highlight what the loss of a social 11

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centre – or, as these social centres are known academically, a ‘second-generation squat’ – would mean for a close-knit community. These centres have been key institutional actors across Spain and have been places where protests have been planned so frequently and with such success that they have helped foster a new political culture. They have had a huge influence in a country where protest isn’t viewed as a public disturbance but as a public ritual, a public’s right, and, for many, because it was outlawed until the death of Franco, a public’s duty. Those I saw protesting across the city represented two different political movements: the anti-austerity left and a movement for a referendum on Catalonia’s membership of Spain. At first it looked like both movements spoke with singular voices: anti-austerity protestors carrying placards denouncing funding cuts to hospitals, schools and other social services, and Catalan activists calling for the referendum. Both movements were in part triggered by the financial crisis of 2008 and sometimes their activism intersected. But their roots and their development slowly built momentum for separate and distinct reasons. Each movement had its own story with its own leaders, and even before research on this book began, it was clear that each movement was as diverse as the number of those who would turn out on the street in support of them. Both, however, shared two key demands that defined them: the desire to make Spain more democratic and the desire to make it more inclusive. Two demands that would test Spain’s institutions to their limits. 12

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II The Spanish have a tendency to remember key historic moments by referring to them by the date on which they occurred, leaving some political conversations sounding more like a discussion about algebra than politics. It’s a linguistic feature that probably has its roots in journalism’s concise headlines, and it was further developed during the period when it was necessary to convey a message in the confined space of social media. There is 18-J (18 July 1936), when a military coup was launched by General Francisco Franco against the democratically elected Republican government of Spain, beginning a bloody three-year civil war. While historians disagree over the exact number of people who died during the conflict, it is largely believed that roughly half a million people were killed and as many forced into exile. The war was won by Franco’s fascist forces, with the help of Hitler and Mussolini, and saw Spain live under a dictator until 20-N (20 November 1975) when Franco died, having ruled Spain for forty years as both a violent autocrat and a widely supported leader. Reformist elements within his party decided to continue his legacy but with democratic legitimacy by contesting the country’s first elections on 15-J (15 June 1977). The socialist Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE or Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) won the election and the country’s ruling elite came to an agreement – the so-called Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) – not to dig up the past, an aim made official by the passing of the Amnesty Law of 1977, which has left an indelible mark on the nation ever since. This largely peaceful transition to democracy came under threat during 23-F 13

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(23 February 1981), when members of the military burst into parliament with loaded weapons and took the chamber hostage, launching a coup d’état that failed within a few hours. ‘Spain tends to have a major upheaval every forty years,’ said PSOE politician Susana Díaz in 2018, ‘and now we’re in one of them.’2 Beginning with Spain’s loss of its colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam in 1898, the Civil War from 1936 to 1939, the transition to democracy from 1976, and the rise of the radical left and right and Catalan separatism today, the country does seem to have a sense of regularity in its moments of major political change. For the current generation, there is a new set of iconic dates for the history books, dating however from the last decade. These new dates come not from great moments of state-managed theatre; they come instead from moments of resistance and defiance from ordinary people, and this book will focus on two of them. The first began in the early hours of Sunday morning on 15 May 2011 (15-M) after a group of around forty people spent the night on the concrete floor of the half-moon-shaped Puerta del Sol in Madrid. The impact on Spain of the month-long mass occupation that followed was profound. An enormous network of social movements formed and spread across the country, a key factor in why there were so many protests in Spain in the following years. In just a few years, they would play their part in ending the two-party system in Spain, influencing the centre-left to move further left, and breaking the consensus of the economic and political settlement in postFranco and neoliberal Spain. 14

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In Catalonia there is one recent event that will be remembered by its 7.5 million citizens more than any other. It was a moment that captured the world’s attention and threw the country into a constitutional crisis not seen since the transition from dictatorship to democracy; it left many outside the country perplexed by what they saw: a European police service violently beating voters who wanted to cast a ballot. The day in question was 1 October 2017 (1-O), when 2.2 million people out of 5.3 million eligible voters risked their personal safety to vote in an illegal referendum on the region’s membership of Spain: 90 per cent of them voted in favour of independence. Eighteen days after the vote, the Catalan parliament voted to recognise the illegal vote and the regional chamber passed a motion creating a ‘Catalan Republic as an independent and sovereign state’. Instead, regional autonomy was lost as the central government took back control. Soon, the movement’s leaders were either in self-imposed exile across Europe or held in pre-trial detention. On 14 October 2019 nine Catalan leaders were found guilty of sedition, misuse of public funds and disobedience. Spain once again had political prisoners.

III In this book I tell the stories of some of the people behind these two seismic events. Their voices, their lives and descriptions of the places in which they have lived, worked and mobilised make up the following pages. By speaking to people who have supported the two very different movements 15

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that created 15-M and 1-O, I hope that readers will gain an insight into what has driven people to demonstrate, to join new parties and to vote in an illegal referendum. The book also offers an explanation of the re-emergence of the far right in a country that a little over forty years ago was ruled by a ruthless dictator. The trips in the book were made largely in two periods in 2018. Most of the people I interviewed I had met long before, therefore the journeys were shaped by the people I already knew. I do not claim to offer a full portrait of the country, but instead a glimpse into lives at a time when nationalist and populist sentiments are on the rise across the continent. I believe that these two political movements in Spain are examples of inclusive forms of nationalism and populism, an argument made easier by contrasting them with the rise of the far right in Spain over the last few years, which has been partly in response to these movements, dispelling the idea that Spain has avoided the impact of the rise of the far right across Europe. But this journey is also about the past. There is a third story about contemporary Spain that explains the enormous spike in political activism across the county over the last decade. It’s a story about a violent and troubled past that has created deep currents of feeling that flow through Spain to this day, feelings of outrage and of anger that have weighed heavily on almost every political movement and whose roots lie in a very recent war-torn, bloody, dictatorial, repressive and repressed past. This story is much more challenging to understand – at least it was for me. It’s a story about how people, denied a chance to grieve for lost loved ones, who have memories of life under a dictatorship, either 16

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handed down or their own, influence the dynamics of democratic electoral politics. One afternoon, after returning to live in London, I received a message from Cristian, a Basque friend who lives in Barcelona. Cristian is in his early thirties and describes himself as an anarchist. Like many people I met, Cristian’s politics are principled yet pragmatic: he doesn’t vote, but when it came to the illegal referendum, held against a backdrop of police aggression, Cristian woke up at 4am and accompanied his partner and her family to their voting booth to protect them should the police arrive. When he was visiting his family in Vitoria in the south of the Basque Country at the time of writing this book, he came across an old photo in a box of a young girl. Below the thumbsized picture read a request for urgent donations for the 3,840 Basque children who had sailed on a ship built to carry only 800 to Southampton a few weeks after German and Italian planes razed the Basque market town of Guernica. Despite calls from the Labour Party, the British government refused to support the democratically elected Republican government against the rebellion by Nationalist troops led by General Franco, but the country did help some of the victims of Nationalist atrocities. Upon their arrival, the children were temporarily put in camps in Hampshire before finding permanent shelter, mostly through the Catholic Church or the Salvation Army. Some of these children found a new home in private households across the country. The advert for help that Cristian sent me was appealing for money for a group of children who had been moved to a small village twenty minutes away from the town I grew up in. 17

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Sir Paul Preston, one of the leading scholars on Spanish history, has written that the ‘denial of the experiences and recollection of both victors and victims [in the Spanish Civil War] … inflicted great long-term damage on Spanish society’. The author of a series of landmark studies of Franco and the Spanish Civil War, he has argued that, ‘to this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure’.3 Despite growing up twenty minutes away from a place in Britain that housed child refugees from Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, it took the chance finding of a postcard for me to learn about it. As it turned out, there were missing bits of Spanish history all around me: over dinner in London I discovered that my great-uncle, a veteran of the First World War, came extremely close to travelling to Spain and fight Franco’s forces by joining the thousands of male and female volunteers from over fifty countries in the International Brigades. Furthermore, when I returned to Spain for this book, I discovered that only a block away from that small and noisy first apartment once stood the offices of the Falange, offices that after Nationalist victory in the war had a ‘huge queue that stretched all around the block of people who had eagerly taken up the call to denounce their neighbours, workmates, and acquaintances’, according to historian Nick Lloyd.4 There is no plaque outside the building, no memory of the part it played in killing and imprisoning so many people. Even after moving to Barcelona, it took me a while to begin to understand the impact of Spanish history on everyday life. 18

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Only after interviewing activists for magazine and newspaper pieces did I begin to appreciate the depth of their feelings about the past. People were answering my questions about the financial crisis with reference to Franco, fascism and the dictatorship. Part of the reason why it may have taken me longer to comprehend the power of this third influencing story on contemporary Spanish politics was that, in Spain, there are no museums to tell the story of the Civil War and the period of dictatorial rule that followed it, despite an international campaign from writers and historians (including Sir Paul Preston) to build an International Museum of the Spanish Civil War. With no agreement between historians, politicians and the public on an official account of Spain’s bloody past, there remain only single-issue museums, documenting particular battles or conflicts during the war. In October 2016, just as we were preparing to return to London, a temporary exhibition opened in Barcelona showcasing the Francoist art that once loomed over pedestrians throughout the city. Before the show, crowds assembled outside to display their support and condemnation. The gathering ended in a fistfight between two middle-aged men; one item from the exhibition placed outside the entrance doors, a statue of Franco mounted on a horse, had rotten fruit, eggs, paint and a pig’s head thrown at it before it was pushed to the ground and its iron head decapitated. For some it didn’t matter that the aim of the exhibition was to denounce Franco’s legacy – it was just too much to have his face reappear on a Spanish street.

19

CHAPTER 1

MADRID OCCUPATIO N, GENT RIFICATI ON AND T HE POL I TI CS OF T HE ST REET

On 15 March 2018, videos shot on mobile phones of angry crowds in Lavapiés, a poor, gentrifying district in the centre of Madrid, went viral. The videos showed the sun disappearing behind old apartment blocks and a row of baton-wielding riot police facing off with a group of protestors hurling steel tables and chairs taken from a local café along with the odd clump of paving stone dug out of the old city road. Once the sun had set, more videos were posted online. Filmed with the shaking hands of someone witnessing the law being broken in close proximity to the police and lit now by the yellow and red glow of flames from overturned bins, the footage showed people jumping on cars, smashing the windows of banks and defacing ATMs. The riot continued into the early hours. Six people were arrested. The narrow streets of Lavapiés were ablaze that evening because, earlier in the day, Mame Mbaye, a thirty-five-year-old street vendor from Senegal who had been living without official documentation in Spain for twelve years, collapsed and died on a pavement close to his home in the centrally located neighbourhood. Mame worked as a ‘mantero’, a word derived from the Spanish for blanket (manta) that is used to describe the street vendors who line Spain’s busiest commercial avenues to sell 23

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fake designer sunglasses, counterfeit bags and replica football shirts. Most visitors to Spain will have probably glimpsed the life of a mantero: standing for hours on the pavement, the strings of their cotton blanket in hand, they keep one eye out for the police and the other on their next customer – if caught, they face up to two years in prison. Undocumented and mostly of West African origin, manteros are subject to a life of poverty and insecurity thanks to an immigration law that requires non-EU citizens to have obtained documentation to work in Spain from their country of origin. There are around 500 manteros living and working in Madrid, and an estimated 2,000 working in Barcelona. They have few rights and upon arrest will in all probability be sent to a Foreign Internment Centre, institutions criticised by the United Nations for being instruments of racial profiling that function more like jails than temporary internment facilities. Conditions have been so poor in these centres that they have been the scene of multiple hunger strikes. According to the authorities, that afternoon in March two police officers were called to help a man suffering from an epileptic fit. Arriving on the scene, the officers found Mame with a packet of tobacco and a handkerchief wedged between his teeth. The police spent forty-five minutes trying to resuscitate him. Other manteros, however, told reporters another story. They claimed that Mame went into cardiac arrest after being chased by police officers on motorbikes from Puerta del Sol, where he had been working. The manteros alleged that the police had finally caught Mame in their daily game of cat and mouse. In running for his life, his colleagues alleged, Mame had lost it. 24

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As crowds clashed with the police, the details of Mame’s life quickly emerged online. Mame had landed in Tenerife by boat from Morocco in 2006, later travelling again by boat to mainland Spain, and then on to Madrid by land. During the twelve years Mame had spent in Spain, he applied for a residency card three times. He was rejected each time. Like every mantero, Mame struggled to make a living, but any spare money he did make he sent back to Senegal to the only living members of his family – his brother and nephews. Mame was also a member of the Sindicato de Manteros y Lateros de Madrid, the manteros’ union that campaigns for the decriminalisation of street selling and better access to residency cards. Made up in Madrid of fifty people, it meets every Tuesday. A photo of Mame at a meeting was posted on Twitter and shared thousands of times. Dressed in a pair of denim jeans and a long white T-shirt, the picture showed him standing at one of the union’s rallies with a piece of paper stuck to his back. It read ‘Sobrevivir no es delito’ (Surviving is not a crime). I landed in Madrid late on the evening of Mame’s death. I’d come to the city to try to discover how small grassroots organisations have shaped some of the political shifts that Spain has witnessed over the last decade. Madrid has been at the centre of political revolts, movements and activism in Spain and Mame’s death was going to show the strength and diversity of that activism. I arrived too late to witness the riot and went straight to a friend’s apartment in Carabanchel, in the south of the city. The following morning the sky was cloudless, and Madrid, Europe’s highest capital city, was free of its notorious thick 25

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layer of pollution. I had a panoramic view of the sprawling mass of red-brick apartment blocks from the kitchen. There were old metallic satellite dishes and rusting air-conditioner units hanging to the side of flat-roofed buildings and an aeroplane crawling across the sky. Behind me was a worn-out sofa next to storage space for pots and pans made from pallet wood. The table was covered with stale bread and a drum of unmarked olive oil. There was also the smell of fresh coffee and wet dog. The morning view was not from a penthouse suite but from the top floor of an office block, which until a year ago had been occupied by a telecommunications company. The company had left and now ten friends, previously scattered around squats and temporary accommodation in Lavapiés, had struck up a deal with a landlord desperate for occupants. The floor’s ceiling still had the old office square-patterned grey tiles with air-conditioning grills and panelled lighting. The walls however were now adorned with posters of the CNT, an Anarchosyndicalist union founded in Barcelona in 1910. The inside of the toilet door was covered in stickers, like a toilet in a bar, advising residents what to do if they found themselves next to a squatted building. ‘Don’t call the police. Welcome them like you would welcome another neighbour. Let them occupy an empty building. Help them live with dignity.’ Over the last ten years, the number of people living in the centre of Madrid has decreased by 10 per cent,1 while between 2015 and 2017 the number of tourist apartments grew from 4,000 to 6,000.2 In 2016, the average monthly rent increased by 14.6 per cent.3 With more and more empty buildings either 26

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sealed off or bricked up, bought to use as tourist apartments or transformed into new retail or restaurant spaces, this group of friends had been forced to move further out of the centre, crossing the Manzanares River to Carabanchel. The ten friends, from different parts of Spain, all under thirty-five, were paying guests, not squatters. Most were in full-time employment or students, and despite not one of them being an artist, a dysfunctional housing market calls for innovative solutions, therefore they had settled on naming the place an ‘artistic commune’. But for the people staying in this kind of accommodation, it’s more than just a convenient form of housing: it’s a way of life, a kind of social collective. The house holds assemblies every week, they have a kitty for food and a rota for who cooks and cleans. An industrial-sized lift took me down to the bottom floor after breakfast. Next door was a small evangelical church whose closed doors couldn’t prevent the sound of the Friday morning choir ringing out into the street. When the service finished, a group speaking in thick Colombian accents stood outside smoking. Almost half of all immigrants in Madrid are South American and many of them live in Carabanchel.4 It’s in neighbourhoods like this where the economic crisis, and especially the housing crisis, were acutely felt. During the boom years, the construction and real-estate industry accounted for 43 per cent of Spain’s GDP. For over fifty years, Spain aggressively pursued the creation of an economy built on home ownership. By the time the winds of the financial crisis swept through Spain after Goldman Sachs employees left their offices in New York with their belongings in cardboard 27

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boxes, 85 per cent of those eligible to own a home in Spain did so. This left Spain with one of the highest rates of home ownership in the EU. Such was the pace of construction that between 1997 and 2007 more houses were built in Spain than in Germany, France and the UK combined. To keep pace with this record-breaking industry, mortgage lenders were handing out loans often at 100 per cent of the value of a property, sometimes more, ensuring that these new homes were filled. Many of those awarded these mortgages were helping fuel the boom. In just ten years, 4.6 million immigrants moved to Spain and most of them were from Latin America. Men found work in the construction of properties and women in cleaning or maintaining them. For this precarious section of society, it was cheaper to buy a home than to rent. But when, in 2011, there were 3.5 million empty homes registered across the country, one-third of those evicted were immigrants to Spain. Today, the advertising boards around Carabanchel remain full of finance deals – not for houses but for new cars or instant cash payday loans. On the metro, I reached into my pocket for my phone to find more videos from Lavapiés online: the ash and broken glass had been cleared up from the previous night but the anger remained. Just before noon, the head of the Senegalese consulate visited Lavapiés. Shortly after arriving in the neighbourhood, the diplomat was pursued by an angry crowd criticising him for visiting the area too late after Mame’s death. He was forced to take refuge in a Senegalese restaurant; the police were called. The diplomat escaped in his car under the protection of a police escort. 28

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In a few hours, a demonstration in Mame’s honour and ‘against murderous institutional racism’ had been organised. Later I made my way to Plaza Nelson Mandela in the heart of Lavapiés, close to where he lived and died, and where the demonstration was due to end. The demonstration was televised live in the cafés and bars I passed, and when I turned a corner into the square groups were already tightly gathered in conversation. There was the smell of hand-rolled cigarettes and the sound of rotating blades from the police helicopter above. Paving stones from the sidewalk used as ammunition last night were still missing and shops, normally open for at least a few more hours, had already drawn their steel shutters. Carrying a banner that read ‘Institutional racism kills’ and flanked by the lights of television cameras, a long line of protesters arrived. Mame was well known in Lavapiés. An owner of a bar recalled to a journalist from the newspaper El Español how he ‘would arrive almost every day in the afternoon and would ask for a coffee. He didn’t talk much but was very respectful. He would sit at a table with friends. They would talk about football, about religion.’ But most of the people here tonight did not know Mame personally. They were here on a Friday night to show their support to a marginalised and harassed community in Spain; a community that is normally silenced was now finally being heard. These movements are not affiliated or aligned with charities, political parties, private companies or traditional unions. They are social collectives founded in their neighbourhoods, an expression of something distinctly local. Following 15-M, the Spanish state did everything it could to limit the historic outburst of protest from becoming a norm. 29

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In July 2015, the government passed Ley Mordaza, known colloquially as the Gag Law, a piece of legislation imposing fines of between €30,000 and €600,000 on protesters who fail to follow a set of new standards for demonstrations. These include the prohibition of protests close to a legislative building, obstructing public officials from completing a judicial order (such as an eviction), climbing buildings or monuments to protest and filming police officers, among other measures. As the legislation made its way through parliament in 2014, Amnesty International issued a stark condemnation, not just of where the right to protest was heading in Spain but where it was at. ‘The Spanish Government is using the full force of the law to suffocate legitimate peaceful protest,’ it claimed. ‘The police have repeatedly used batons and rubber bullets against demonstrators, injuring and maiming protestors and bystanders alike. The police act with complete impunity, while peaceful demonstrators and leaders of social movements are continually harassed, stigmatised, beaten, sometimes arrested to face criminal charges, imprisonment and fines.’5 The fourteen people who were arrested on that first night in Madrid, the people who lit the match for weeks of occupations and years of activism, have remained in the legal system ever since. In May 2018 they were eventually tried for offences that carried up to seven years in jail, a possible sentence made to look all the more disproportionate given the deep feeling of injustice many feel due to the unamended 1977 Amnesty Law that pardons crimes committed during the dictatorship, despite the United Nations in 2013 calling for the law to be 30

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overturned. With no South African-style truth and reconciliation commission after the transition to democracy, no clearing out of Franco’s bureaucratic regime, no accountability for those responsible for the imprisonment and torture of thousands, many feel a particularly acute sense of anger towards the Spanish justice system. Take Antonio González Pacheco – or, as he is known, ‘Billy the Kid’ – a former member of the Francoist police who stands accused of torturing thirteen prisoners during Franco’s rule. According to Trial International, a Swiss-based legal NGO, ‘His victims [were] mainly university students and militants arrested during strikes and rallies.’6 According to his victims, he had the habit of ‘spinning a gun around his finger as he beat his victims’ and he is ‘reputed to have been especially sadistic, telling his victims how much he enjoyed beating them’. Billy the Kid currently lives in Madrid, is in his late sixties, and, according to the local media, enjoys running half-marathons. With the police not far away, some of the manteros take the microphone and address a packed plaza to denounce the daily harassment they endure by the police as they attempt to survive. The speakers stand in front of a tightly packed crowd sitting on the floor in the corner. I stand on the other side of the plaza in another circle of people gathered around a group of men facing east, kneeling on the floor praying. Like almost every organised protest in Spain, the gathering is peaceful. But the absence of violence is by no means guaranteed. There is a moment when a group of young Senegalese men rush through the crowd, knocking people to the ground. They stop at the plaza’s edge and argue with one another about 31

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what to do once the demonstration has finished. The speeches are coming to a close, the sun has nearly set and the men can sense that the next act in tonight’s performance might be to continue last night’s confrontation with the police. A journalist with a camera mounted on his shoulder tries to film the discussion but is pushed to the ground as he approaches. An older set of Senegalese men run over and calm the group. Within an hour the crowd has dispersed and the night ends without incident. Six days later, Mame’s body is buried in his home town of Touba in Senegal. The cost is covered by donations from the Senegalese community in Madrid.

S E C O N D - G E N E R AT I O N S Q U AT S Number twenty-four on Calle del Amparo has seen better days: the four-storey apartment block’s terracotta and pebblewhite bricks are chipped; its shutters look as if they don’t close; and small pieces of crayon-drawn graffiti adorn the edges of each balcony. The building, which extends across most of one side of the square, hasn’t been occupied by paying residents for almost twenty years. Abandoned long before the financial crisis, it is another tomb in Spain’s colossal graveyard of empty homes. Number twenty-four, however, no longer stands empty. As the demonstration played out, two men stood on its roof next to a tripod-mounted video camera that pointed down to the square. The two men live-streaming the demo were a sign that life once again exists within its walls. However, this has not been provided by the market, but instead by a small group of 32

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activists who have occupied the building since 2013, renaming number twenty-four La Quimera (the Fantasy). The story of some of the abandoned buildings in Spain runs deeper than the crisis; so too does the story of those who have reinjected life into them. La Quimera had once been occupied before: in 1997, another group of activists renamed it Laboritorio Dos (Laboratory Two). Exactly where Laboritorio Uno was located isn’t clear, but this second occupation lasted six years, until the police intervened. Despite the utopian-sounding name, the aims of the occupation of La Quimera are founded very much in reality, as the occupation is part of Spain’s ‘Autonomous Movement’. With over sixty buildings in Madrid, and up to 600 across Spain, occupations by this kind of social movement have been using abandoned buildings for decades as spaces to work with working-class and other marginalised communities that live nearby. La Quimera’s occupants outline their aims online: ‘To generate an infrastructure that serves social movements’ and to ‘challenge and question private property, acting directly against it by squatting an abandoned space, handing it over to use, to enjoy, and to meet the community’. Had I been here two days earlier, according to their website, a platform more sophisticated than that of many small businesses, I would have been able to get a taste of this practical, hands-on movement: I could have taken free classes on how to maintain my bicycle, how to hack a website from my laptop or how to garden in my flat; I could have attended feminist groups, housing meetings providing expert, free legal advice, or applied to host my own political meetings on an issue of my choosing. 33

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A sheet draped over the front of the building told the neighbourhood that those occupying the building practise the beliefs of this political movement. As wide as the building is long, the sheet read: La Quimera de Lavapiés: CSOA. It is by no means unusual to spot something hanging on the front of a residential building in Spain: flags and banners are often draped from balconies, especially in Catalonia. But sheets adorning a building’s façade that contain the acronym CSOA (Centro Social Okupado Autogestionado or Occupied, Self-Governed Social Centre) represent an autonomous grassroots political movement that has helped foster a new generation of activists, organising with new ideas and new methods. While in the 1970s and 1980s squats had existed, emptied, and then reappeared all over Madrid, the next set of ‘secondgeneration’ occupations in the 1990s had at their hearts a commitment to reach out to those beyond the graffitied walls of an abandoned building. For these squatters, social change would not simply be achieved by resisting the state, one disobedient act at a time, or by demonstrating that a world without private property was in fact possible. Instead, they were encouraging radicalism by opening their doors and engaging with the public. During this era, a squat would no longer be just an end in itself, but a tool to produce wider social change. At least that’s what the occupation of number twenty-four aimed to achieve. However, social centres (especially La Quimera) are not short of critics. And there was one of those critics in the square the night of the demonstration – but not from the right. Okupas, as they are known in the press, have mainly been criticised in the last few years by the right-wing 34

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party Ciudadanos. ‘Spain is becoming a paradise for Okupaciones,’ the party has tweeted. Ciudadanos estimates that there are 80,000 buildings illegally occupied in Spain and a party spokesperson has said that ‘mafias in many cases are behind the occupations’. This is, of course, partially true for some occupied empty buildings. El Raval, a gentrifying area of Barcelona just off Las Ramblas that had long been associated with crime, now has to grapple with the fact that the buildings emptied thanks to the financial crash have become a hotspot for so-called ‘narco-apartments’, where empty buildings are used for the sale of drugs and prostitution. However, in the eyes of the right in Spain, narco-apartments and second-generation squats are one and the same. But on this particular evening the critic of La Quimera comes from within its own ranks. Carlos, in his late twenties, dressed in an un-ironed white shirt and holding a tan leather suitcase, leans against a wall chatting with friends, keeping one eye on the demonstration and the other on his mobile phone until the demonstration has finished. A qualified lawyer, Carlos is part of the group called ‘SolLawyers’ that was formed after the month-long mass protest of 2011. Although trained in law, Carlos doesn’t work as a lawyer. Instead, he is a social housing officer for some of the few social housing estates in Madrid. The years of encouraging home ownership have left Spain with massive underinvestment in the rental sector and a chronically underfunded public, subsidised housing sector. Only 11 per cent of all houses in Spain are for rent and of those only 2 per cent are public sector. But Carlos regularly offers his legal services for free to anyone detained by the police while 35

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taking to the streets. Indeed, he spent last night at a police station representing one of those arrested and again is available tonight: his name, Twitter handle and phone number were circulated online a few hours before the demonstration began.

T H E D E M O C R AT I C T U R N Only when there are just a few people left in the plaza does Carlos leave. Along with him and a few others, I head to an indoor market that stays open until late. I had passed this market earlier in the day when there were people pushing shopping carts passing through its doors. The counters with legs of jamón have since been taken down, but a few bars inside remain open, where everyone discusses last night’s riot and who or what really killed Mame. The police have issued a statement that Mame was not chased but that he died of natural causes, and, following news that another police chase of a group of manteros somewhere else in the city occurred at around the same time of Mame’s death, real doubts about the police’s role are raised. Right now for the group the truth doesn’t matter. Their anger at a political system that ignores people in need of institutional change is long held and never takes much to be ignited. Carlos – or, as his friends call him, ‘el Hablador’ (the Talker) – tells me about the importance of social centres, about their true value for Spanish society, and about his time in La Quimera. Carlos joined the occupation in 2016. It wasn’t the first building he had squatted. He was active in grassroots politics as a teenager before and after 15-M. He has memories 36

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of occupying buildings in his small home town west of Madrid, or, as he refers to it, of ‘doing experiments’. Such memories include regular threats of violence from neo-Nazis in his home town. When Carlos joined La Quimera, he thought he was going to be part of a social centre that would engage with the local community, as their mission statement declared that it would be a centre realising some of the key ideals of 15-M: local engagement and accessibility. But after a few months of working at La Quimera, Carlos left, and when he did he published a blog on Facebook explaining why the centre was betraying the vision of creating an inclusive space. In the twelve-page blog post, entitled ‘Doing Politics Without Anyone’, he argued that the founding mission of the group was to create a project of the neighbourhood, or ‘de barrio’. ‘A space for neighbours where they could do politics from the margins, a space to construct and offer more possibilities outside the law and against the law.’ An occupied space that would be a ‘social centre where the social element will be stronger than the centre. A space to do politics … between equals and for ourselves.’ ‘But they just didn’t want to engage with people outside the doors of the building,’ he told me. One of Carlos’s friends that night wears a T-shirt with an intricately patterned skull above the words Patio Maravillas, the name for what was once Madrid’s largest and most active social centre. A home where the radical left could meet, Patio Maravillas was located in a school building that had been abandoned for years and occupied since the summer of 2007. Although it no longer exists, it was instrumental in the 37

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organisation of 15-M, and therefore has gone down in social movement history. The year Patio gained its legendary status, it was not only the Spanish who were protesting. The year 2011 was a remarkable one for mass protests around the world after Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit seller in Tunis, had set himself on fire after his cart was confiscated by a police officer who slapped and spat on his face in December of the previous year. Large demonstrations in Tunis followed, and, by January, Tunisia’s president ended his twenty-four-year rule, fleeing the country. Nearly a month later, Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule of Egypt ended after the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In Libya, protesters weakened Colonel Gaddafi’s rule and, with support from the US and UK, saw him removed from power. In both Yemen and Syria, protesters also took to the street to demand political change. By the end of 2011, popular protest had swept around the world so fervently that TIME magazine awarded its annual ‘Person of the Year’ award, an honour for the individual who had exerted the most influence in the world in a given year, to ‘The Protestor’. The edition featured two Spanish activists. One of those featured was Jon Aguirre Such, a Basque architecture student aged twenty-three. If you look closely at the most famous photo of the 15-M march in Madrid, you can spot his pencil-thin moustache and jet-black hair just above the letter ‘O’ of the demonstration’s banner. A few months before TIME magazine listed him as one of the most influential people in the world, however, Aguirre Such had little to do with politics. He had always been political, but his 38

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activism was confined to his university campus. For years he had organised radical thinkers to speak to his classmates about how architecture could be democratised and made more citizen-led. The typical guest speaker invited during his undergraduate days was a sociologist, geographer or anthropologist, until, in early 2011, he decided it was time to invite a political activist. A friend had mentioned a group called ‘Real Democracy Now’ (¡Democracia Real YA!) that was organising a march and collecting signatures online. Aguirre Such went to their website, read their manifesto and added his name. He also invited the group to visit his campus and give a talk. On the evening of 13 March 2011, Aguirre Such spoke at a small assembly at Patio Maravillas. Thanks to his articulate and clear speaking style, he was appointed a press officer for the movement, propelling a complete outsider to the centre of 15-M. Patio’s deliberative and open culture allowed for someone like Aguirre Such to join the movement. In places like this across Spain, a new movement was building, unlocking a wave of political talent, slowly creating an alternative kind of politics. As the doors of second-generation squats opened to locals, a generation of activists poured in. Social movements against housing, unemployment and corruption all began to use these spaces to plot their political campaigns. Had they organised their campaigns in spaces provided by a political party, the party’s ideas and practices would inevitably have moulded them. Instead, deep inside second-generation squats, established political traditions could be ignored. And within the confines of the walls of buildings without 39

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plumbing, electricity or heating, unaffiliated and detached, a new generation of activists had the freedom to develop their own political practices. One of the most important shifts in practice of the new, autonomous Spanish left was noticeable in the way political meetings were held. Gathered in a circle, activists from organisations such as Real Democracy Now would hold an ‘assembly’ (like the ones witnessed in 15-M) where a decision would be reached only if there was consensus among those gathered. This radical democratic method of political organisation had a name: horizontalism. In theory, horizontalism means that no voice can be held to have more value than another. The likelihood of minority viewpoints being ignored decreases and the chance of debating a wider variety of issues increases. In this environment, an experienced activist and a newcomer are equals and each one has the same amount of access to the decision-making process as the other. As a consensus rather than a majority must be reached, an equality of expression is created. Horizontalism was one of the main values of 15-M and has a rich history in Spain. From the country’s many anarchist groups over the last hundred years, to the anti-military and conscientious objectors of the 1970s, to feminist activist groups such as Mujeres de Negro (Women in Black), they all tended to use horizontal methods in an assembly-based format. Most recently in Spain, political activists from the Global Justice Movement of the 1990s have organised horizontally. During this decade of unchecked globalisation, the IMF, World Bank and G8 spread free-market ideologies around the world. In 40

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response, anti-capitalist activists gathered in their thousands to protest. In 1999 in Seattle and in 2001 in Genova, activists took buses and planes to gather together in solidarity against the new global elites. As they crisscrossed the globe in support of one another, Spain played host to several key meetings. In the small city of Zaragoza in 2001 and in Ciudad Real in 2003, activists from around the world participated in large horizontal assemblies.7 When different radical leftist groups began using secondgeneration squats, hundreds of social movements underwent a series of subtle, yet hugely significant, organisational, strategic and ideological changes. The new style of politics that began to emerge – local, democratic, inclusive, issue-led – went beyond the distinctions of left and right. The first major change was ideological. With open, welcoming squats the new home of the radical left, and the Global Justice Movement unable to resist the power of globalisation, the popularity of transnational activism receded. Activists didn’t have to wait for the next global or European meeting. Now their local squat hosted meetings. This shift from the transnational to the local had the impact of fundamentally changing activists’ political focus. Gone was simple condemnation of the intergovernmental beasts of the world and a plea to convince people that ‘another world is possible’. Now, as sociologist Cristina Flesher Fominaya explains in her work on Spanish social movements, activists began a ‘sustained, profound and engaged critique of the democratic institutions put in place during the Spanish transition to democracy’.8 The attention of smart and committed campaigners now fell on the 41

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‘specific mechanisms that facilitate political corruption, lack of transparency and lack of “real” democracy’.9 Fominaya refers to this ideological change as a ‘democratic turn’. No longer was there an ‘out of hand rejection of the state and political class’, where previously the radical left’s political demands had ‘centred around a rejection of the state as fundamentally illegitimate’.10 Now the left employed a ‘highly organised attack on the illegitimacy of representative democratic situations, using the courts (both national and international) and the law to hold politicians and officials accountable for their actions within the legal framework of the state itself.’ No longer would these movements simply be anti-political. They now called for a deep re-engagement with politics, and, after the economic crisis hit, the sector in urgent need of attention was housing. The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca or PAH) is Spain’s most successful social movement and an excellent example of this change. Set up in Barcelona in 2009, the PAH has helped stop thousands of evictions across Spain with direct non-violent action to prevent bailiffs from repossessing a home, while also offering free legal housing advice to people who have defaulted on their mortgages. They also lobby governments with clear housing policy changes, rather than contesting the very idea of property itself. Following the democratic ideological shift that had taken place, the radical left in Madrid began to think like shrewd politicians of major political parties rather than angry radicals of minor political sects. Press releases would be sent to the 42

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media and press conferences would be held before large demonstrations. A communication style was agreed upon and stuck to. The radical left that was being born was a movement that was willing to adapt, collaborate, share, alter its methods and engage with political institutions. Those noted above are just a few examples of social movements acting in this way. There are many more. What is so crucial is that when this commitment to assembly-based discussion through consensus was taken to Spain’s most public of places during 15-M – a city’s plaza, where both the old and the young congregate – ordinary people with no interest in the day-to-day business of politics were welcomed. The voices of political novices suddenly mattered just as much as those of seasoned politicos in meetings. The radical left’s strategy in Spain was changing and their popularity was increasing. Their appeal was broad but their values were principled. Complex political demands were being distilled into simple messages and horizontalism was providing a direction of travel for a new kind of politics. One of the main factors for 15-M occurring was, of course, the underlying economic conditions in Spain after the financial crisis. At the time of the occupations, in May 2011, unemployment in Spain stood at 21 per cent, the highest in the EU and more than double the continental average. Youth unemployment was 41 per cent, and of all those aged between sixteen and nineteen, a staggering 64 per cent were unemployed. One in five under thirties still hadn’t landed their first job, and half of those who had found work were employed on short-term contracts. But it was these shifts in the political culture of the 43

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radical-left grassroots movements in Spain that played a huge role in the large mobilisations on the left that Spain witnessed over the last decade.

THE DRAGON The following day I travel to La Elipa, another working-class district in the east of Madrid, with a list of social centres I had gathered from the group in the market. I’d come to find La Dragona (The Dragon), an LGBTQ social centre that has been occupied since October 2008, and is more in line with the inclusive ethos of Patio. The building, a 130year-old modernist structure, is apparently located outside the entrance to Madrid’s largest cemetery, La Almudena, a burial ground of 120 acres with five million bodies buried inside its walls – the population of Madrid is three million. Leaving the metro, I try to follow a detour from memory that avoids the major roads. I walk up a hill and get lost in a housing estate of apartment blocks only a few metres apart with bars on the lower windows, washed clothes and white linen bedsheets hanging from them and the sound of Latin-American Spanish inside. Beyond the housing estate, I see black buckets lining a pavement with lilies, roses and poppies that hang over their edges. Opposite is the cemetery’s palatial entrance, and on either side of it are two large modernist buildings, both made from red brick with faded forest-green shutters and chipped wrought-iron entrance gates. But the one on the left has a piece of wood (not a sheet like in Lavapiés) spray-painted in 44

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white, black and red hanging from its first floor that reads ‘La Dragona: CSOA’. La Dragona was occupied three years before 15-M and is another example of what was occurring within social movements in Spain. The entrance is through a small lobby on the walls of which are two large posters. The first lists a timetable with the days of the week and space underneath for pinned pieces of paper advertising workshops, classes and assemblies. Above, an orange card reads: ‘Welcome to La Dragona. You are in your home. Look after it.’ Close to the door on the other side is a football table, a few old office chairs and a broom. The wall on the right is painted red. On it, in black block capital letters, is a list of the ten ethical codes that people entering La Dragona must observe: 1) The space is free of male violence and trans, lesbian, bi and homophobia; 2) Our bodies are ours; 3) No means no; 4) Don’t presume anything – identities are selfdetermined; 5) Don’t take it as a given: ask; 6) Respect diversity; 7) No sexists, no lads, no staring; 8) Faced with aggression: react!; 9) You are not alone; 10) Drugs: legal or illegal are not an excuse. Know your limits. La Dragona also has a website with a mission statement: Self-management is a project that emerges from the idea of liberating a space for the young, the working class, for the neighbourhood, for the city, for everyone [spelt as the feminine todas]. Its intention is to fill a dead space, a forgotten building, which we saw empty for many years. It opened to weave networks of participation and collective growth for those who have always lived here, as well as 45

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new neighbours. A combative space, against speculation, against the commodification of leisure, against the capitalist market that these days shows its inability to satisfy the needs of people who are unable to save themselves. A space that works in a horizontal assembled and selfmanaged manner.

There is an eight-page document below the timetable that sets out who has the keys and when, responsibility for the building and the use of the rooms. The end of their first public declaration states: ‘a social centre for each neighbourhood’. The centre also has reviews online. There are fifteen reviews that appear on Google with an average of 4.7 stars. The first review states simply: ‘more raves’ (four stars). La Dragona was occupied on 3 October 2008 by a group of young people because, as the website declares, they wanted to ‘rehabilitate the building and put it at the disposal of social movements and the people of Madrid, especially from the barrio of La Elipa’. That rehabilitation is deeply symbolic of some of the economic challenges Spain has faced over the last few decades. One of the companies that provides public services in Madrid, and has control over the cemetery that La Dragona sits next to, is Funespaña. Funespaña was once publicly owned, until it was sold into private hands by Madrid’s conservative mayor in 1992 for the price of just 100 pesetas – what today would be valued at €0.60. The company was judged to be virtually bankrupt by a man who, a few months after the sale, would go on to become a shareholder and member of 46

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the company’s board of directors. A few months after the sale, Funespaña registered a profit of 800 million pesetas and twenty years later a court estimated that the company should have been sold for €7.4 million. The council lost income from the sale and also lost future earnings, as Funespaña went on to make a profit every year apart from one. During this period, the price of a funeral increased. In 2016 the cost of after-death services was €4,765, compared with €2,566 in 2008. Around 25,000 people die every year in Madrid, causing financial worry at an emotionally traumatic time. And the condition of the cemetery worsened: statues were allowed to crumble, and one of the buildings outside was left abandoned, until a young group of activists occupied it in 2008, opening it up to the neighbourhood. And it’s not just economic history that looms large around La Dragona. Just around the corner, on the red-brick cemetery wall, is a plaque commemorating Las Trece Rosas (The Thirteen Roses) who, as it reads, ‘gave their lives for liberty and democracy on the day of 5 August 1939’. In the months following the Civil War, thirteen young women were imprisoned and, along with fifty-six other prisoners, were executed that day by firing squad after being tortured by Franco’s police. The thirteen young women, members of a youth socialist organisation, stood accused of, as historian Sir Paul Preston writes, ‘a non-existent plot to murder Franco’.11 In victory Franco governed with an iron fist. Martial law lasted until 1948, his ‘Victory Parade’ speech in May 1939 setting the tone for his starkly anti-Semitic, fascist, authoritarianism with which he would rule: ‘Let us 47

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not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many.’12 The execution of ‘The Thirteen Roses’ can be explained both by their left-wing political affiliation and also by their gender. During and after the Civil War, violence towards women was a key characteristic of Franco’s police and army, as Sir Paul Preston catalogues in his seminal study of the violence of Franco’s regime, The Spanish Holocaust. If arrested, women were often raped in police stations and transferred to concentration camps or prisons. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbols of the yoke and arrows.13 One story in the book, tragically among so many from the war and the years under Franco, was of a homeless mother arrested by the police who ‘called to her son who was crying. On hearing that his name was Lenin, they picked him up by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a wall.’14 While this plaque remembers the crimes of Franco and his regime, on the other side of the cemetery wall until 2012 there was a memorial to the Condor Legion, a division of German Luftwaffe sent by Hitler to help Franco and responsible for the bombing of Guernica. La Dragona is a repudiation to all of this history. It’s an attempt to fill in where society and the economy have failed, it is an attempt to enable communities that appear atomised to be collectivised. Its place is also as a reminder of Spain’s history and its injustices. It fulfils the objectives of the plaques, both inside and outside the cemetery walls, that honour 48

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opposing moments from Spain’s history: indeed, it acts as a living, breathing plaque, a reminder of what has gone before.

FA S C I S T O C C U PAT I O N S Social centres that act as spaces for concrete political change in the lives of Madrileños are not just a feature of left-wing activism. Back on the metro, I head for Plaza de Colón to visit another occupied building, this time in a building that once housed a bank. Situated in a less residential area than La Dragona, this social centre neighbours luxury clothing shops and a Hard Rock Café, and, only a few blocks away, there is the political headquarters of the then ruling party, the Partido Popular (PP or People’s Party). As traffic pours past on a busy road separating the station from the building, I don’t have to look very hard to find the blue and white flag fluttering on the roof that reads ‘Hogar Social – Somos Lo Que Hacemos’ (Social Home – We Are What We Do). This three-storey building is occupied permanently, unlike the social centres of the left, and I could see the mattresses on the second floor pushed up against the windows and a room scattered with pink and yellow toys. The front doors of the building are smashed, the glass is broken and covered in paint. This space is occupied by a grassroots organisation of neo-Nazis, and while its activists are at the other end of the ideological spectrum, the location they occupy is just as symbolic. The grey and brown building is the ex-headquarters of Banco Madrid. Banco Madrid was declared bankrupt in March 2015, a few years after the financial crisis, after 49

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creditors withdrew their money when the bank was accused of laundering the profits from organised crime. The bank mainly catered for the rich, but 300,000 small investors (mostly pensioners) deposited an average of €11,000 each – and all of these small investors lost their money after the bank went under. It was one of the biggest fraud cases in Spanish history and one that would plague Spain for the next twelve years. One of its executives even fled to an island off the north of Venezuela, undergoing plastic surgery several times to evade the police. Like La Dragona, Hogar Social has online reviews. On Google, seventy-eight reviews are listed with an average of 3.9 stars. ‘They do great social work with Spaniards who are marginalised by power and who are abandoned’ (four stars). ‘A ray of light where darkness is taking over the world’ (five stars). ‘Nazis’ (one star). Hogar Social occupies this building to highlight the economic injustices Spanish people face. The money lost at the hands of corrupt bankers, the ensuing homelessness and rise in poverty are all on their agenda. However, their understanding of Spanish people is limited to a racial conception of citizenship. After the terrorist attack in Brussels in 2016, some of its occupants threw smoke cans and flares at a mosque in Madrid, and more recently they took to the streets calling for the removal of ‘Latin groups’ from certain areas of the capital. This group has found a political voice in Spain over the last few years with the rise of the far right. In 2018’s regional elections in Andalusia, Vox, once a fringe party created in 50

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2013, burst onto the political scene, winning twelve council seats after campaigning on an anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and anti-Catalan platform. Its leader, Santiago Abascal, an ex-PP councillor and the grandson of a Francoist mayor, has rallied against the ‘dictatorship of political correctness’, has attacked the ‘gender ideology’ of Spanish feminists – a group which the party calls hembristas (feminazis) and which he claims ‘criminalises’ all men15 – and has argued for the building of ‘insurmountable walls’ in Spain’s North African enclaves.16 Uniquely among the modern Spanish right, Vox position themselves as defenders of the Christian re-conquest of Spain, rescuing it from the Moors. In a campaign video for the 2018 regional elections, Abascal was filmed on horseback with a group of other male riders on an Andalusian plain. Andalusia currently celebrates its regional day on 28 February. During the election, Vox suggested changing this to 2 January, the day of the end of Moorish rule and the Christian re-conquest of Spain following the fall of Granada in 1492. Their electoral breakthrough in 2018 was welcomed by former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, who tweeted: ‘The Reconquista begins in the Andalusian lands and will be extended in the rest of Spain.’ When the party launched its national campaign for the 2019 elections, it chose Covadonga in Asturias, the location where the Reconquista began in 718 and the Moors suffered their first defeat in the battle for the peninsula that lasted until 1492. The links with the US extend past David Duke and straight to Trump’s White House, as his ex-adviser Steve Bannon has praised the party as ‘ready to defend its borders’. This link may 51

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explain where the far-right party gained its national election slogan: Hacer España grande otra vez (Make Spain great again). The party’s anti-immigrant discourse has been fuelled by an anti-globalisation message. Vox’s second most senior politician, Ortega Smith, attempted to use the refugee crisis to rally voters from the two other conservative parties by describing the arrival of refugee boats on Spain’s shores as the product of a global conspiracy. Rather than civil war, underdevelopment and long-term political and economic crises triggering the movement of millions from parts of the Middle East and Africa, he attributed the crisis to ‘globalism controlled by the Soros and Merkels and companies of the world [who] want to sell us the idea of a humanitarian crisis’.17 This building is the sixth the group has squatted in two years. The blue and white flag has flown above other buildings in Madrid, which include the ex-headquarters of No-Do,18 once Franco’s propaganda machine. It is the architecture that sticks out most for me this afternoon; before I leave, I spot the name of the plaza that the building sits in. Thanks to the failure of the free market, the neo-Nazis have made camp in the ruins of a bank in a square named after the Iron Lady, the free-market champion herself – Plaza Margaret Thatcher.

A DEFICIT OF POSSIBILITIES The weekend of the disturbances in Lavapiés, the Saturday newspapers all lead with commentary on the riots. ABC, a right-wing newspaper, carries ten pages of coverage. An article inside is headlined: ‘Lavapiés is the future if the law isn’t 52

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imposed in Europe and its borders.’ In a few days an autopsy will declare that Mame died from congenital heart disease, a rare heart defect he would have had from birth. The rightwing press will publish a host of articles over the next few days when this information is released, criticising the mayor’s inability to quickly condemn the riot, as well as the actions of two of her councillors who tweeted suggestions that the police chased Mame. To try to heal wounds between the council and the police, in a few months time the city council will give the officers who tried to resuscitate Mame medals of honour. On my way to Traficantes de Sueños (Dream Traffickers), an independent bookshop in La Latina, to meet a man from Andalusia I had spoken to the night before in the market to learn more about life inside the centres, I pass through Puerta del Sol. It was here, as night fell over the shops and offices that surround the square on the night of 15 May 2011, that one of the group of demonstrators stood and through a megaphone read the 15-M manifesto to begin the monthlong occupation. After the demonstration we came here freely. We came together to defend our dignity and political and social consciousness. We don’t represent any political party or association. We share a will to change. We have come here because we want a society which values life over economic and political interests.

Twelve hours earlier the small group had marched through the capital, along with thousands of others. Indeed, Spain’s largest 53

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cities were brought to a complete standstill by protesters marching behind eight-metre-wide banners that in large black print demanded ‘Real Democracy Now’. The police arrived at 4am on 15 May and asked the group to move. Instead, they locked arms and formed a chain. The police broke them up, dragging them across the plaza. By sunrise, they had arrested nineteen people. Someone was filming the whole exchange, however, and posted the video on Twitter. Within hours 10,000 descended on the square. The occupation trended on social media under a blizzard of different hashtags – ‘SpanishRevolution’, ‘Don’tVoteFor Them’, ‘WeAreNotLeaving’, ‘TakeTheSquare’, ‘TheyDon’t RepresentUs’ and ‘LosIndignados’ – but eventually it was the date of the protest that stuck: 15-M. By sunset on Tuesday 17 May, the infrastructure of a small town emerged. Under purple and white tarpaulin, a kitchen, a library and a crèche were built. Sofas were passed over heads, poles were secured in the ground. Cleaning duties were assigned, toilets installed, electricity powered in and Wi-Fi turned on. Huddled around tables under low tents, hackers programmed live streams of the square’s discussions. Small committees run by the activists from Real Democracy Now began coordinating this unprecedented experiment not only of mass protest but of large-scale radical democracy. This wasn’t a riot or an unruly mob. There were rules to this uprising: no one from the institutional left – trade unions or political parties – was allowed to join in an official capacity. They were welcome, but not as representatives of their respective organisations. No flags denoting political 54

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organisations could be raised. And this was not a party: heavy drinking and drug use were not permitted. To join this occupation, there was no number to call or badge or colour to wear. Simply cross the road, enter the plaza and sit on the floor to wait for your turn to speak in an assembly. Or not. You could just sit and listen. With people sitting cross-legged on their jumpers and coats or stray pieces of cardboard, gazing up at complete strangers, social norms in this plaza were temporarily suspended. Strangers who would normally avoid eye contact on the bus or in the supermarket now sat huddled together, sandwiched between sleeping bags for so long that the print of the pavement would etch itself into the palm of their hands. They explained to each other how they couldn’t pay next month’s bills, how their job was on the line, how they were on the verge of homelessness. And together they began to discuss a political and economic alternative to the one under which they were living. Complete strangers shared their greatest fears and wildest ambitions, with a feeling of complete disbelief at what they were witnessing, but coupled with a sense of absolute certainty about why it was happening. The occupation in Madrid lasted a month. While the outpouring of anger and indignation was principally aimed at the economic consequences of the crash, the constitutional and legal settlement formed following the death of Franco was a key contributing factor to such huge levels of mobilisation. But this wasn’t blind anger and indignation. It was anger at the specifics of that settlement. Therefore, it is crucial to remember that 15-M and what came after it were reformist 55

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– a dirty word in many left-wing circles in Spain. 15-M was deeply engaged with the political process and had a strong desire to reach out to those not traditionally interested in direct action. Spain was witnessing something remarkable: for hours and days – and, in some of Spain’s cities, for weeks on end – in huge groups, ordinary people critically discussed the crisis engulfing the country. The sound of political debates like these normally drifted out of university seminar rooms, parliaments or TV studios. In May 2011 they drifted out of plazas in the heart of city centres and into the warm night air. But this square has long been a site for public protest. In 1931, when the Second Republic was declared, thousands flooded the space, leaving the country with one of its most iconic photos: a black and white picture of a crowd dressed in suits and bow ties with the striped Republican flag high in the air. The plaza continues to inspire political action by groups in the city. Today, next to one of the white stone water fountains, there is a group of around fifty men huddled under Senegalese flags with a crowd of shoppers around them. Some carry the same sign that Mame was photographed holding: ‘No Human Being is Illegal.’ In the centre of the group, a handful of men, low to the ground, swing their arms, singing a song that becomes louder and louder until one of them lifts his head into the air and sends a piercing scream across the square. When the group has finished, the crowd clap, pick up their bags and continue with their day. Located in a two-storey building on a road where all its neighbours dwarf it in size, the Traficantes de Sueños bookshop 56

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has just reopened for the afternoon. After a few minutes Paco emerges to greet me, wearing the same knitted black beanie he had been wearing the other night. Despite being over six foot tall, Paco is referred to by his friends as ‘Pacquito’. There is a queue outside a door near the back of the shop. Three young men with files of papers in clear plastic wallets under their arms chat in French while waiting to enter the room. Opened in 1995, it is not just an alternative bookshop. ‘Traficantes de Sueños is a collective,’ explains Paco. ‘We don’t only sell books. We also help undocumented migrants to get papers.’ And that’s not all. Traficantes hosts public events and has a young, in-house publishing arm that publishes under a creative commons licence. Up the stairs we settle down in a stockroom where the only occupants are cardboard boxes stuffed full of books sitting on black wire bookshelves. ‘We say in this country that there has always been a deficit of possibilities,’ Paco says. ‘15-M demonstrated that it was possible to create a really open culture, where anyone could participate, anyone could have a say, anyone could join.’ Paco knows many of the social centres around the city well. He came from Almeria to Madrid to study, and after graduating he remained in Madrid, moving from occupation to occupation. And after the crisis, while many of his friends emigrated, he remained in Spain finding what work he could. ‘At the beginning everything was to do with mortgages – people just couldn’t pay them. But then after 15-M it was about much more.’ I’m surprised to learn that Paco doesn’t come from a political family. His dad worked in the police and his mum in a bar 57

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owned by the family as well as in a local shop back in Almeria. And despite living in Madrid for over a decade, Paco hasn’t lost his thick Andalusian accent. He still drops his ‘s’s and speaks with a rhythm wholly different from the Catalan-accented Spanish I learned. His hands lie on his lap while he talks, until he flicks them out mid-sentence, the way a card dealer deals out a hand in a casino. ‘I remember after 15-M, there were a lot of social centres that opened, and some worked very well and others didn’t last very long,’ he begins before turning to explain the challenges of running a social centre. To make a space open is difficult. If I define myself as a ‘liberal anarchist’ I can feel very comfortable with lots of things, but by doing this I can be very exclusionary. Liberal anarchism has a different language with specific codes. It’s a kind of language that can insult people. For an occupied space to work, there has to be a will from people who are opening the space to experiment. That’s what’s radical: to negotiate within a space, the possibility of dialogue, along, yes, with the possibility of confrontation in the streets. But seeing how to prolong a space with just a minimum of rules and then have flexibility to experiment with the rules … I mean being able to try to work thematically with different people who are not the same, and then to be able to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work and to be able to move forward. A person who is sixty years old will not see the world the same as someone who is twenty-five years old. 58

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But we need to be able to live together and learn from each other – I think that is the challenge. It is not that we are so different, but look at the social context today. The idea of living like a heterosexual couple with a nuclear family model has been put into question by the generation in our families that questioned this. The communes of the 1970s and 1980s that broke these assumptions, they serve as a reference to generate a space within a city, but let’s say these movements never worked on the issue of democracy. This generation has put it on the table.

Paco’s descriptions illustrate that social centres are not just spaces for radical left-wing political organisations; they are centres for democratic experiments. This all points to a word that many people have been air quoting this trip: ‘reformist’. Still a dirty word in some circles, it is really an integral feature of these movements. We are sitting in between hundreds of thousands of pages of theoretical work on the left – and while Paco would never admit this, he goes about changing Spain every day: through where he lives, where he works, where he shops. His politics isn’t posturing, it isn’t theoretical; it’s practical, it’s on his doorstep, it’s his life. I arrange to meet Paco that evening in a bar covered from ceiling to floor in blue and white tiles to walk around Lavapiés. ‘You would never see anyone but men over the age of sixty in this bar five years ago,’ he tells me. ‘But now everyone is young and the beers are served with napkins on their tops.’ Paco used 59

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to live around here in empty buildings, ‘experimenting’. ‘I think we are in a moment of big change and on a good path,’ he says as we step out of the bar into the drizzling rain. ‘I think ten years ago no one could imagine that we would be where we are now. Institutional politics was, in a sense, an ultra-closed regime, deaf to many of the things that happened on the street. Back then you didn’t see any cracks in the system to be able to transform it. I don’t really like metaphors, but before it was like hitting a wall. There was never any change.’ Now ex-members of Patio Maravillas are councillors and a radical left-wing party is a major national political party, attempting to build on some of these democratic themes. ‘Today, with all its weakness, in all its complexity and against its contradictions, the tools that have been generated by the street institutions and others allow us to continue moving forward and see what things we are going to transform or not.’ Paco says this as we stop outside a gym. ‘I used to live here,’ he says, pointing to the floor above the large glass doors. ‘I lived here for about a year. It was great. We created something amazing. I didn’t know everyone when we moved but then we stayed together and moved when we had to.’ There is a sense from Paco of both not belonging in the country and at the same time being deeply embedded in the neighbourhood. When we stop under a balcony where he rolls a cigarette, he nods at a few passers-by. We turn a corner and he’s surprised. ‘It’s gone. All this wasn’t here – the hotel, the shops, this cinema.’ Pablo seems philosophical about his past. He shrugs his shoulders and turns down the edges of his mouth when thinking about a 60

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cause to which he gave a period of his life, a commitment lived out in practice, but he doesn’t seem possessive or territorial over the meaning and legacy of his beliefs. Paco is heading south to Carabanchel too, and when the drizzle turns into a downpour we sprint for the metro.

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CHAPTER 2

FROM THE PLAZA TO PARLIAMENT PODEMOS AND THE NEW GENERATI ON

8.30am, Tuesday morning, Madrid 2018. Western Europe is gripped by freezing temperatures, thick snow and icy winds, and Spain’s capital, the continent’s highest, hasn’t escaped the blizzard. The Congress of Deputies, the Spanish parliament, looms opposite a statue of a frozen Miguel de Cervantes whose shadow stretches across a small square. With great flowing manes and a paw each posed on a solid ball resembling a globe, a pair of lions made from melted iron cannons used in the Spanish–Moroccan War in the 1920s sit squat in front of a high black fence, behind which is a set of large golden doors and a short shotgun-wielding police officer. The neighbourhood built around this eighteenthcentury building bustles with activity as parliament is to convene in thirty minutes. A long line of chauffeur-driven cars with blacked-out windows queues to enter the car park beneath the building. There are so many cars the queue snakes around the back, blocking all other traffic. A few taxis beep their horns. A truck driver theatrically raises his arms. I spot Mar García Puig, a member of Podemos – or, more precisely, a member of their Catalan branch En Comú Podem – in her thick red woollen coat in a crowd flowing out of the 65

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metro. Most have their eyes fixed on their feet, necks halfburied in a scarf. Mar looks up and smiles. I know her from Barcelona, where she still manages to spend the second half of each week, a commute made easier by the high-speed train that connects the two cities. An ex-editor for Seix Barral, one of the largest publishing houses in Spain, we met before she ran for political office at a book talk in Barcelona. I remember messaging her the night of the 2015 election before I returned home for the Christmas holidays to see if I could congratulate her in person. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she replied to my message. ‘I’m at the hospital. I’m in labour!’ The night Mar went from political activist to politician, she gave birth to twins. Before the morning’s legislative debate on housing, there will be a set of parliamentary questions and Mar is asking question thirteen. I take my seat on the upper floor of the chamber, which I’m shown to by a tall, well-groomed guard whose dark-brown suit and gold cufflinks match the mahogany desks with gold trimmings on the chamber floor below. Leaning on the handrail, I look down at the horseshoe-shaped chamber: a few politicians have already taken their seats. When a bell rings out, however, hundreds of men and women, mostly dressed in suits and dresses, pour through two side doors. It is easy to spot Mar’s Podemos colleagues in the crowd of lawmakers: dressed in drainpipe jeans and cream winter cable-knit jumpers; they wear Converse trainers and carry backpacks covered in badges. They look more like university students than politicians. It is easy to spot Mar, too, still in her thick red coat. With everyone seated in either a red leather conference armchair (opposition) or a black leather 66

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armchair (government), two enormous television screens hanging on the wall flicker on and the show begins.

TEJERO’S GUN MARK Rewind thirty-seven years and the bright spotlights revealed a very different scene. At around 6.30 in the evening on 23 February 1981, Spain’s newly democratic parliament was taking a landmark step in its transition from dictatorship to democracy. With Franco dead for six years, politicians were voting to elect a new prime minister. As the speaker read out the names of each of the 350 politicians for the historic vote, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero burst into the chamber, dressed in an olive-green military uniform and a flat black military beret and carrying a pistol. Flanked by his most loyal soldiers, armed with machine guns, Tejero stood halfway up the short staircase that leads to the chamber’s podium and yelled ‘Quieto todo el mundo!’ (Nobody move). He then fired a shot into the ceiling, sending most in the chamber scrambling under their desks. The dramatic scene, immortalised in Javier Cercas’s book The Anatomy of a Moment, revealed that even with Franco gone there remained many loyal to his brand of authoritarian politics. Within hours of Tejero launching a military coup, King Juan Carlos, a man chosen by Franco to continue his legacy, appeared on television screens behind his desk in the Zarzuela Palace kitted out in full military uniform to denounce the coup. The military intervention into democratic politics was then brought to a quick end. Juan Carlos ensured 67

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that Spanish democracy would survive and, unlike in many other countries, the transition from dictatorship to democracy would be a peaceful one. Had Tejero and his allies succeeded, it would have been the second coup against a democratically elected Spanish government in just forty years. While the coup itself was a failure, as a demonstration of power it was a success: push too hard for a democratic settlement that aimed to right the wrongs of the past, and, well, you had an idea of what those loyal to Franco would do. The perception of an ever present threat from pro-Franco forces ensured that the transition to democracy wouldn’t dig too deep into the past. The Amnesty Law of 1977 ruled that those with violent pasts (torturers, murderers, abusers) would escape justice and legal persecution as Spain’s political institutions advanced into a new democratic age. Spanish democracy would live, albeit in a unique form. From my seat, while the PP’s then prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, answers the first set of questions in his infamous monotone voice, I twist my neck up to the ceiling to try to find the bullet holes from Tejero’s gun. The ornately decorated, richly detailed domed ceiling curves away from me, and the glare from the row of spotlights that hang from a ridge on the wall, like lights of a theatre illuminating the stage below, make it impossible to focus. The parliamentary establishment that emerged from this peaceful but piecemeal transition was dominated by two parties for forty years: one conservative, born out of the reformist elements of Francoism, the Partido Popular (PP); and the other social democratic, with historic ties to one of 68

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the biggest unions in Spain, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). Over the following forty years, Spain’s democratic transition was consolidated. The country joined the European Union and repealed many Francoist laws. But the financial crisis of 2008 produced new threats to this political status quo, albeit non-violent and democratic threats, which emerged over a two-year period in the wake of one of the biggest economic crashes the country had ever seen. These threats, at first, presented themselves on the left in the form of Podemos, the fourth-largest parliamentary party in Spain; and on the right as Ciudadanos, the fifth-largest party until the November 2019 elections. With the addition of the far-right party Vox in the second elections of 2019, who became the third-largest party, new parties won 35 per cent of the vote, filling the chamber with a new generation of politicians who have brought an end to the domination of the political establishment created in the dying years of Francoism. Podemos, formed in January 2014 out of the momentum for change generated by 15-M, helped elect sixty-nine activists to parliament on a pro-immigration, anti-austerity, feminist agenda with a populist, anti-establishment message. They were, in the words of the sociologists documenting the high number of protests in Spain, an ‘institutionalised expression of political outrage and social unrest’.1 In just one general election, Spain’s parliament became more diverse (the first black politician in Spain’s history was elected, Rita Bosaho), more gender equal (40 per cent of seats were now held by women, the highest level of parity ever), and ever so slightly younger. Built on a political model resembling a mass movement more 69

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than a traditional political party, Podemos created a much more open and transparent form of political organisation than parties of the past. Participation was devolved at a local level through ‘circles’ that encouraged citizens from and inspired by 15-M to become involved in electoral politics. Those wanting to join the party could do so for free by registering online, as long as they were over the age of fourteen, and all of the party’s financial receipts were available online. However, the horizontal organising methods of 15-M that had emerged from the country’s social centres were sacrificed. In just a few months, a well-oiled, professional and hierarchical party machine was built. In the European elections in May 2014, the party won five seats and over one million votes. By October 2016, the party had 430,000 registered members. At the beginning of the political project, Podemos led in the national polls. Podemos wasn’t the only political newcomer making waves: Ciudadanos (Citizens), formed in Barcelona in 2006, began life as a regional Catalan force campaigning against the surge of support for a referendum on Catalan independence, mostly picking up disenfranchised PP voters. Led by a young, charismatic lawyer, Albert Rivera, who gained national notoriety after appearing naked in a magazine to express his party’s commitment to fighting corruption, the small party stood on a pro-business agenda. The 2015 general election left the Spanish parliament in a state of political deadlock for six months. For the first time, Spain’s political parties were unable to form a governing majority. Also for the first time since Franco’s death, a general election was re-run. With the old radical left, Izquierda Unida 70

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(United Left), winning one million votes but gaining little representation due to imbalances in the electoral system, Podemos saw an opportunity: with social democratic parties rapidly losing support across Europe, old and new radicals joined forces to replace (or surpass, as the party referred to it) the social democrats (PSOE) as the main parliamentary force on the left. With an agreement of fifty measures (such as raising the minimum wage and securing housing rights) that were presented in a manifesto resembling an IKEA brochure, the two parties campaigned separately but fought the election together, rebranding as Unidos Podemos. Later, they changed their name to Unidas Podemos, feminising the phrasal form of the Spanish word for ‘together’. While the second election campaign was short, it was not lacking in major events. As pro-independence parties in Catalonia continued to threaten an illegal referendum on independence from Spain, an online newspaper published a secret conversation between the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the boss of the Anti-fraud Office in Catalonia, Daniel de Alfonso, from 2014 in which they discussed the possibility of implicating pro-independence politicians in false corruption scandals. The narrative of ridding Spanish politics of its corrupt tendencies (a key pledge of the new parties) remained high on the agenda. The second event that left a big mark on the elections, however, tested people’s appetite for radical change. On the final day of the campaign, the UK voted to leave the EU. Spain’s political newcomers on the left had been able to make such dramatic advances in the last few years partly 71

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thanks to the country’s electoral system of proportional representation. Proportional representation permits a popular vote to be largely replicated in parliamentary seats, but the system has electoral disadvantages for small parties – another reason for the new alliance on the left of the new and old radicals. However, Unidas Podemos failed to make the electoral gains the polls had predicted. Turnout was 3.2 per cent lower than in December and Izquierda Unida voters stayed at home or gave their vote to PSOE. Compared with their combined vote in 2015, Unidas Podemos lost over one million votes; they gained seventy-one seats, more than Podemos had managed alone, but far fewer than they expected. Such a coalition of the radical left restricted Podemos’s appeal beyond its more radically minded base. Ciudadanos similarly suffered in the re-run election, losing eight seats. While the loyalty of their voters and cross-party appeal had limits, this re-run election did show that these new parties were here to stay. A few months later, with the social democrats agreeing to abstain from an investiture vote, the PP went on to form a minority government. After ten months without a government, Spain once again was ruled by the right. As Rajoy was sworn in, thousands gathered outside parliament to oppose his return to office. With the help of Podemos and regional nationalist parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country, PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez removed Mariano Rajoy from office and the PP from government in 2018. The tabling of a no-confidence vote came as a former treasurer of the PP, Luis Bárcenas, was found guilty of fraud and money laundering in the Gürtel 72

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case, a decade-long corruption scandal that implicated politicians as well as business officers (Rajoy was called to give evidence during the trial). Part of PSOE’s success came from Sánchez’s journey to power, which began after he was forced to resign as leader of PSOE in 2016 after his party colleagues forced him out for contemplating entering into a coalition with Podemos. It took him little time to reveal that it was the heads of banks and companies who had forced his colleagues’ hands. By 2017 he had been re-elected as leader of PSOE, a return that allowed him to create the perception of a more radical, leftwing leader than he – or his party – actually was. Sánchez was able to find common ground with Podemos, however, as the smaller party helped Sánchez govern for a little under a year. A budget drawn up by the two parties that rose the minimum wage by 22 per cent, addressed the cuts to pensions and unemployment benefit, and implemented rent controls saw them govern with a more left-leaning agenda. After calling elections in April 2019, PSOE, while failing to win a majority, took first place with 123 seats. Upon their election, every Podemos MP signed a code of ethics that renounced many of the perks elected officials enjoy. Podemos politicians have forgone an official car, free internet at home, a pension and a €3,000 annual spending limit on taxi journeys. They have also agreed to serve a maximum of only two terms and to cut their expenses to €850 a month, down from €1,820; the former figure is more in line with the three million people in Spain (one in five) who earned an average of €1,000 a month in 2016.2 73

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Part of the motivation for such changes can be explained by Podemos’s political anti-establishment narrative. But they are also an attempt to improve the reputation of parliament. Over the last decade Spain’s democratic institutions experienced a steep decline in trust. In 2007, according to Eurobarometer (the European Commission’s leading polling agency), 77 per cent of people in Spain claimed to be very or fairly satisfied with the way in which their democracy worked; however, by 2014 that number had dropped to 22 per cent.3 That sharp fall included trust in parliament. Before 2008, 50 per cent of people in Spain trusted the national parliament, but at the height of the crisis less than 10 per cent claimed to trust the institution.4

VIOLENCIA MACHISTA It is common for writers and journalists from outside Spain to base their descriptions of the country around noise, specifically how much of it there is. I have done it myself, and that cliché isn’t lost on me today. Despite the presence of microphones in front of each member of parliament, it’s tricky to hear a speaker over the chatting, laptop typing and shutter clicking of the group of photographers sitting in a pack in the corner. Sitting towards the middle of the chamber, after eleven opposition questions have been asked, Mar rises to her feet, bringing her microphone closer to her mouth. I lean forward slightly to see her when she asks her question. ‘Does the government believe that gender inequality has anything to do with the model of the economy?’ 74

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Mar’s question encapsulates a topic that activists have been raising for years and one at the heart of Podemos’s gendered criticism of the Spanish economy. But the topic has a particular relevance to the day’s political agenda thanks to another historic day of activism a few weeks before on International Women’s Day: La Huelga Feminista (Feminist Strike), or, as most referred to it, 8-M. United by the slogan ‘When We Stop the World Stops’, 5.3 million women in 2018 walked out of their workplaces for two hours on the morning of International Women’s Day to protest against unequal pay, sexual harassment and inequality in the distribution of domestic responsibility and labour between the sexes. Organised by Comisión 8M, a social movement of around 400 feminist associations and Spain’s largest unions (smaller unions carried out a twenty-four-hour strike), they brought the country to a near standstill, as every form of transport ran a reduced service and demonstrations flooded 120 Spanish cities and towns. In Barcelona 600,000 marched through the city; in Madrid one million.5 According to an El País poll, 82 per cent of the population supported the two-hour strike.6 The success of the strike, however, should not simply be measured by its popular support but by the breadth of its focus. Data from 2014 shows that, in Spain, women’s hourly earnings were 12.7 per cent lower than a man’s for similar tasks performed by men and women in the workplace.7 Another study from the National Institute of Statistics shows that women spend almost double the amount of time men do on unpaid work. While men spend fourteen hours a week on unpaid tasks (such as caring for children or family members, 75

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household chores or voluntary work), women dedicate an average of 26.5 hours a week on the same tasks.8 After taking her seat, Mar is read a short scripted reply about how ‘a country only evolves, progresses and grows when it counts on all its talent, the feminine talent and the masculine talent’. With an opportunity to respond, Mar is straight back on her feet. Standing again, this time holding the microphone on the desk in front of her, she replies, ‘Do you know that domestic work and care is mostly performed by women and is part of our economy? In fact,’ she continues, ‘a very important part. According to studies, it is 53 per cent of our GDP. But this work is invisible, it is carried out in situations of total precariousness, and isn’t recognised in any of the official statistics.’ Mar has two minutes before her microphone will be cut off and her voice silenced, so she speaks quickly and clearly. ‘Will your government finally take these jobs into account? Will they dignify them? Will they recognise them and will they make them visible?’ She sits down to a round of applause from the Unidas Podemos benches. Once seated, Mar picks up her phone. Another issue central to Podemos’s politics is pressing the government for action to reduce the prevalence of male violence against women. Between 2007 and 2017, 739 women were murdered in Spain as a result of gender violence.9 In 2016, 134,462 women reported being victims of gender violence10 and in 2017 Spain’s courts dealt with more cases of violence against women than ever recorded.11 Indeed, a few weeks after Mar’s question, Spain will be rocked by one of these cases that will become known as La 76

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Manada (the Wolf Pack), a name taken from a WhatsApp group used by five men who gang-raped an eighteen-year-old woman in Pamplona during San Fermín in 2016. In the early hours of the morning during the annual festival when bulls are released down narrow, busy streets, one of the men offered to walk the woman back to her car. Instead, he led her into the lobby of a building and took her mobile phone. Within half an hour, the woman had been raped by the five men. The woman was found later crying on a bench. The men (one a police officer and another a soldier) were acquitted of rape two years after the attack. In Spain, the law states that sex constitutes rape only if there has been violence or intimidation. Despite a video, recorded by the group and shared on their WhatsApp group, showing the eighteenyear-old motionless with her eyes closed during the attack, three judges from a Pamplona court argued that there wasn’t evidence of violence or intimidation. Indeed, one of the three judges argued that what had happened between the five men and the woman was consensual. The ruling will take Spain by storm. Leading politicians from all parties will question and condemn it. Following the acquittal, hashtags #Cuentalo (Tell it) and #YoTambién (Me Too) will trend and hundreds of thousands of women will fill Spain’s major streets again to demand change. In June 2019, the supreme court in Madrid overturned the Pamplona judges, ruling that the men’s actions did constitute rape rather than sexual assault. The five defendants had their sentences increased from nine to fifteen years each. Between 2011 and 2017, the amount of money the government allocated to programmes aimed at preventing 77

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gender violence was cut by 19 per cent.12 Following years of pressure from feminist groups and Podemos, the government allocated €1 billion of funding over five years in July 2017 to fight gender-based violence. This funding allows survivors of domestic abuse to access six months’ unemployment benefit, providing them with the financial independence to leave their violent partner. The package of funding came with a host of other policy changes too, such as training for health and medical staff to be able to identify abuse, and financial assistance and professional help to be given to survivors yet to file a criminal complaint. A 2015 report showed that, of 300 abused women, 91 per cent failed to contact the authorities out of fear that they or their partner would lose their job, and so the changes should go some way to helping women escape abusive partners.13 But on the day I visit parliament, yet again there has been another act of violence against women. I take my phone out, making sure the well-groomed guard in the dark brown suit can’t see, and flick through Twitter. Since sitting down, Mar has retweeted an article from a newspaper that runs stories about femicides under a section named ‘Violencia Machista’, an indication of how the work of political activists has normalised their gendered perspective on the nature of this type of violence. The story details the death of a thirteen-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl in a house fire the previous night, and the subsequent suicide of their father in Getafe, south of Madrid. The article explains how the police had found a note from the man confessing to murdering the children after the mother had left the house. The couple were in the process of 78

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separating, and the police believe that, when the man was left alone with the children, he set the house on fire, locking the children inside, before stepping in front of a train not far from the house. Above the news story Mar tweets ‘News like this is shocking. All strength to the mother, the family, and friends. You’ll never be alone.’

FEMINIST HEGEMONY Back outside and Cervantes is no longer standing alone in the small square. Since the morning, the police have closed the road leading to parliament and called for reinforcements. There are now several rows of police vans blocking the passage of around 1,000 doctors and nurses dressed in white and carrying signs on wooden sticks that read ‘NO’, with a pair of scissors drawn in the middle of the O. Another protest, another public service hit by austerity. Between 2009 and 2013, the health budget in Spain was cut by nearly 13 per cent. An extensive report by Amnesty International published in 2018 concluded that such cuts were responsible for increasing the average waiting time for operations, decreasing the quality of care offered to patients and shrinking the time patients spent with medical staff. These effects of funding cuts also fell disproportionately on ‘people with lower income’ and ‘people with chronic health conditions, people with disabilities, older persons, and people accessing mental health care’.14 There was strong resistance to these cuts following 15-M and those protesting today are a continuation of that resistance a decade on. The campaign against austerity 79

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was organised by sector and visualised in different ‘tides’ that flooded streets across Spain – in this case a sea of white coats. Seven years on from those initial demonstrations and medical staff are still having to make their voices heard. Emerging out of a gate at the front of the building, Mar ushers me back into parliament via a different entrance and to the canteen. ‘I still get so nervous when I speak in the chamber,’ she says as we queue, plastic trays in hand. ‘I was not a kind of traditional activist,’ she begins once we have taken our seats at one of the long tables in the middle of the busy room. ‘I was very much involved in things, like working with women writers and poetry made by women, but I was never … I never felt drawn to the traditional unions or political parties.’ Mar is not only referring to the larger unions that failed to back the twenty-four-hour Feminist Strike but also to the political party that would usually gain the votes of those, like her, wanting more transformative, radical change in Spain – Izquierda Unida (a party she’s in coalition with). She describes the left-wing party that emerged out of the old Communist Party, along with those larger unions, as ‘very masculine’ and as saying ‘typical Marxist things’. For someone like Mar, before the crisis there didn’t exist a political party with the kind of culture that spoke to her, that offered a path to political participation. Then along came Podemos. As the party emerged, Mar became integrated into a feminist group within Podemos called Podemos Feminismos. Since her election, she has been one of the leading parliamentary voices on reforming LGBT legislation to create a national body to promote and defend LGBT rights. 80

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Perhaps Mar’s idea of a more traditional activist is Lucía Martín, who in a green jumper and grey scarf, fresh from a speech on housing reform in the chamber, joins us briefly before departing to address the media. Prior to arguing for housing reform in parliament on behalf of Podemos, Lucía, also from Barcelona, was a spokesperson for the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages. In some ways Lucía personifies the Podemos revolution: taking activists from the street and helping them find political power to make the legislative changes they know need making in the interests of the majority. But if Lucía personifies how the new political party can offer a way for activists to gain power, Mar personifies how people with strong political beliefs, but not embedded in grassroots politics or attracted by the political process, can suddenly feel that a political party and institutional politics are a home and a career for them. ‘I thought it was important to be involved because in Podemos, well, I was a cultural worker, and Podemos has always had this important discourse about how you are in a culture and you have to work to change that culture.’ What Mar is referring to is an explicitly theoretical political perspective that the party’s co-founders and senior leaders, a small group of political scientists, have established. Centred around the work of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, they have focused on his idea of hegemony: that those in power win the consent of those they rule by manipulating a society’s values and culture. Since Gramsci’s death, his idea of hegemonic power has become a key concept in political battles and has featured in the left-wing populism theorised by political 81

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philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. While Laclau, an ex-professor at the University of Essex, died in 2014 before he saw Podemos’s success in adapting some of his ideas into political practice, Chantal Mouffe is still alive, living in London and publishing defences of these ideas. She has even published one in collaboration with Podemos co-founder Íñigo Errejón, in which she argues that the political battle between parties is fought ‘in the field of culture, because to a large extent that’s where common sense is built, and it’s also in the cultural field where one can subvert it’.15 ‘Those capable of persuading the majority to identify itself with their conception of the common good achieve hegemony,’ Mouffe has written.16 The Feminist Strike, and the wide support it gained, is a good example of this, and it’s one Mar uses to highlight its power. ‘Spanish television is awful,’ Mar tells me. ‘But television was another thing that was very important for the success of feminist strikes in Spain: journalists – including journalists you wouldn’t think about, for example from El País and this very big journalist and TV presenter called Ana Rosa Quintana – joined the strike and all the journalists made a manifesto called Las Periodistas Tambien Paran [Journalists Strike Too].’ ‘All the parties were a little bit lost with 8-M, including PSOE, because they totally missed what was going on. They couldn’t detect that apart from the traditional unions, there was a movement there that was very powerful,’ Mar continues. Podemos’s position in favour of a strike was clear, as it was the previous year when Mar and her Podemos colleagues participated in the Feminist Strike themselves, walking out of the 82

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chamber mid-session and standing with striking workers outside parliament. This year they did it again, and along with her male and female Podemos colleagues, Mar donated her day’s wages to the Coordinadora Feminista, the body organising the strike. But, in Mar’s opinion, ‘Last year wasn’t like this year.’ The MeToo campaign and the effects of austerity, along with years of activism by feminist groups, mean that violence against women is now unacceptable. ‘We have helped make an important cultural change regarding it. Feminists have won over a lot of young people, like a kind of hegemony. It’s a movement that is now fashionable.’ During lunch it becomes clear that, for Mar, these battles have not been merely theoretical: for her, sexist attitudes prevail in old, large unions and within the traditional political parties. However, she is quick to point out how sexist behaviour can be found everywhere, including in her own party. Podemos is trying to change things, but you have sexism everywhere. For example, in our group En Comú Podem we detected a lot of sexist things. We don’t have staff who work directly for us. We have technical staff who we share. And for us they are technical staff, so if I need a photocopy, I do it myself. We have this mentality that we don’t have an assistant to make your phone calls, etc. But we detected that men from En Comú Podem were using the female staff much more to reserve rooms for meetings or asking ‘Could you please get me my suitcase in reception because I don’t have time to go for it?’. So we decided to create a course of information for the 83

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male and female MPs about gender. We did two days of providing this type of information and the men were very surprised. They didn’t understand what was going on, they hadn’t noticed any of this. We told them that we were very disgusted and that gender roles were very much in the group and that there was no respect for all these kinds of things. They were very surprised and they were going to open their eyes. It’s so difficult to change but some things are just educational.

Sexist behaviour isn’t just confined to the way in which male politicians interact with female staff members. Another issue Mar picked up on was how some of her male colleagues had a tendency to ‘occupy space’. ‘The other day in our Telegram group, Lucía sent an article from a newspaper that explained how in films, even when a woman plays the main role, men speak for 80 per cent of the film; women, on the other hand, speak for only 20 per cent. And everyone in the group who started commenting on the article were men! It’s like they couldn’t even notice in that moment what was happening.’

CHANGING POLITICAL NORMS Most afternoons after lunch, before committee sessions begin, some of the group from En Comú Podem gather in an office on the Podemos corridor for a coffee and a roll-up cigarette. ‘These offices are terrible,’ I’m told by one of the team as I sit on a sofa in a light, modern room in a building adjacent to parliament. ‘When I arrived the desk was against the wall, sticking 84

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out with two seats in front and my chair behind, like a teacher. There is nowhere for collaborative work here. No rooms to sit around and work through an idea.’ Since the occupant (who asked not to be named) arrived, the desk has been moved. It is now pushed against the wall and there are two sofas with throws covering them on either side of the room. A few staff members enter the room; with more people than seats, half the group sit cross-legged on the floor, rolling cigarettes. Someone opens a window and places a white plastic cup in the middle of the floor and, despite the building having a no-smoking policy, the group (apart from Mar) starts smoking. It’s a small act of rebellion by a new class of politicians and feels more than symbolic when the group starts speaking in Catalan. Downstairs in the chamber, despite there being five official languages throughout the country, politicians are allowed to speak only in Spanish. While we had lunch, the group spoke a little in Catalan, but with the door closed, they now speak more freely. Changing political norms and helping create a new political common sense have come easier for Podemos in some areas than in others. In an attempt to articulate a shared sense of identity for its national political project, the party has put forward an idea known as pluri-nationality, a vision for the country that is built around the cultural differences that exist. ‘In Spain there are four nations that share the same state: Spanish, Basque, Galician and Catalan,’ Iglesias has said. ‘We want Spain to be a collective project, but it can only be achieved through an agreement that recognises these different nationalities and sensitivities.’ 85

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But building this collective project has been challenging. Podemos has won much of its support in Spain’s autonomous regions, but not as much in its central heartlands. To articulate a common sense of identity between the regions and the centre, Podemos has attempted to build a shared, inclusive, multicultural and multilingual idea of Spanish nationalism, reclaiming the Spanish flag for the left, a flag previously and arguably still synonymous with fascism and authoritarianism. A case that demonstrates this difficulty occurred when, during the march in the centre of Madrid on the evening of the Feminist Strike, a huge Spanish flag was slowly unfurled as protesters brought the city centre to a halt. As the red and yellow material began to fall over the scaffolding of a building on Gran Vía, boos and yells started to ripple across the crowd just at the sight of the flag, until the cries morphed into the sound of confusion when the words printed on the flag, ‘Viva España Feminista’, could be read. The flag had been displayed by an art activist group that refers to itself as an ‘ultra-rationalist collective’. Their act was to argue that the feminist movement should be articulated within the confines of the Spanish state, not outside it. But the chants of ‘That flag doesn’t represent us’ and the support for a few people who climbed the scaffolding to take down the flag show just how difficult it is for such a flag to become a symbol of progressive causes in Spain. Podemos has long taken a nuanced position on Catalonia that has also exposed the challenges of this national project. Over the last few years, the party has attempted to argue against independence but in favour of a referendum and the development of a new constitutional settlement, in which 86

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Catalonia would be recognised as a nation. This position has tested their national project and popularity in Catalonia, especially following the violence of 1-O. Overnight, the party was put in an incredibly difficult situation over whether to recognise the illegal but peaceful referendum result. By choosing not to back the result of the illegal referendum in Catalonia, in the eyes of many of its Catalan voters the party was seen to now be on the other side of the ‘will of the people’. In other parts of Spain, it appeared to be on the side of the Catalan independence movement. ‘We didn’t have symbols. We were the referee,’ said Mar after letting out a long, loud sigh when I ask her about the vote. The only party to advocate such a position, Podemos performed poorly in the Catalan municipal elections following the crisis and also took a hit in the polls nationally. The Catalan crisis, however, didn’t cost votes for the new right, Ciudadanos, in the 2018 national polls. Rather, it helped them. Their harsh rhetoric against independence leaders attempting to break away from Spain saw Ciudadanos momentarily leap ahead in the polls. Indeed, it was such rhetoric that helped galvanise the right into a more extreme position on Catalonia, helping create a sense of anger that could not be contained by either Ciudadanos or the PP – a key reason for the rise of Vox, a far-right party. The reason why moments of constitutional crisis between the Spanish state and its autonomous regions benefit the right rather than the left has been explained by Spanish political theorist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, who has argued that, unlike a country such as the United States, which after 9/11 87

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identified the state’s enemy as beyond its borders, Spain identifies its enemies internally. ‘The real enemy,’ SánchezCuenca has written, ‘is inside and can be characterised as the “anti-Spain” (red-separatist during the Franco regime, separatists during democracy).’17 For Sánchez-Cuenca, ‘Spanish nationalism shows its worst face when it faces the demand for national recognition by the Basque Country and Catalonia. It is there where their civic and democratic values are blocked, denying at the outset that Spain can shelter more than one nation.’ According to this interpretation of Spanish nationalism, political projects that ‘recognise the different nationalities and sensitivities’, like the agenda Podemos has campaigned on, are much less likely to persuade than calls for a zero-tolerance approach to movements and pro-independence leaders who unilaterally declare independence. Once the last of the coffee has been drunk, the team stand and wave the smoke out of the window before reopening the office door and filing out into the corridor. Mar is the chair of the Committee on Children’s Rights and has a session to attend in another section of the large network of parliamentary buildings. She escorts me out and walks with me across the road. The protesters have returned to work and the square is as empty as it first was this morning.

ANOTHER PIECE IN THE INSTITUTIONAL JIGSAW It is still near freezing the following day when I take an innercity train to the edge of Madrid, then a short tram ride further 88

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away from the city centre. Riding next to me is a group of students dressed in hiking boots, baggy jeans and hoodies with short fringes high on their foreheads and piercings under the bridge of their noses. I’m heading to Somosaguas, one of two campuses of La Universidad Complutense, one of the universities in Europe with the highest number of enrolled students. I follow the students who walk up a road lined with palm trees that give way to the university. Over the last week in Madrid, this university had popped up in conversations with activists frequently and reverentially. Even for those who haven’t ever enrolled, it seemed to be a location that has been formative for so many. Somosaguas is home to Economics, Business, Psychology and Political Science and stands between the start of an arid countryside and a view of thick smog sticking to the base of four glass towers. In the distance lie snow-capped mountains. More than one graduate of Complutense had described this campus in the context of the country’s history. According to some sources, when Francoist architects built the university in 1968, they deliberately designed it to be placed so far away from the urban centre that the potentially disruptive force of rebellious students causing chaos in the city was minimised. For them, even the buildings – described to me as ‘prison-like in design’ by one ex-student – were built not to educate and enlighten, but to control and secure: a historical perspective that many, it seems, share not just of their universities but of their country. The students turn into a car park full of old hatchbacks with chipped paint and missing hubcaps; I can then see the 89

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brutalist buildings that inspire these thoughts. It is a quiet day on campus, and without hordes of young people to surround the large cement buildings, the site gives the impression of an abandoned housing estate rather than a university. Between 2008 and 2016, while the economy stagnated, student numbers at universities grew by 21 per cent but public funding for them simultaneously dropped by 16 per cent.18 In May 2012, there was a historic strike of institutions at every level of Spain’s education sector, the first time such an event had occurred in Spain. The graffiti is symbolic of the lack of investment in education as well as the cuts, but it’s also representative of a political culture that exists in a university like this. Once inside, I can see both that culture and a possible reason for comparing the place to a prison: there’s a dark central atrium in the building’s core with a series of classrooms and lecture theatres, still with blackboards. The building’s interior is painted orange and black and large cement pillars hold up cement walls. The walls next to the canteen are entirely covered in graffiti: ‘Eat pussy not animals’ reads one; ‘Rebel girl! Rebel!’, ‘Class war? I’m a feminist’, ‘Refugees welcome’, ‘Against fascism’, ‘Equality starts when we all have the right to be different’, ‘Living is easy with eyes closed’. The canteen has a set of murals on its walls. One commemorates the Black Power fist salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Olympic Games; another remembers a protester shot and killed by police during the Greek protests against austerity in 2010; and then there are snippets from Picasso’s Guernica scattered around, one of a crying horse’s head, another of a distraught mother. 90

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This university is another piece in the institutional jigsaw that has bred a new political culture in Spain. Not only because a generation of activists have been influenced by this enormous university, but because the core of Podemos were either educated or taught here, including its first two leaders, Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón. Indeed, it was while working here that Iglesias, who once declared himself ‘sick of losing’, launched an amateur television programme named La Tuerka (The Screw). Filmed in a disused garage in Madrid, Iglesias moderated a series of interviews and panel discussions. One of the first episodes was on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of Franco and featured Errejón. After the first episode the show quickly gained a cult following. Their political relationship and their differing strategic visions for this start-up party have defined its development. The divisions between the pair were laid bare after their poor performance in the re-run elections. Podemos went back to where they started, the Vistalegre arena in Madrid, and back to their members to ask if they favoured deviating from Iglesias’s political course of strongly opposing the political classes of which they were not a member. Two competing visions for the party’s future were presented to the membership. On the more radical left was Iglesias and his team. They had led Podemos into an alliance with IU. The electoral appeal of this move had been shown to have limitations, but Iglesias argued that acting as an opposition to the political elites they had originally campaigned against was essential. On the centre-left was Errejón and his team, who argued that to maintain a wide appeal among the electorate, the party needed 91

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to abandon Iglesias’s language of radical change and appeal to more centrist voters lost in a climate of economic gloom, instead of only pursuing voters whose natural home would have been on the left. Errejón argued that Podemos had a better chance of gaining power by using less politically charged language and symbols, and working with the old ‘enemy’, PSOE. One of the most symbolic differences between the two was Iglesias’s choice to pump a fist in the air after speeches, while Errejón displayed the peace sign. With 150,000 votes cast, Iglesias was returned leader with 50 per cent to Errejón’s 33 per cent. The internal divisions in Podemos plagued the party for the next two years until Errejón announced his departure from Podemos in January 2019 to set up another left-wing coalition called Más Madrid in time for the municipal elections in the city. Errejón left Podemos when the party was busy celebrating its five-year anniversary and Iglesias was at home on paternity leave. Iglesias became one of the last figures from Complutense to remain at the top of Podemos. The leadership conference boosted the party’s powerful grassroots credentials but cost it weeks of negative media coverage, marginalised some of its brightest brains and reinforced the dominance of a political strategy that was losing its way from an inclusive, horizontal 15-M message and form of politics. Following the result, the party has continued to underperform. However, supporting PSOE in government, as part of a confidence and supply deal or as coalition partners, does offer Podemos a chance to regain its momentum. The place of universities in Spanish politics hasn’t just been confined to the political history of Podemos. A string 92

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of corruption scandals concerning the authenticity of the university qualifications of some of the most senior politicians in Spain dominated the headlines in 2017 and 2018. The stories began with Cristina Cifuentes, the PP head of Madrid’s regional government, who looked to be surviving questions about the authenticity of her master’s degree qualification that she had made public until two of the signatories accused her of forgery. Her days were numbered when a security video from 2011 was mysteriously leaked to the media that showed her bag being searched by police for two bottles of anti-ageing cream she was accused of stealing. The new leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, was in turn accused of graduating from King Juan Carlos University without ever attending a class or completing his dissertation. The PSOE Health Minister, Carmen Montón, was then forced to resign over accusations that back in 2011 she too had graduated with a master’s without ever attending a class. These corruption scandals around education qualifications, issues that pre-15-M would not have had the power to remove ministers or politicians, reached a head when the new prime minister, Dr Pedro Sánchez (PhD in economics) was forced to publish his thesis to prove it both existed and that it wasn’t plagiarised.

I N T E R G E N E R AT I O N A L U N FA I R N E S S In 2008, a group of young social scientists formed an online intellectual collective (or, as they called it, a ‘web-tank’) named Politikon. Spain has nearly fifty think tanks informing and shaping the national debate on public policy and the research 93

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and analysis they produce help steer political conversation in the press on a range of issues. But with their structures and policy focus, these think tanks are at odds with the new political agenda and the source of their funding is obscure, and so Politikon has attempted to break their hold on analysing the nation. Independent of any political party, the group’s members are now widely read columnists in some of Spain’s biggest newspapers. They also appear regularly on a variety of platforms in a media landscape that is evolving rapidly. Their monthly public political discussions are held at the back of a busy bar in Malasaña, a neighbourhood to the north of the city centre that ten years ago was an area where many activists used to squat or run social centres in empty, discarded buildings. After the activists were turfed out by developers, Malasaña has undergone a period of rapid development. The squats are long gone and today its narrow lanes are lined with pastel-coloured buildings that house boutique hotels, designer shops and health stores, with refurbished old bicycles with wicker baskets leaning up against the shop fronts. Much of this development has been built on an employment model that has confined young people to a permanently precarious working life. In Spain, 58 per cent of workers (or six in ten) under the age of twenty-nine are unable to plan for a stable, secure life as they are employed on temporary contracts, despite the Spanish economy generating large amounts of wealth.19 On the edge of Malasaña, before I leave the heavy traffic of Gran Vía by slipping down a narrow stone alleyway, I pass a huge development where there are adverts for the ‘First Four Seasons hotel in Spain’ among the thousands of scaf94

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folding beams and dark, netted construction sheets. Despite high unemployment and the rise in insecure work practices, Spain registered 7,000 new millionaires in 2017.20 This month’s talk is on the art of political communication in the television and social media age and is delivered by a contributor to one of the country’s newest and most successful literary magazines, Jot Down. It is a talk like so many I’ve heard on democratic politics that analyses the world with an equal dose of humility and scepticism of politics beyond its national borders. As the bar slowly fills, I sit down in a small room at the back behind thick, half-drawn red velvet curtains with two members from tonight’s hosts, Politikon. Pablo Simón, Visiting Professor of Political Science in Madrid and its most senior member and editor, explains that ‘in Spain there was the Indignados movement. 15-M increased the public’s attention on very specific issues. The public suddenly wanted to know how politics works, so we decided to respond to the increase in demand with Politikon.’ High on Politikon’s intellectual agenda for Spain is an urgent focus on explaining why the young in Spain have been so badly hit by the crisis. In 2018 they published their first book, The Invisible Wall: Society’s betrayal of young people, a data-driven appeal for putting an intergenerational analysis at the heart of public policy. ‘What we see in Spain is that the face of poverty has changed,’ says Pablo softly but quickly as he leans on the table between us when we speak before the event begins. ‘It used to be the face of an old woman who doesn’t have enough money for retirement. But now it’s the face of 95

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a child. This is because the big losers during the crisis were young people and children.’ Young people are generally considered to be those below the age of twenty-four. Politikon’s research shows that, since the crisis in 2008, the average income for a young person has been reduced by 20 per cent, while, thanks to the protection of pensions, those aged over sixty-five have seen their average income increase by 5 per cent. A staggering 40 per cent of young people are at risk of living in poverty, more than double the figure ten years ago. And with an expensive rental market and an economy with low levels of unemployment providing largely insecure or part-time opportunities, life for young people in Spain has become much harder over the last decade. Meanwhile, according to the UN, nearly 40 per cent of children in Spain live in poverty, an increase of 9 per cent since the economic crisis, placing the country in third place for levels of child poverty in Europe, behind Romania and Greece.21 Politikon are keen to stress that the young have not been the only group to be let down since the crisis. Other vulnerable groups in Spain, they argue – such as women, migrants, the unemployed, those aged over fifty and, of course, those below twenty-four – have been structurally disadvantaged by the crisis and the response to it. ‘If you are a female migrant who doesn’t have a job and is either above fifty or young, then society has left you in an extremely vulnerable position,’ explains Pablo. But what their analysis asserts is that there has been a generational neglect of young people before and after the crisis by those in power. 96

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Also across the table from me is María Ramos, a co-author of the book whose analysis dates further back than the crisis. What we saw following the crisis is that there was the creation of a huge difference between generations. Young people suffered the most, but really this inequality was something that was magnified in 2008. This inequality already existed in the economic system, probably because the political agenda only focused on the issue of retirement. You’ll see most days that politics is really only focused on one age group: pensioners. Before the crisis the young had to face mortgages they couldn’t afford because they didn’t have the income or enough money. Now young people accept that they are never going to own a house and that they’ll have to rent. But then you are trapped again, even just renting, because you are on a temporary work contract facing a range of huge prices just to live.

It’s this intergenerational economic division that helps explain the rise of new parties, the pair argue especially on the left. ‘In Spain, young people tend to vote for new parties,’ says Pablo. Such is the reliance on votes from the young for the new parties that Podemos has campaigned to lower the voting age to sixteen, a change that would see one million new citizens eligible to vote. The young in Spain are naturally disposed to the left. In opinion polls that place people’s ideological leaning on a scale, over 60 per cent of eighteen- to thirty-four-yearolds declare themselves to be politically on the left.22 97

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Political divisions, a stagnated party reboot and the dominance of an electoral strategy that has proved incapable of appealing beyond its base have all called into question Podemos’s short-term appeal, especially after their thunderous emergence on the political scene. However, intergenerational inequality and the additional one million who will soon be able to vote offer a chance in the long term for the party to come closer to winning an election. As more people file into the bar for the talk to begin, Pablo stands up. ‘We are worried about precarity and working on low wages on temporary contracts. We are worried about the education system. We are worried about the government’s priorities for the welfare state, about our new political parties, and how they can change politics in order to tackle the problems we now have.’ Over ten years on from the crisis, the concerns about the future remain and people in Spain are still asking themselves the question Pablo puts to me as our conversation ends: ‘What’s the future for us in Spain?’

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CHAPTER 3

THE VALLEY OF THE FALLEN F RANCO’S GHOST AND ‘ESPAÑA PROFUNDA ’

Twenty-five of us gather one Sunday morning between the Royal Palace and Royal Theatre in the centre of the city for a half-day trip to Sierra de Guadarrama, a mountain range just outside the capital. The wide avenues are empty apart from street cleaners and steel shutters are still drawn over shop windows. The only other people are early risers in thick coats out walking their dogs with folded newspapers tucked under their arms. The next five hours, according to the flyer I am handed as I board the coach, will be spent visiting El Escorial, ‘a sixteenth-century Royal Monastery and Palace created by Philip II in 1563’ and then El Valle de los Caídos – the Valley of the Fallen – ‘a Benedictine Abbey and memorial dedicated to the victims of the Spanish Civil War’. Our guide, Carmen, has a birthmark on the tip of her nose and a pair of glasses attached to a purple string around her neck. Our driver, Raul, has a belly that touches the steering wheel and a mechanical nod for each passenger. ‘Both historic sites are fifty kilometres away; our journey will take forty-five minutes,’ Carmen announces into a microphone that hovers in front of her mouth once everyone is seated. Within just a few minutes we are out of the city and on a motorway that points north to a range of mountains, the tips 101

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of which are freshly covered in a thick, white blanket of snow. We pass retail parks, petrol stations and car showrooms on the edges of commuter towns. On the edge of one is a large cemetery, the rows of tombs stacked above ground like bodies awaiting burial in a hospital’s morgue. Despite the early hour, there is a small group of people huddled clutching flowers. The second stop on this morning’s tour comes into view first. Away in the distance, behind the large roadside adverts, there is the 150-metre granite cross of the Valley of the Fallen. The monolithic Catholic symbol balances on a small mound of rock above two giant bronze doors and is ‘the tallest cross in the world’, according to Carmen. Some 230 metres deep inside the mountain, she explains, there is a basilica, ‘the final resting place for over 40,000 bodies’. In reality, this burial ground is a mass grave where only two bodies are remembered by name: José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange, and until 24 October 2019 Francisco Franco. When discussing politics in Spain, especially with one of the 2.2 million people who voted for independence in Catalonia, or one of the 5.2 million who voted for Podemos in their breakthrough year in 2015, the existence of this highly contentious site is almost always referred to as proof of the country’s dormant fascism and the mainstream conservative Partido Popular’s accommodation of Franco’s authoritarianism. This is especially true when those wanting to change Spain speak beyond its borders. While in exile, and on a visit to Switzerland in 2017, Catalan leader Puigdemont told an audience: ‘I don’t know if the world knows that Franco’s mausoleum still exists in Spain, paid for by public money and 102

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visited by thousands of people every year.’1 In 2018, having arranged a visit for Members of the European Parliament to the Valley, Miguel Urbán, a Podemos MEP, explained his intention in bringing his European colleagues to the Valley: ‘Franco died, but Francoism did not.’ It’s impossible to understand Spain’s new movements without understanding Spanish conservativism. Much of the legitimacy and political energy that has fed the Catalan independence movement has come from their opposition: an intransigent, inflexible Spanish right that gains much of its support from a hostile attitude towards pro-independence forces. Similarly, the radical left’s political rise has been heavily influenced by the Spanish right. Podemos’s ideas for changing Spain have been articulated around a ‘Second Transition’, a reference to the democratic transition that replaced Franco. I’m making this visit, therefore, to see if I can begin to understand more about what Spanish conservatism really is: to see, in just a morning, if I can glimpse a sense of what it means for a European country in the twenty-first century to continue to provide a public space of homage to a dictator who led a military coup against a democratically elected government and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his country’s citizens. Maybe the Basilica buried 230 metres deep means nothing, invalidating the 1951 William Faulkner quote often used in regard to Spain’s relationship with its history: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ By entering the heart of the mountain, I hope to see behind the curtain. 103

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‘THIS SITE BECAME A C O N C E N T R AT I O N C A M P ’ Turning off the motorway with the granite crucifix to our right, we drive through the foothills of the mountain range, until we arrive at the grand, austere stone building of El Escorial. The wind, much stronger than in the city, pierces through my coat as I disembark from the coach. At a back entrance we are given audio guides and split into two groups. Apart from the monks, El Escorial is virtually empty. Essentially a mausoleum when you drop down below the ground floor, most of the tour is spent passing through a long corridor of rooms in which Carmen meticulously explains the meaning of each elaborately decorated tomb. There are tombs with features on their sides, there are tombs with features on the top, there are tombs made from stone, some from mahogany, others from granite. There are tombs placed side by side and tombs ordered above and below one another. The tour soon feels more like a crash course on the importance of the ritual of burial: how the personality of each dead member of the country’s elite has been represented in the material and design of a casket; how in death we express our living selves. Towards the end of the tour we are taken to the bedroom of King Philip II, and, at different times, one of his five wives’ rooms, from where ‘they once ruled the world’. We see where they read, where they ate, where they prayed, where they entertained, where they slept. We learn about their habits, their interests, their hobbies. Each work of art on the wall is explained, each large statue contextualised. The tour lasts 104

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three hours and it feels like little is left out. We stop for a coffee break before filing back onto the coach and back to Raul, who doesn’t seem to have moved. As we re-board, Raul collects our audio guides. ‘We are now going to a church, not a mausoleum,’ Carmen begins. ‘It would therefore not be appropriate for me to guide you around. So I will explain to you the history of the site on our journey there.’ Carmen clears her throat and Raul starts the engine. The end of the First World War, the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, economic crisis, the fleeing of the Spanish royal family, the Second Spanish Republic, its years of instability, rising social tensions, Franco’s coup and the ensuing war – Carmen races through a condensed history of the causes of the Spanish Civil War while holding onto the headrest of the seat in front of her while Raul navigates the long bus around narrow roads. Halfway through the history lesson, an elderly man towards the back of the bus begins to shout. It isn’t clear what he’s yelling, but it doesn’t stop everyone else on the coach yelling back at him for silence. Carmen’s flow, however, doesn’t stop, the interruption coming as no surprise. Carmen then turns her attention to the Valley. The Valley of the Fallen was constructed after the war. When Franco came to power he spoke to the monks of Escorial. He wanted to be buried there when he died. They said no; they told him told him that he wasn’t the right kind of person for this place. So he looked for somewhere else, somewhere to make a dedication to the victims of the war. Franco chose this place because it’s so near to 105

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Escorial, because of its symbolism of death and memory. He designed it too – on a piece of paper. But who built it? Who did the hard work?

Raul stops the bus and Carmen turns off her microphone. We have arrived. Stone pillars with black iron gates mark the entrance and the beginning of the mountain path. There is a price list on a piece of wood nailed to the gate and a long line of cars spilling out before it. We join the queue. After paying, Carmen returns to the bus. Raul shuts the door and releases the hand break. ‘I think you know who did the hard work: the war prisoners. This site became a concentration camp. Construction started in 1940 and ended in 1959. Please get your cameras to take a photo quickly. We can’t stop on the bridge, but there is a good view approaching.’ Those on the other side of the coach rise to their feet and lean over. ‘The result is a mega-sized church. It is bigger than St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, something that is prohibited by the Catholic Church. Some of the building, therefore, is not consecrated. Once it was consecrated, the 34,000 bodies of Republican and Nationalist soldiers were brought there. You won’t see the tombs of them as they are behind a locked door inside the mountain.’ These bodies, dug up across the country in the middle of the night, were packed on trucks and dumped in the basilica, without seeking permission from their families, destroying crucial evidence about how they had died. The coach stops climbing and Carmen stops talking. That’s it. History lesson over. Following a forensic account of El Escorial, we are given the history of the Spanish Civil 106

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War and the story of the creation of Spain’s most controversial monument from Franco’s reign in five minutes. Nothing on why this place, virtually unchanged since Franco’s death, still exists; nothing on what efforts are currently being made to exhume Franco’s remains and move his body away from this site; nothing on how thousands of families are trying to recover dead bodies from here and around the country. We park in a bay of a three-quarters full car park. We seem to be the only tourist coach. ‘The coach will be leaving in fortyfive minutes. The gift shop is located by the basilica’s entrance. Enjoy your visit.’

‘ A P O S I T I V E N AT I O N A L A S S E T ’ Franco was born on the Galician coast in the town of El Ferrol in 1892. He was sent to military school in Toledo at fourteen, graduating 251st out of 312 in his year. At nineteen he was sent to Morocco, where by and large he would spend his next ten years. In Northern Morocco, where the Spanish were in conflict with Berber tribes, Franco, according to one biographer, learned his authoritarian style of governing in a country ‘where a de facto state of war prevailed’.2 Franco excelled in this war-torn environment and quickly rose through the military ranks. At just thirty-three he became the youngest general in the Spanish army, and, at the time, the youngest general in Europe. On this appointment, his service record chillingly read: ‘He is a positive national asset and surely the country and the army will derive great benefit from making use of his remarkable skills in higher positions.’3 107

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In 1934, Franco used his Moroccan troops to violently suppress a miners’ strike in Asturias. It took a week to crush the rebellion, which was then followed by a series of bloody reprisals targeting many of the mining villages that had supported the strike. Acts of violence perpetrated included rape and torture. Fearing he might lead a coup in 1936, the Republican government deployed him to the Canary Islands, where they believed he would be less of a threat. On 17 July 1936, however, Franco led a military rebellion in the Canaries. He then flew to Morocco to command Spain’s bloodiest, most experienced set of troops. With the Spanish navy loyal to the Republican government, Franco was unable to move his troops in large numbers across the Strait of Gibraltar. It took the largest airlift in history up to that date, by the Luftwaffe with a little help from Mussolini, to move Franco’s troops from North Africa to southern Spain. The coup failed, however, and the military rebellion took only half of the country. Sections of the army, working-class militias and revolutionary groups loyal to the Republic fought back, dividing Spain into two: those loyal to the Nationalists and those loyal to the Popular Front. With the support of both Mussolini and Hitler, Spain’s military generals appointed Franco Generalissimo of the army, the navy and the air force and the head of the government in late September 1936. The Italian and German governments supplied Franco with weapons via Portugal, then ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, while the Republicans received arms from the Soviet Union and volunteers from the International Brigades. Many countries blockaded Spain, 108

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refusing to intervene in the conflict. The Luftwaffe’s bombing of many Spanish cities and Italian ground troops in northern Spain meant that Franco’s reliance on his fascist alliance eventually enabled victory. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Franco ruled like a fascist. But as fascism fell across Europe, many historians and biographers argue that it is fairer to suggest that he ruled like an authoritarian dictator: silencing dissent and governing by fear, rather than through an expansive social project similar to those in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. ‘It is now increasingly rare to define Francoism as a truly fascist and totalitarian regime,’ writes his biographer Enrique Moradiellos. ‘The dominant perception now [is] that [the regime] was a military dictatorship, first fascistised and then transformed into an essentially authoritarian regime, despite the fascist features, which remained until the end.’4 To absolve Franco’s legacy of any association with the worst of European fascism is in no way meant to suggest that Franco was a less violent, less horrifying force of the right. When thinking about Spain’s fascist past, therefore, it is both important not to overstate the role of fascism in Franco’s rule and essential not to forget it.5 The last time the Generalissimo was seen in public was on 1 October 1975 in Plaza de Oriente in Madrid. It was a moment that revealed his frailty but also the strength of his support. Just a few days earlier, he had ordered the execution by firing squad of five people, two of whom were members of ETA. The executions prompted protests by Republicans in exile across Europe, which in turn produced a sea of people – 109

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estimated to be one million – in Madrid. There were reports of right arms extended in the fascist salute and people chanting ‘Franco, Franco, Franco’.6 In November, Franco would suffer three heart attacks. Already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he had two-thirds of his stomach removed in an emergency operation fifteen days before his death on 20 November 1975. On his deathbed, he is reported to have said, ‘Dear God, how long it takes to die!’7 The next day, the national press reported the death of Franco. La Vanguardia published a front-page picture of his dead body dressed in military uniform under the headline ‘He is no longer with us’ – proof of his death, just in case anyone thought the story was fake news.

THE BASILICA Off the bus, I join the staggered line of well-dressed families on a path that twists around the base of the cross. Pine needles are scattered on the ground and fragments of granite from the base of the cross, now towering directly above me, lie at the edge of the path that is covered lightly in snow. Ahead of me is a family with a double pram. The mother collects a mound of snow with her gloves, pats it into a ball and throws it at her husband’s back, who turns and smiles. A little further and the path opens out to a dull, featureless expanse of concrete bordered by cypress trees: a procession space with a view in the direction of Madrid. There are two sets of granite arches either side of the bronze doors. In front of the doors couples kiss and take selfies; friends also pose with their thumbs up. 110

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Maybe Faulkner is wrong; maybe the past is dead. Maybe the people who have given up their Sunday morning to come here want to experience a building that is located in a large, virtually empty mountain range, one that offers a silence that couldn’t ever be found in a capital city, even on a Sunday morning. Maybe the families ambling on the concrete promenade have been looking forward to escaping the city’s smog to these hills, and it just so happens that this is their Sunday getaway. Maybe they have seen so many pictures of El Escorial that they could sketch it from memory and see the architecture here as representative not of twentiethcentury authoritarian and fascist thinking but in keeping with Spain’s larger history. Maybe with the picnic tables and the panoramic views, this is a place for families, not fascists. Maybe the past is not just dormant, it is dead; this monument as inactive as the mountain it sits on top of. In other words, maybe everyone has come for the flora and fauna rather than Franco. I pass through the doors and am plunged into near darkness. My eyes take a few moments to adjust and for a few seconds everyone is just a shadow. There are small lamps on each side of the arched tunnel and a faint echo of footsteps and light chatter. I touch a wall; it’s freezing cold. With every step down the arched corridor, the natural light behind me fades and I can feel the city disappear even further. I pass a large plaque on my left, referencing the basilica’s opening – the only piece of information on display. The corridor finally expands out into a windowless dome. There are people lighting candles to my right and two monks, dressed in heavy 111

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brown robes with cloaks and hoods, chatting in the middle of an elevated circular altar. Beyond the chatting monks there is a pack of people with their heads bowed. I walk towards them and there he is, Francisco Franco, below a rectangular grave that widens slightly at its end: the dictator who ruled Spain for forty years, one of the men responsible for triggering a coup d’état against a democratically elected government, a military leader responsible for an army that raped, murdered and tortured thousands, the head of an authoritarian government that endured by terrorising its population, imprisoning those who disagreed with him or simply supported the opposition. It is a grave that symbolises a dark passage in both Spanish and European history, and that this morning has two bunches of flowers freshly laid in respect. I decide to remain a few feet to its side to observe how those here interact with it. Last night, when I typed into Google ‘Valley of the Fallen’, I had found photos of men with shaved heads raising their right arms. I was assuming that is what I would find today. But instead, almost immediately, I discover that acts of tribute and homage are delivered in a much more discreet manner by a much wider set of people. One of the first men I see brings his fingers to his lips, crouches, and then places them gently at the foot of the grave, holding them there for a few seconds with eyes closed, and then he walks away. Another, a middle-aged woman, crosses her chest, crouches, and touches the grave. Within two minutes I count ten people doing something similar. Not everyone is paying tribute, however. Whenever an act of homage is paid, an eyebrow is raised, a sideways glance 112

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is given, or a nod of the head is followed by an elbow nudge while the crowd shuffles and whispers. There are also those standing motionless, looking slightly ill at ease, shoulders hunched, frozen. Then there are those with their shoulders spread, who appear to know their surroundings, who look as if they belong somehow. And while they aren’t looking at the crowd, they know that everyone is observing them. It is this group that soon makes me feel something other than curiosity. I begin to feel like their audience. I begin to feel complicit in an act of homage to a piece of history I do not want to revere. I soon realise that I’m not playing the role of bemused spectator, foreign fly on the wall – I am an active audience member. I have bought my ticket to watch the spectacle and my silence begins to feel as loud as applause. At El Escorial, the death, the torture, the slavery, the historical and massive abuses of power of the Spanish Empire were present to a certain extent. They weren’t as critically discussed as you would hope – and had I been born in South America, I’m sure that last sentence would be written differently – but at least they were presented in some manner. But here in the dark depths of a mountain built by prisoners of war and occupied by a recently deceased dictator, we are guideless tourists. There are no signs or information laying bare even fragments of the truth. The absence of any story being told makes me feel like I am supporting that silence: I begin to feel like I am legitimising the acts of homage in front of me and the trip; even though I knew what I was paying for, I feel in some way duplicitous. Faulkner is right – the past, quite clearly, isn’t dead. And if history is still present, then it is being made now, 113

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and I am part of it, as people act out their political allegiances, allegiances celebrated in private and here performed in public. Ten minutes later a family of four begin circling the grave. After the crowd has thinned, the dad, who earlier had a pained expression on his face, puts his hands in his coat pockets, lifts his chin in the air, and, assuming an absent-minded air, walks over the top half of the tomb, just missing the flowers with his boots, as if by accident. His son smiles and his wife grabs him by the arm, as if leading him away from mischief. A few feet past the grave, the man turns around to see if anyone saw. I catch his eye and nod in approval, a silent well done. Three young men on the other side of the grave notice my gesture. With a buried dictator between us, they stand staring at me with their hands in their trouser pockets, their belt buckles protruding, rolling on the back of their heels. I look away and then back at them. They are still staring. One walks up to the grave and crosses his chest, eyeballing me the whole way. As Carmen said on the bus, it’s not only Franco who has a marked grave here. Located on the other side of the circular altar is Primo de Rivera, whose grave, at least today, is much less popular than its neighbour. I look back and the three men are following me. Maybe these three men are outliers, maybe the people crouching by his grave to press their kissed hands on his grave are an anomaly, but perhaps they come here to remember a man they admire in a space where they feel comfortable. Maybe they feel gratitude. If so, then the Valley of the Fallen is not a relic from the past whose contents are as dead as those who lie underneath. It’s a living, breathing authoritarian and fascist space. 114

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The gift shop is small and full. You can buy Valley of the Fallen mints, Valley of the Fallen sweets, Valley of the Fallen chocolate. There are rosaries and postcards by the till, and even though it’s March there are Christmas cards and baubles with cherubs painted on them. There are books about the abbey and photo books about the lives of the monks. There is nothing on the Civil War and nothing on Franco. Aside from being built to stroke the ego of an autocrat, Franco saw the Valley as a way of bringing the country back together following a bloody civil war. However, he had a very specific idea of national reconciliation. A few weeks before the end of the war, and a few months before construction began, Franco gave a speech in which he argued that ‘hatred and passions’ must be ‘put aside’, but not in ‘the manner of liberals, with their monstrous and suicidal amnesties’. Instead, he called for ‘redemption of sentences through work, with repentance and penance’, accusing anyone who thought differently of being ‘guilty of irresponsibility or treason’. According to Franco’s gospel, ‘no honourable Spaniards, no thinking being, could stand aside from the painful duty of punishment’.8 For the winners of the war, and for the new national project, it was only the defeated who had to make amends. The rebuilding of Spain would come at the expense of the losers, a strong and painfully tragic fact symbolised by the creation and continued existence of this site.9 I’m the last back to the coach and am happy to receive a glare from Carmen. A little under an hour later I’m back in Madrid, where I meet friends for lunch. Usually, when explaining something to Spanish friends, especially on a new 115

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topic, I make mistakes, stutter over the right word and piece of grammar to use, and speak slowly. When I do this, I can feel them looking behind me, slightly bored, easily distracted. Sometimes they pick up their phones while they listen. But not when I am telling this story. However much I stumble, I’ve never held their attention as well as when I recount my half-day trip to the Valley. My friends hang on every word, and as I finish each sentence they ask a question: ‘Where exactly was his body?’ ‘What kind of flowers were they?’ ‘What did the people look like who put their fingers on his grave?’ ‘What clothes were they wearing?’ ‘How old were they?’ Once I’ve answered their questions, I’m unable to get another word in, as they then begin to argue among themselves.

REBRANDING THE RIGHT Since Franco died and Spain transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, the Spanish right has had a troubled relationship with his legacy. As democracy in Spain established itself into a position unthreatened by another military rebellion, the reforming elements of Franco’s regime, ready to compete in a democratic system, created the Popular Alliance. A political party directly affiliated with Franco, it spent twenty years divided and in disagreement over their deceased ideological ancestor, and therefore out of power and in the political wilderness. From this time in opposition, the Popular Alliance learned two invaluable lessons: the closer the direct affiliation with Franco, the fewer votes they won; the more divided they were, the further from power they would be. 116

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Political rebrands of the right have been a key feature of its recent history. And the most important rebrand that helps explain the present political landscape came in 1989 with the creation of the Partido Popular (PP). This new conservative party was designed by a Franco cabinet minister, Manuel Fraga, a member of the Popular Alliance. A little after the creation of the PP, Fraga stepped aside and ushered in José María Aznar, a man who would go on to be prime minister for eight years. Aznar was too young to have served under the dictator and marked the next generation of conservative leaders, helping break with the past. That said, Aznar did write a letter to his local newspaper when he was sixteen years old defending his membership of an independent Falangist organisation rather than the established organisation, as he saw it as the ‘authentic incarnation’ of fascist leader José Antonio’s vision. Aznar, like much of the PP, was essentially untainted by the past but still associated with it. This is the result of the PP being conservatives who are more wedded to Franco’s authoritarianism than any other, as many political scientists and historians of Spain have argued. Political scientist Sebastian Balfour has argued of the PP that ‘the majority of its leaders are sons, daughters or grandchildren of leading members of the Francoist political élites … Francoism is [therefore] the skeleton in the PP cupboard’.10 Spanish political scientist Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas has also argued that the PP is ‘old wine in a new bottle’,11 and British historian Helen Graham, a leading scholar on the Civil War, has argued: ‘Spain’s conservative Partido Popular, in many regards [is] the ideological heir of Francoism.’12 117

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Perhaps the most notable political rebrand the party has attempted began in the early 2000s when the PP stood on a new idea of national unity. Rebranding with the concept of ‘constitutional nationalism’, an idea pioneered by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the PP tied national identity to the values upheld in the Constitution. As political regenerations for a party with historical links to fascism go, there’s nothing quite as ironic as looking to Germany for inspiration – a country with a similar (but also very different) violent, fascist history – stealing an idea from one of its philosophers and ignoring the key feature of it: a critical engagement with the past. This rebranding saw the right develop an almost religious affinity with Spain’s Constitution, a document drafted three years after Franco’s death and changed on only a few occasions in its history, and especially with one key line: ‘the inseparable unity of the Spanish nation’. While in Germany there are strict laws that prohibit public acts of support or homage to Adolf Hitler, no such laws regarding Franco exist in Spain. In many ways, the two resurgent political forces in Spain over the last two decades have tested what kind of democratic values the Spanish right hold, and in so doing they have revealed a legacy of police violence towards peaceful protesters, repressive legislation against demonstrators, imprisonment without trial of separatist leaders, the hunt for exiles abroad, accusations of external influence in domestic political parties, the demonisation of those from the left and from autonomous regions, and the criminalisation of dissent. Some of this has emerged from the judicialisation of the Catalan conflict after the courts became the arbitrators in a political conflict, rather 118

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than politicians. But the rhetoric from the right around the judicial-led conflict has exacerbated tensions. The movements campaigning for social and economic justice and the movement for a referendum in Catalonia – while enormously different – share the political goal of creating an inclusive, democratic Spain and a commitment to use the tools of democratic dissent to further their aims. Among their opponents in parliament they have inadvertently triggered Francoist tendencies that the Spanish right have been trying to hide for the last four decades. There is a term for this ideology of the right: sociological Francoism. It is an idea used by Spanish and European academics alike and challenges the notion that just because the structures of Francoism have gone, destined to eventually die after fascism was defeated across Europe, ‘its mentalities and prejudices live on in Spain’, as Helen Graham writes, where the idea of pluralism … is still alien.’13 It is not, therefore, that parties endorse Franco, or eulogise him, or feel any nostalgia for him, and it is not that they want to see Spain returned to a dictatorship. It’s that their lack of critical assessment of their past has meant that Spain has not rid itself of the values and attitudes of authoritarianism on the right. This idea of pluralism is perhaps seen at its most insidious by the Spanish right when in the hands of separatists. And it is not just pluralism, but also what Graham calls ‘the strong belief that political matters are the exclusive affair of a professional political class, accompanied by an intense, if latent, suspicion of civil society and the enduring belief that citizens’ behaviour is potentially destabilising.’14 Therefore, 119

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perhaps the clearest example of the legacy of Francoism can be seen in corruption: ideas of nepotism and patronage remain deeply embedded in the culture of politics and in the way in which government operates. ‘During the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain with Franco dead, almost everyone began to construct a past to better face the present and prepare for the future.’15 This is a quote buried deep in The Imposter, written by Javier Cercas, which tells the story of Enric Marco, a man who had claimed that he was interned in the concentration camp Flossenbürg as a Catalan anarchist fighter but had really been a volunteer in Nazi Germany, one of many who went to contribute to the German economy to repay Franco’s Civil War debt. Marco became a national hero until it was revealed that he was a fraud. But in his book, Cercas casts a more forgiving light on Marco, who he describes as a man ‘who reinvented his life at a moment when the entire country was reinventing itself’. The same might be said of the PP, but perhaps as the last few years have shown, we shouldn’t be as forgiving of the PP as Cercas was to Marco.

P U B L I C A R T, F O U N D AT I O N S AND INSTITUTIONS So what of Franco’s legacy, apart from its influence on Spain’s main conservative political party and the Valley of the Fallen? Well, the Valley aside, Spain has made substantial progress in ridding its public spaces of Francoist architecture. In 2007, PSOE passed the Historical Memory Law, a landmark piece 120

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of legislation that, after thirty-five years, broke the consensus not to – quite literally – dig up the country’s past that had governed Spain since Franco’s death. As its preamble stated, the law would ‘recognise those who suffered in the Civil War and during the dictatorship’ by helping recuperate the lost memory of fallen relatives, providing financial compensation to victims, and compelling the government to excavate and re-bury those in war graves. The law also began the removal of Francoist symbols from public spaces. The right opposed the bill. During its passage through parliament, the PP’s leader, Mariano Rajoy, soon to become prime minister, argued that it ‘serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever’.16 The debate over how to include the Valley in the bill became such a contentious topic that one member of parliament returned home to find the words ‘El Valle No Se Toca’ (The Valley is not to be touched) painted on their front door. However, the historic piece of legislation did have an impact on the Valley. Demonstrations there would now be banned and a commission of experts was established to look at how to rehabilitate the monument. Their report was published in 2011 and recommended that Franco’s body be removed and transferred to a private burial site, chosen by his family, and that José Antonio’s body be placed with the other skeletons in the crypt.17 The commission also suggested that a ‘memory centre’ be built explaining the true story of the Valley and the Civil War. In 2011, when Rajoy was sworn in as prime minister, he shelved the report, arguing that the economic crisis was of more importance than dealing with the past. He also cut €20 million of state funding for civic organisations that had been leading the 121

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exhumations of Civil War graves since 2007. When PSOE came back to power in 2018, the Spanish parliament passed a law in August opposed by the PP and Ciudadanos to exhume Franco’s remains and begin the process of changing the Valley into a shared commemorative site. However, the Memory Law of 2007 did have some success in other areas of Spain. Over the last decade Spain has taken down most of the visible symbols of Franco: statues of the dictator have been removed, often in the middle of the night; plazas named after the dictator have been renamed. There have been many conservative-run city administrations that have been reluctant to administer the law, however. Take Madrid. The PP, in power from 1991 to 2015, did little to erase Franco’s legacy both before and after the bill became law. It wasn’t until 2015, when the city council changed hands to the 15-M-inspired Ahora Madrid coalition, that some of the final changes to the city began. While streets carrying Franco’s name in the city have gone, those with an association to his regime remain, but when the Madrid council voted on a new plan to remove the remaining names – this included replacing the names of two roads named after Franco’s generals, renaming one after a famous teacher and the other ‘Cooperation Street’ – every party expect the PP voted in favour. But it has not been only the PP that has been resisting changes to the public display of Franco’s memory. The Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco, perhaps the clearest example of his legacy, continues to be a presence, albeit a minor one, in Spain. In 2017–18, the Foundation took Madrid’s council to court to stop the removal of the road name Calle de 122

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los Caídos de la División Azul – the Street of the Fallen Blue Division – on the grounds that the unit of Spanish volunteers the sign commemorates, who joined the Nazis in the Second World War, was formed in 1941, a year that doesn’t fall within the period between the military uprising and the end of the Civil War covered by the law. The Foundation was awarded the highest annual state subsidy a non-profit-making organisation can receive by the PP after its election in 2000. Chaired by Franco’s only daughter, Carmen Franco, until her death at the age of ninety-one in 2017, the Foundation exists to glorify the dictator’s legacy and is often in the headlines.18 In August 2017, when nineteen activists of the Galician Nationalist Bloc unfurled two banners calling for the return of one of the two towers of the former summer residence of the dictator, Pazo de Meirás, to public ownership, the Foundation pressed charges against the activists. According to Franco, the Galician local government gifted the property to him during the war. In 2017, Franco’s grandchildren decided to put the building up for sale at €8 million. The banners read ‘Let Us Return Stolen Goods. Francoism Never Again.’ The Foundation argued that the nineteen had broken into the grounds and charges were brought against them, carrying large fines and long prison sentences. In 2017, 230,000 people signed a petition asking the government to ban the Foundation.

THE SLOW PACE OF CHANGE ON THE RIGHT If Spain has an established right-wing party with links to Franco, and, as I witnessed in the Valley, a steady stream of 123

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people commemorating the bloody, authoritarian dictator, why did Spain not witness the emergence of a far-right party for nearly a decade when the populist right-wing were in the ascendency across Europe? In Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Italy, far-right parties all made significant headway in the polls. Why was it only in 2018 that Vox, a new far-right party, won twelve seats in Andalusia’s regional parliament, and only in 2019 became the third-biggest party in the national parliament? Many extreme right-wing parties have grown in Europe because of a feeling that establishment parties do not represent them. In Spain, however, the PP has done enough over the last decade to make far-right voters feel represented. That is at least what two social scientists concluded in 2014. Spain was an anomaly in Europe because the populist radical right are structurally ‘hindered’ from succeeding in Spain. While right-wing voters across Europe were running away from the established parties into the arms of far-right leaders, the PP was able to hold its coalition of voters together, a coalition that was once described to me as representing capitalism, Catholicism and Francoism. That is because, as the academics point out, far-right voters in Europe have valued governments that demonstrate strength on law and order issues. As the PP was outmanoeuvred by the new centre-right party Ciudadanos, which campaigned more aggressively against pro-independence Catalan leaders, and the Catalan question awakened more nativist ideas about Spanish nationality in the far right, the PP and Ciudadanos whipped up so much anti-Catalan sentiment that they began to lose voters to Vox. In 2019, the PP suffered a huge loss of seventy-one seats. 124

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Even when the vote on the right split, as Ciudadanos emerged, disenfranchised conservative voters were being tempted away on issues that 15-M and Podemos had put on the political agenda, such as corruption, temporary contracts and low wages. Concerns on people’s minds shifted from social issues to constitutional questions in the aftermath of Catalonia’s unilateral declaration of independence. Back in 2006, 50 per cent of people in Spain believed that immigration was the main problem in the country, but by 2011 this had fallen to below 10 per cent.19 And in 2013, thanks to the activism of 15-M, only 1.5 per cent of the population thought immigration was the key problem facing the country. Instead, 82 per cent thought that unemployment was the biggest problem.20 In addition, Podemos’s success limited the far right’s chances of an electoral breakthrough. After Podemos burst onto the scene and raced to the top of the polls, the fear that it could become the biggest and most powerful party in Spain was a real concern for the right. In the words of the leader of Vox, far-right voters hadn’t been voting for his party ‘because they were too afraid the ponytailed one could come to power’.21 When Podemos’s internal splits and failed political strategy saw their polling numbers slide, the right were free to begin voting on their principles rather than tactically.

‘E S P A Ñ A P R O F U N D A ’ There are ghosts in Spain that still haunt the country’s contemporary political system and society, and, if the last decade is anything to go by, these ghosts are primarily of the 125

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authoritarian regime that ruled the nation for nearly forty years. These ghosts have been so powerful that they have pushed some citizens to aspiring to renounce their citizenship and vote for a future independent of Spain. Take Mercè, a doctor born near León, a non-Catalan speaker but long-term Barcelona resident, a Spanish passport holder and pro-independence voter. ‘It’s terrible. Spain has been so bad to the people wanting a referendum,’ she once told me. ‘They just want to vote. That’s it. It’s clear Spain doesn’t want to change. It’s finally time to leave.’ In early 2018, Mercè invited me to her family home in rural Spain, or, in her words, ‘España profunda – where Franco lives.’ On my way in a car from Madrid to meet her and her family in Benavente in the north-west region of Castilla y León, I again see the cross of the Valley to my left; it quickly disappears after I descend into a long tunnel and emerge out into a European landscape I had never seen before: miles and miles of uninterrupted agricultural land. There are no trees, no hedges, no bushes – apart from a few farmhouses, nothing that could cast a shadow and impede the growth of fields and fields of fruit and vegetables. But there is hardly anything growing: the sprinkler systems, the width of a plane, sit inactive during a cold spell. In Benavente I wait a few hours for the family who are making the eight-hour car journey from Barcelona to arrive and take me to Valderas, a small village on a hill above a river where Mercè was born. Tired from the drive, the family head straight to a bar, where I recount my journey to the Valley. When the father replies with a similar enthusiastic disbelief at the existence of the monument, his daughter holds his arm and 126

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reminds him to lower his voice. Garlic soup and white wine are on the menu, as is pig’s ear and another part of the animal that I can’t identify and prefer not to try. A total of 1,661 people live in Valderas and there are five bars. We move from bar to bar, each paying for a round of drinks that doesn’t ever reach more than €6. In every bar old friends of the family drift over to say hello to Cecilio, Mercè’s ninety-year-old father. With bowed legs from a lifetime of agricultural work, Cecilio is the reason why Mercè now calls Catalonia home. Mercè’s mother had an uncle in Barcelona, and so, together with millions of others from across the country, in the 1970s Cecilio became one of the many internal migrants who moved as the cities began to swallow workers. However, unlike his daughter, he hasn’t quite taken to Catalonia. ‘It’s full of thieves and liars, Barcelona,’ he tells me. ‘They are crazy to want independence. Just crazy. No one wants to work anymore. What do you do without work in life? Everyone is just lazy or stupid. Only stupid people want independence.’ Cecilio, a union member as a young man, fought in the Civil War on the Republican side and was spared death following the war, Mercè tells me, because ‘he was a good guy and well liked here’. Mercè is the oldest of three sisters and, as we sit next to Cecilio, she mops up the oil from the food around his mouth. That fondness doesn’t seem to have deteriorated: more people come to greet him and joke that the family should leave him here when they return to Barcelona in a week’s time. We lose him after the first bar as he accepts an invitation to play dominos. 127

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In the next bar, the family huddles around Mercè’s youngest daughter after finding a local newspaper. ‘Earlier today,’ she reads, ‘key Catalan leaders escaped police services by crossing the border to France and then making their way to Belgium.’ ‘Escaped?’ says Mercè. ‘Escaped? They aren’t criminals. They are our representatives.’ A woman of a similar age to Mercè comes over to our table, greeting everyone with a kiss. On hearing I’m from the UK, she invites me to watch tomorrow’s practice Easter procession around the town, as she and her husband will be wearing the black conical hooded capes next week for Easter. Mercè politely declines, saying that we will be busy. ‘Adios,’ she says to the table as she leaves, adding a ‘Goodbye’ in English for me. ‘Y adéu,’ Mercè mutters in Catalan under her breath when she has turned her back.

LEAVING HOME What drives someone to vote to create a new country and leave the one they live in behind? When I lived in Barcelona it seemed to be the hope of creating something new, the possibility in the wake of the economic crisis of making a community more responsive to its citizens, and a fresh break from the status quo. When Mercè took me on a tour of Valderas the next morning, however, I began to sense a heaviness, a frustration, a despair, a sadness and a deep feeling of regret at what had transpired rather than anything resembling utopia. Leaving her husband and brother-in-law to cook lunch (cod braised in garlic, olive oil and pimentón), Mercè, her daughter 128

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and I walk around the town, arriving at her first home. ‘Every morning we used to walk down to Plaza Mayor to collect water,’ she says. ‘The small windows you can see here where the pavement meets a building was where we stored meat, fish and water. Look, I wasn’t always in favour of Catalan independence, but what we’ve seen in the last few years in Spain is a nationalism built on hate.’ Mercè is part of a generation that has undergone a staggering economic transformation. After years of underdevelopment following the death of Franco, admission to the European Union and liberalisation of the economy saw Spain’s economy grow year on year until the project came crashing down spectacularly. Mercè is the daughter of an agricultural labourer, the child of a poor town who has become a doctor and now lives in a rich, cosmopolitan city, but none of this progress in her life has been strong enough to engender a sense of Spanish patriotism. Like nearly every other town and village in Spain, Valderas has experienced a drop in population since the economic crisis. In just under a decade, the village has lost 347 residents who have moved to the city, a large number of them young people. Despite the Spanish government establishing a national strategy in 2017 to counteract the demographic changes, 50,000 people in March 2019 marched through Madrid to demand more action.22 One consequence of this demographic change has been that towns such as Valderas are now likely to have more male residents than female. While there are one million more women than men in Spain, in three out of every four villages there are more men than women.23 This has allowed Vox’s ideas of Spanish 129

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identity built around bull fighting, hunting and horse riding to appeal to this rural section of society, a section that legitimately feels economically left behind. ‘España vacía’ (‘Empty Spain’) became a key reference point in the 2019 general election, and as the country’s electoral system disproportionately allocates more parliamentary seats to rural areas, the importance of these votes to the far right was extremely high. Sitting on the edge of the circular stone rim of the now dry water foundation, Mercè points out the name of the square ‘Plaza de Onésimo Redondo’, named after a particularly anti-Semitic Falangist who died in combat in 1936 in the Civil War. Valderas removed the ‘Plaza Generalissimo’ plaque from its main square only four years ago. ‘I remember when I was young, on “Victory Day” people gathered in that plaza to sing “Cara del Sol” [the Falangist anthem]. They don’t do it anymore, but you had to stop and raise your arm. If you didn’t you were suspected of being anti-Franco.’ Out of the plaza, we pass the local union headquarters. ‘When I was young, this was a cinema. Unions were banned.’ Daily life under Franco was one of fear and dread. Before films played in cinemas, a news reel of Franco’s working day would run as propaganda. It’s these memories that remain in the minds of many. It has been suggested to me that Barcelona was never made Spain’s capital as it was a port city. With the influx of migrants and ideas from outside, port cities tend not to be looked on favourably as stable capital cities: however, Mercè’s rebelliousness in voting for independence doesn’t come from outlandish, far-fetched ideas. Instead, it is based on a belief in pluralism and the democratic process. 130

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Such views have been seen as anti-Spanish, an attitude stemming from the dormant Francoism that scholars such as Helen Graham have identified. When she writes of the provincial worlds and nineteenth-century social attitudes that characterise sociological Francoism she is writing about what I have glimpsed here in Valderas. The legacy of these attitudes are powerful, and, as Paul Preston has explained, they should be thought of in the same way as we think of the ‘sociological communism [that] exists in the countries of the old Soviet bloc’.24 Perhaps the one commentator who has summed this up most succinctly is the Spanish author Enrique Moradiellos: ‘A considerable part of today’s political culture may have its genesis and its origins, for better or worse, in the times he [Franco] presided over and moulded, and this may have given rise to, among other aspects of political life: the obsession with unanimity in political decisions, the tendency to demonise conflict and differences … the complacency towards corruption and venality.’25 Indeed, Franco and the Falangists used to refer to Spain in the grip of republicanism and separatism as being a ‘sick patient’. It’s the return to this way of thinking that has led to Mercè, as a Spanish person living in Catalonia, able to speak another language and engaged in trying to negotiate the country’s democratic settlement, being viewed as anti-Spanish: part of the legacy of the political ideology that survives unchallenged in Valderas.

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CHAPTER 4

FEAR OF THE NIGHT T HE LONG ROAD TO CATAL AN INDEPENDENCE

Jordi Bilbeny has been campaigning for the independence of Catalonia all of his life, a fact he demonstrates one afternoon when he takes down a book from one of the shelves that line the walls of his study on the second floor of his home. Hidden among his vast library of thick history books, which spill out from the shelves and onto the floor, Jordi has no trouble locating this faded white, pocket-sized book among the hundreds of hardbacks in Spanish and Catalan. In his hands, the slim edition naturally springs open to a page towards the back. Standing by his computer in an oversized woollen jumper, Jordi reads: ‘Overcome the thought that clings to the fear of the night and knocks us to the ground. There is no future but independence.’ The words are his, from a poem he contributed to a conference, as the book describes, on ‘the national independence of Catalonia’ in 1987. For as long as he can remember, Jordi has been researching the history of Catalonia, and he has devoted more than a decade to writing about how Catalan history has been so fundamentally revised by Spanish historians that the Catalan nationality of key historic figures has been erased. Debates over Spain’s history largely focus on questions related to its contemporary history. Questions regarding 135

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how to remember Franco’s regime, its place in preserving a period of peace following the Civil War, the true extent of the regime’s acts of murder and torture, the behaviour of soldiers (on both sides) of the Civil War, and similar angles of historical enquiry of the 1930s onwards have dominated conversations about the past. One recent occasion prompted the country to think further back in time, however, after the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, wrote to King Felipe VI in 2019 asking for an apology for the massacres, oppression and abuses of the Mexican indigenous community committed by Spanish colonial officers in the sixteenth century. Every Spanish political party dismissed the call for an apology, expect Podemos. The leader of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, said that such a request was ‘an intolerable offence to the Spanish people’. Jordi’s focus, however, has been on Spain’s early modern period. In one recent book, he argued that the diaries of fifteenth-century Italian explorer Christopher Columbus showed that he was in fact Catalan. Jordi has also argued that Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, arguably Spain’s most important work of fiction, was first written in Catalan and then translated into Spanish. For over ten years now, through the New History Institute, a grouping of like-minded Catalan historians, Jordi has been giving talks and publishing his alternative (some say conspiratorial) accounts of Catalan history. Perhaps because of the importance he places on the Catalan language and its historically precarious status in the country, or because of the accusation of Spanish interference in Catalonia’s past, in recent years Jordi has been seeing more people attend his talks 136

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and listen to his ideas. The spike in interest in his alternative historical accounts is however indicative of the suspicion and mistrust of some in Catalonia towards the Spanish state, rather than being an interest in the scholarship itself. To say his ideas of Catalan history are on the margins of historical debates between Catalonia and Spain is an understatement. Jordi’s study of the fifteenth century hasn’t gained him a PhD and he isn’t affiliated to any university; his ideas are largely dismissed by historians. But it’s not an overstatement to say that Jordi was in the middle of one of the most important events in the recent history of the region. Appropriately for an amateur historian, Jordi has an artefact in his study that documents it. On a dusty shelf in the corner of the room, behind a postcard, a cassette and a silver torch, is a small poster that reads: ‘Arenys de Munt 13.09.09 Consulta per la Independencia de Catalunya’ – the day the campaign for a referendum on independence began.

A GRASSROOTS PUSH FOR INDEPENDENCE Jordi has lived for most of his life in Arenys de Munt, a small town an hour up the coast from Barcelona, and it was here, just over ten years ago, where Jordi, once a member of a small group of activists, helped organise a non-binding public vote on the question of independence for the town’s 8,000 residents. The vote was denounced by the Spanish government and challenged on the streets by supporters of the fascist group the Falange, now with a small membership and largely 137

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an irrelevance. Raising their right arms in the fascist salute, they waved Spanish flags to intimidate voters. The police were present to keep the peace, and, despite the commotion, 2,569 residents of Arenys de Munt voted in favour of Catalonia becoming independent of Spain; sixty-one voted against. News of the vote sent a shockwave around the region and helped create the foundations for a new grassroots movement that campaigned for the ‘right to decide’. Over the following twenty months, more than half of Catalonia’s municipalities held similar votes, with the final one occurring in Barcelona on 10 April 2011. Each vote was organised by local voluntary organisations rather than councils and each vote produced a result in favour of independence. This intensive period of grassroots activism saw many Catalans receive what political scientist Lluís Medir refers to as a form of ‘civil training’.1 Residents of small towns and villages familiarised themselves with the mechanics of participatory democracy. From setting up polling booths and collecting votes to counting and declaring a result, during these twenty months, thousands of Catalans rehearsed one day holding a referendum on a much larger scale. Throughout this period, and afterwards, two civil society organisations shaped the landscape: Òmnium, founded in 1961, which was once shut down by Franco, accused of providing clandestine training to Catalan teachers; and the Catalan National Assembly (Assemblea Nacional Catalana or ANC), founded in 2012. Joining them was the Popular Unity Candidacy (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular or CUP), a radically left-wing parliamentary party also created in 2012, of 138

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which Jordi was a member at the time of the vote in his coastal town. This new party became so influential that it went on to hold the balance of power in the region’s parliament in 2015, playing a key role in the push for independence. When Jordi was in his twenties, living in Barcelona and writing poetry about independence, the post-Franco constitutional settlement was showing no significant signs of losing support amongst citizens across the country. Approved by 15.7 million voters (a massive 91 per cent of Spanish citizens) a massive 88.5 per cent of Spanish citizens in a national referendum in 1978, seventeen autonomous communities were created and one of the most devolved European. By 1992, Spain’s autonomous communities were given further political control over key public services, such as education, the police and regional television services. While Jordi’s alternative theories on Catalan history haven’t yet gained the ground he hopes, it took a little under ten years for his political opinion on Catalonia’s future to go mainstream. As this pro-independence grassroots movement grew, so too did support for Catalan independence, bringing the legitimacy of the constitutional settlement into question. In 2006, only 14 per cent of Catalans supported independence, according to the Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió. By 2011, support for breaking away from Spain had doubled; it continued to rise over the following years until it hit 47 per cent following the scenes of police violence of O-1 in 2017. This surge in popular opinion prompted a new proreferendum consensus among several political parties of both the centre-right and centre-left in Catalonia. A grouping called ‘Junts pel Sí’ (Together for Yes) made up of the 139

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Republican Left of Catalonia, Democratic Convergence of Catalonia and Democrats of Catalonia attempted to turn the regional elections of 2015 into a plebiscite on independence. In September of that year, 48 per cent of Catalans voted for separatist parties – enough for a parliamentary majority of pro-independence parties. Having already held a consultative referendum in 2014, and following this decade-long grassroots push, the leaders of the independence movement felt they had earned the right to hold an official referendum, despite failing to gain permission from the Spanish government. Throughout this period tensions between the Spanish and Catalan governments deepened and, a few weeks before the 2017 referendum was scheduled, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy made a televised statement calling for a ‘stop [to] this escalation of radicalism and disobedience once and for all’.

THE POLITICIANS TAKEOVER Footage from mobile phones bore witness to what happened in Catalonia on 1-O: police smashed the windows of polling stations (mostly schools) to confiscate ballot boxes; groups of people sat on the floor of polling stations, their hands gripping a stair rail as an officer in full riot gear (helmet, bulletproof vest, padded gloves) jumped from the stairs, landing on someone in the crowd. Everyone screamed and panicked. Other videos showed elderly men and women, some in their late eighties, with blood pouring down their heads, walking away after attempting to vote. Some 900 140

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people were assaulted by the police and admitted to hospital that day. Amnesty International condemned the ‘excessive and unnecessary’ violence, saying that ‘police officers beat defenceless people who posed no apparent threat’.2 Right under the watchful gaze of the Spanish intelligence service and 10,000 Spanish military and police officers, a small but committed section of Catalans from different political persuasions hid ballot boxes in their homes at the risk of large fines and distributed polling cards by the million that read ‘Do you want Catalonia to be an independent country in the form of a republic?’ In towns across the region, farmers blocked roads to prevent police access from the motorway, thousands slept overnight in polling stations, and eventually voters put their personal safety on the line to disobey the police’s order to leave polling stations. The referendum – organised and held by Catalan citizens – posed a series of pressing questions to both Catalonia’s and Spain’s political leaders. As the police violence of 1-O threw the region and country into a state of shock, the public looked for leaders to lower tensions and de-escalate the ensuring crisis. Three days after the referendum, King Felipe addressed the nation in a televised speech. Relatively young, the new king, fluent in four languages including Catalan, presented something of a third way between Madrid and Barcelona, a possible neutral force to broker the deadlock. Felipe had only come to the throne three years earlier following the abdication of his father, King Juan Carlos, after he was photographed proudly standing in front of a dead elephant, rifle in hand, in Botswana. The trip was a disaster. 141

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When it was then revealed that a weekly hunt at the safari park in Botswana costs up to €6,000, with the killing of an elephant quoted on their website as £17,000, at a time when Spain was gripped by a set of painful austerity packages, the king’s reputation was in tatters. The trip was not going to be ignored by the media, after the king fell over in Botswana and was flown home. He was not the only one injured on the hunting trip. His thirteen-year-old grandson had to have shrapnel from a shotgun cartridge removed from his foot. Could the new, young king offer a constructive path forward? No, he couldn’t. Seated at his official desk in his Zarzuela Palace dressed in a suit, with a finely trimmed beard and the Spanish and European flags to his left, he spoke to only one section of Spain. ‘We find ourselves at a critical juncture for our existence as a democracy,’ he began. Certain Catalan authorities, he argued, had put themselves above both democracy and the law, showing ‘an unacceptable disloyalty towards the institutions of the state’. This disloyalty was shown by trying ‘to break Spain’s unity and national sovereignty’. The speech lasted just under six minutes and the king ended by reaffirming his commitment to the ‘unity and permanence of Spain’. The speech, astonishingly, failed to mention, let alone condemn, the elephant (so to speak) in the room: police violence. On the afternoon of 10 October 2017, eight years after that first vote was held in Arenys de Munt and nine days after 2.2 million people participated in a referendum that was denounced and violently opposed by the Spanish state, Catalan president Carles Puigdemont stood behind a lectern in the 142

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Catalan parliament and explained how the region had reached this moment of political crisis. He began with the Statute of Autonomy of 2010, an agreement between Barcelona and Madrid that Puigdemont referred to now as an ‘unrecognisable text’, and described the ‘contempt for language, culture and the way of being’ that many Catalans felt the Spanish government felt towards them. In the speech, he tried to appeal to those in Spain who stood against his campaign for independence. I want to send you a message of calm and respect; of the will for political dialogue and agreement … We are not criminals. We are not mad. We’re not carrying out a coup … We are normal people who want to be able to vote and who have been prepared to engage in whatever dialogue was necessary in a mutually agreed way. We have nothing against Spain or the Spanish. Many citizens, in fact millions of citizens, have come to the rational conclusion that the only way to guarantee the survival … of our values as a society is for Catalonia to be constituted as a state … I want to follow the people’s will for Catalonia to become an independent state. We propose to suspend the effect of the independence declaration … in order to work towards putting into practice the result of the referendum.

Just a few years ago, Puigdemont was the mayor of Girona and a little known figure outside the region. Aged twenty-one, he had a car accident that left him with a white scar across his cheek and upper lip and a slightly damaged left eye. Having worked as a journalist before standing as a candidate for the 143

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centre-right party Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya), Puigdemont was propelled to the top job, becoming leader of the region after Artur Mas, ex-head of Convergence and President of Catalonia, was unable to be re-elected as President when he failed to gain the support of left-wing party CUP. In response to Puigdemont’s recognition of the referendum result, many parliamentarians from other parties outside Puigdemont’s broad coalition stormed out of the chamber in protest. These parties had believed that the pro-independence coalition had been hijacking Catalan politics for the last few years and were unnecessarily and unfairly dividing Catalans and ignoring what they referred to as ‘the silent majority’. The crowds gathered outside, however, cheered. Just eighteen days later, on Saturday 28 October, the Catalan parliament voted to implement the referendum result by voting in favour of creating a ‘Catalan Republic as an independent and sovereign state’. Soon afterwards, the Spanish Senate voted to invoke Article 155, an article of the Constitution that in Spain’s relatively young modern democratic history had never been used before, the use of which the British newspaper the Financial Times described as ‘Madrid Presses Constitutional Nuclear Button’. The Spanish government now had control of the regional police, civil service, finances and public media. New elections were called. Spain was in uncharted territory. In response to the independence declaration, Spain’s European partners rallied behind the government in Madrid, refusing to recognise the new republic and conspicuously 144

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using the same language and arguments as those of the king and prime minister: the ‘constitutional unity’ of Spain, an element of Spanish democracy for the centre-left and right that has become so important in recent years that it seems to be a moral duty to defend it. Theresa May expressed her desire that the rule of law was upheld and ‘Spanish unity preserved’. Angela Merkel phoned the Spanish prime minister expressing her support for ‘Spanish unity’. Emmanuel Macron, under rising pressure from some in Corsica for a referendum on its membership of France, publicly threw his support behind the ‘constitutional unity of Spain’. Despite its Constitution setting out commitments to national self-determination, the EU’s Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, expressed some of the organisation’s anxiety more bluntly: ‘I don’t want a situation where tomorrow the European Union is made up of ninety-five different states.’ The day following the declaration, some of the Catalan independence leaders, including the President, met in a rural farmhouse by the coast in a village between Girona and Figueres to decide what to do next. Would the Spanish courts really send them to jail? A plan, named the ‘farmhouse pact’ by Reuters, was forged. The group would divide: half would remain in Spain and face the Spanish justice system, the other half would live in self-imposed exile and take their arguments to Brussels, the heart of Europe. The plan was decided over a dinner and a breakfast the next morning, and, by lunchtime, Puigdemont had crossed the French border in a car driven by a friend, quickly reaching Marseilles, where he boarded a flight to Brussels. To throw 145

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Spain’s secret services off his scent, an associate had driven his official car in a different direction. By leaving Spain for Belgium, Puigdemont was attempting to put the Catalan case on Brussel’s doorstep. Over the next few weeks, Puigdemont’s influence in Belgium was limited to a few meetings with regionalist parties from across the continent. Back in Barcelona, proindependence campaigners pleaded: ‘Europe, please help us.’ Now the opposition to the pro-independence movement had caught onto the fact that political legitimacy in this fight was found in the act of demonstration. In October, thousands marched through Barcelona in support of Spanish unity and in opposition to Puigdemont. On 3 November 2017, Spain issued a European arrest warrant for Puigdemont. Four days later he handed himself in at a Belgium police station and was released on bail. On 5 December, a few weeks before the regional elections, the arrest warrant was withdrawn. Just before Christmas, Catalans went to the polls. Once again, Catalans voted for parties that would provide a parliamentary majority for independence: the political deadlock was set to continue. A month later Puigdemont flew to Copenhagen to attend a debate titled ‘Catalonia and Europe at a Crossroads’. At the University of Copenhagen, he told an audience: ‘The shadow of Franco is still long. What’s happening in Catalonia is as decisive for the future of Europe as Brexit.’ Catalans, he said, were being ‘treated like terrorists’. Puigdemont insisted it was time to negotiate, but that the solution to the impasse shouldn’t be ‘penal’ but ‘political’. It’s tempting to see Britain’s referendum on leaving the EU and Catalonia’s 146

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attempt to leave Spain as similar. Many in Catalonia feel that the economic realities of leaving Spain and the complexities of joining the EU had been neglected by the pro-independence movement. While this is certainly true, in part because no real debate in more open and fairer circumstances has been held due to a lack of a referendum, the political differences between the Brexit campaign and the pro-independence campaign are significant, mainly focusing on the fact that one wants to leave the political institutions, economic structures and immigration rules of the EU while the other is desperate to join. What is true is that the independence campaign has attempted to frame the desire of such a large number of Catalans to leave Spain as a question as big as Brexit for the EU. In February 2018, the Spanish police thought they had got their man on the outskirts of Madrid after arresting someone who looked like Puigdemont. To the secret services, Puigdemont was known as ‘The Mop’ because of his bowl haircut. But the man they arrested turned out to be a comedian in a wig impersonating the Catalan leader. At around the same time, Pep Guardiola, the ex-manager of Barcelona and current manager of Manchester City Football Club, had his private plane searched twice for Puigdemont after he landed at Barcelona’s El Prat airport. On Thursday 22 March, Puigdemont made a trip to Helsinki that would threaten to end his period of self-imposed exile. He was invited by a Finnish parliamentarian to watch a debate and then attend a debate at the University of Helsinki. He would stay two days until Saturday, again communicating his core message that the Catalan crisis ‘is not an internal 147

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affair but a European one’. It seemed that this third trip beyond the safety of Belgium was too much for the Spanish justice system, and on the Friday they reissued the European arrest warrant – not just for Puigdemont but for the five other exiled leaders in Switzerland, Belgium and now Scotland. There was a delay, however, in the Finnish authorities being able to act on the warrant as it was sent in Spanish. The Finns asked for an English translation. By the time it was received, Puigdemont had left Finland on a boat to Stockholm. With the European arrest warrant now reactivated, Puigdemont believed it was safer to be in Belgium and to return by car. Before leaving, he sent for his six-seater Renault Espace, driven by two Catalan police officers who had volunteered to protect him. In under twenty-four hours the two officers made the 995-mile journey from Waterloo to Stockholm to collect their ex-President and take him back to seemingly judicially safer European lands. The car met Puigdemont from the ferry in Stockholm, along with two people he was travelling with: Catalan historian Josep Lluís Alay Rodríguez and Josep Maria Matamala, a Catalan businessman and Puigdemont’s old friend from Girona who had been financially supporting him since he fled Spain. The group travelled through the Swedish countryside before driving through Denmark, unaware that a team of twelve secret service agents from Spain’s National Intelligence Centre were tracking them. While Puigdemont’s car was in Belgium, a small black box carrying a GPS tracker had been fitted underneath it and at least one of the group’s mobile phones was also being tracked. 148

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In the belief that the German justice system would allow a smoother extradition process for Puigdemont, the security service team let the car pass through Denmark. As the car crossed the German border, the Spanish agents alerted off the German police to the warrant and Puigdemont’s whereabouts. At 11.17am on Sunday 25 March, the Catalan ex-President was arrested seventeen miles into Germany in the small town of Jagel, north of Hamburg. He was taken to Neumünster, where he was put in jail awaiting charge the next day. A month after his arrest, the Spanish national police force offered to present medals to the German officers who had arrested Puigdemont. The German authorities declined the offer. His fellow passengers returned to Spain, where, upon landing, they were detained by police and charged with harbouring a criminal. Puigdemont spent the next twelve days in jail. During Puigdemont’s second night in jail, around ninety people were injured in violent clashes with the police on the streets of Barcelona. At this point, many Catalans remembered Lluís Companys, their exiled-President, who nearly eighty years before had fled Franco and was arrested and returned to Spain under the orders of Adolf Hitler. Arrested in Nazi-occupied France, Companys was transferred from a prison in Paris to Madrid, where he was kept in solitary confinement for five weeks and was tortured and beaten. He was then transferred to the castle on Montjuïc in Barcelona and sentenced to death in a trial that lasted an hour on the charge of rebellion. At 6.30am on 15 October 1940 he was put before a firing squad, where he cried ‘Per Catalunya!’ before being shot. The examples are vastly 149

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different, but the link made by many underlines the importance of history in the region’s thinking, as well as the deep distrust they feel towards the Spanish state. After twelve days in prison, Puigdemont was released on bail. In front of a large group of cameras he called for the release of the other Catalan leaders in jail in Spain. ‘It is a shame for Europe to have political prisoners,’ he said. ‘Finally the time for dialogue has arrived.’ Bail was set at €75,000. Puigdemont moved to Berlin until the German court rejected the extradition request on the charge of rebellion. When the Spanish judicial system began to arrest separatist politicians, they did not neglect the role of civil society leaders. Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart (known colloquially as the ‘Two Jordis’), heads of the social movements the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and Òmnium, were both accused of encouraging Catalan protesters to act violently against the police during the referendum and were charged with rebellion, despite video footage of the two calling through a megaphone for protesters to be non-violent. Such a ruling was declared ‘unjust’ by Amnesty International. ‘While calling protests to obstruct lawful police operations, if proved, may be a punishable public order offence, it does not constitute a serious crime such as sedition or rebellion, which carries sentences of up to ten and thirty years.’ In Amnesty’s eyes, such criminal charges were ‘excessive and disproportionate’ and infringed Mr Sànchez’s ‘rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly’. The trial of the twelve Catalan leaders who decided to remain in Spain rather than go into exile began on 12 February 150

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2019. The trial was televised live and called over 500 witnesses. The twelve faced charges that included rebellion, sedition and the misuse of public funds. In October 2019, the region’s Vice-President, Oriol Junqueras, was sentenced to thirteen years in prison.

KEEPING THE CAMPAIGN FAMILIAL AND EUROPEAN There is no doubt that one of the strengths of the independence movement over the last decade has come from its support in towns and villages across the region. The Saturday morning after I met Jordi Bilbeny, a strong sense of community and political activity is easy to witness. The tree-lined boulevard in Arenys de Mar, the adjacent town to Arenys de Munt where I was staying, is closed to traffic to allow small market stalls to sell their goods. There are long queues outside bakeries, with shoppers wheeling packed trolleys full of artichokes and oranges, all the time stopping to talk to their neighbours and friends. Most people I pass wear yellow ribbons pinned to their jackets, a symbol denouncing the imprisonment of the independence leaders. On the sidewalk there are yellow pieces of graffiti that read República and Llibertat! On the second floor of the town hall is a banner that reads Llibertat Presos Politicos (Free Political Prisoners) and there is also a stall manned by activists raising money for the movement by selling badges and posters of pro-independence politicians. This expression of local activism has found a voice not just in the regional parliament but in local government too. 151

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Following the referendum, 712 mayors (two-thirds of all councils in the region) agreed to help a vote take place, all at the risk of legal action. Notably, that support wasn’t provided by the Barcelona mayor Ada Colau, who stuck to her position of not recognising the referendum but supporting the people’s right to hold one – a tricky balance for the mayor of a city so polarised to maintain. Just a few metres away from Arenys de Mar’s central boulevard, there is a quiet, sun-drenched street with rows of Catalan Estelada flags hanging down its centre. Halfway down the street is a sun-beaten door that marks the entrance to Jordi’s family home. After buzzing the intercom and pushing the old, wooden door open, I see Gloria, Jordi’s eighty-two-year-old mother, standing at the top of the stairs. Gloria’s life has been led in the villages that spread out in the gaps between the green hilltops along the coast. She left school at twelve to work in a knitwear factory in a town on the other side of the valley, and she still displays some of her knitwear in a glass-framed cabinet in the corner of her mahogany-panelled dining room. While her son’s relationship to history is theoretical, Gloria’s is personal. ‘I don’t have studies but I have memories of what I lived,’ she tells me as we sit down for tea. These are memories from the Civil War: the aerial bombardments and the rush to hide in the cellar, the sinking of a ship moored near the coast by an Italian aircraft. And there are memories revealing emotional wounds that haven’t completely healed: her father, a barber, was sent to the front and then held in a concentration camp at the end of the war, a period he rarely spoke about but that his family have never forgotten. 152

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Gloria grew up with a clear division between public and private life that was defined by the relationship between region and state: at home she spoke Catalan, beyond its walls, where the language was banned during Franco’s rule, she spoke Spanish. For many Catalan speakers of her generation it was the family, and often the mother, who kept the language alive while the authorities did all they could to banish it from Spain. During our conversation, it becomes clear how little she uses Spanish in her daily life even now as she keeps reverting to Catalan when she comes across the word ‘because’, replacing ‘porque’ with ‘perque’, until she finally switches completely away from Spanish. While her father went to war and her son has devoted his life to the cause of independence, the family’s political radicalism appears to have skipped a generation. Unlike Jordi, Gloria wasn’t always in favour of independence. But, when I ask her if she voted in the 1 October referendum she snaps back ‘Of course’, as if the suggestion she might not have done is an insult. Gloria can’t remember the specific moment when she changed her mind on independence. She reflects that her local priest was pro-independence during Franco, and that life in Spain for her was ‘positive’ as the country transitioned to democracy. She always became annoyed when people said ‘This isn’t a democracy’, citing the reason that, in post-Franco Spain, she could give her son his Catalan name rather than its Spanish equivalent, Jorge. Gloria was stunned when she saw footage of the police beating voters – her local polling station was free of violence 153

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– and now she can’t imagine switching her opinion. ‘I can’t believe such a thing can happen in Europe in the twenty-first century. I just can’t believe it.’ At this point, her other son, Pere, a tour guide in his early fifties, emerges from the kitchen and joins our conversation. Sitting next to his mother, he tells me how he had been in favour of independence all his life. One of the factors that impelled him to become a stronger advocate of the movement was watching the Scottish referendum on its membership of the United Kingdom in 2014, alongside the continued resistance from the Spanish government to the growing support for one in Catalonia. This resistance was seen by many as a strategic position that would change in response to mounting public pressure, an assumption the Catalan leadership got totally wrong. ‘When the Scottish wanted a referendum,’ Pere tells me, leaning forward on the dining table, ‘Britain didn’t dare to deny them it, especially when it was clear that the majority of people in Scotland wanted one. In the United Kingdom there is an acceptance of a difference between nationalities. There is a respect for the Welsh, the Northern Irish and the Scottish; that they have a different culture yet together you’re British. Here there isn’t.’ There are many reasons why the pro-independence movement experienced such high levels of popular support that its political leaders felt impelled to campaign for a referendum and then vote in parliament to unilaterally declare independence. The rise of support for independence in the polls began in 2011 and a positive and inclusive grassroots154

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led campaign calling for a radical change at a time of such economic despair was always going to be attractive. Furthermore, the prevalence of anti-Catalan rhetoric from right-wing politicians and the intransigence on the issue from the ruling Popular Party also gave separatist politicians easy examples to support their argument of the existence of a long-running lack of respect from the Spanish right towards Catalonia. Additionally, when Podemos, the only party advocating a referendum, began to fall in the opinion polls, the hope was lost that it could be possible for a political party to win power in Spain while arguing that a referendum was the only way out of the growing political crisis. The claim made by some Catalans that Spain couldn’t be changed democratically became louder and louder. But in the decade-long political stand-off between state and region there has been another actor that has played a crucial role: the European Union. The modern story of Europe itself has been a source of inspiration for the Catalans. Before the First World War there were just twelve states on the European continent. Following Croatia’s accession in 2013, twenty-eight different countries were members of the EU, an organisation that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 ‘for having over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe’.3 The political norm of European countries holding referendums to resolve disputes was a source of inspiration for the separatist campaign: the referendums associated with the Treaty of Lisbon, the United Kingdom’s referendum 155

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on leaving the EU, the Greek bailout referendum, as well as the Scottish referendum had all created the expectation in Catalonia that their campaign for a referendum would find support in Europe. Of all of these referendums, as Pere pointed out, it is undoubtedly the Scottish referendum that has been the biggest source of inspiration. Such was the symbolic power of this vote that Puigdemont included it in his speech to parliament on 10 October 2017 when he recognised the legitimacy of the referendum. If a referendum could be held, he asked, ‘in one of the oldest consolidated democracies of the world such as the United Kingdom, why could it not be done in Spain as well?’ While Catalans like to draw similarities between the two independence movements, the differences are in fact stark. Perhaps most striking of all are the differences in the constitutional settlements the two independence campaigns find themselves within: while Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom is that of a union, whose inclusion is legitimised by the voluntary support of Scotland, Catalonia’s membership of Spain is that of a state. The need for Spain to acquire the legitimacy of its regions in its constitutional arrangement is much less important than in the United Kingdom. Of course, this hasn’t stopped the two campaigns and their supporters backing each other. Clara Ponsatí, an economics professor at St Andrews University and a Catalan politician wanted by the Spanish judiciary for her role in the independence vote, chose to go into self-imposed exile in Scotland in 2017 and found an extremely supportive new home. On the day of her hearing in a Scottish court following 156

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Spain’s extradition request, Scottish newspaper The National published a front-page photo of the political exile with the headline ‘You Can’t Have Our Clara’. What Catalan leaders have misjudged in their opinion of the EU is that, despite the holding of referendums being the political norm, two of Europe’s biggest powers, France and Italy, have secession movements in Corsica and Lombardy that they both want to contain. The appetite within the EU for supporting referendum campaigns for independence has therefore been small. To counter this absence of support, in 2012 the Catalan government helped establish the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia (Diplocat), a part-private, part-public organisation designed to promote awareness of the region abroad. The organisation helped organise debates and events across Europe to counter the Spanish government’s narrative of the illegitimacy of the independence movement among European academics, journalists and commentators. Following the referendum, Diplocat was closed down by the Spanish government, reopening a few years later. Despite these attempts to explain to Europe’s opinion makers and officials exactly why the region merited a referendum, Catalonia has received little support from across Europe. However, it has been judicial rulings from countries within the EU that have given crucial life support to the movement. Before Catalonia can begin to think about becoming the newest member of the EU, however, it must reckon with the fact that Spain, like every other member state, holds a veto against any new member state joining the union – a future 157

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roadblock that may prove more insurmountable for the independence campaign than its long list of domestic challenges.

THE PRO-INDEPENDENCE LEFT To most people visiting Barcelona, Montjuïc is a neatly manicured hill 173 metres high that provides picture-perfect views of the city and a handsome selection of conveniently located art galleries. Montjuïc’s most popular side points north-east and is permanently well-kept: outdoor escalators, water fountains, palm trees and large aloe vera plants are all symmetrically lined up to form a tiered public space that leads to the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Montjuïc, though, has another, less frequented side. If you follow one of the roads that twist around the hill, past the 1992 Olympic stadium and behind the seventeenth-century castle (once used as a Francoist prison), the polished vistas disappear and a view of the industrial-sized harbour with its fields of crates and cranes comes into focus, stretching out to the Mediterranean. The art galleries are replaced by bus depots and car washes; the wide empty avenues are occupied by learner drivers practising parallel parking rather than Segway tours. On this south-east-facing side, there is also the city’s enormous cemetery. Flanked by cypress trees and huge tombs adorned with crosses and gothic headstones, there are thousands and thousands of plots where former residents of the city rest. Towards the back of this cemetery, hidden away and difficult to reach within the vast complex itself, there is a small quarry and a single point of exit and entry. In front of 158

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its steep rock face is a semi-circular lawn under which lies a mass grave. It is here, in the corner of a cemetery hidden away from the city and its tourists, that I meet Roger Herrida, a proindependence campaigner, police officer and forensic scientist in his early thirties. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and a long, black coat, he wears a grey scarf wrapped tightly around his neck on which is pinned a yellow ribbon and a picture of Oriol Junqueras, leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia and the Catalan Vice-President who was then waiting to stand trial.4 The quarry, now cast in the afternoon shadow, was once used as the resting place for the city’s poor who were unable to afford an individual plot of land in the cemetery. It was reopened towards the end of the Civil War by Franco’s forces and used as a mass grave for those killed by his regime. In Spain today there are an estimated 2,000 mass graves that contain around 150,000 bodies. Since the war, fewer than 6,000 bodies have been exhumed from just 200 mass graves. Within this grave, there are thought to be at least a few thousand unidentified bodies. Today, monuments can be seen to some of those who were believed to be buried under this patch of grass when the grave was reopened by Franco’s forces: there is one to CNT union members who died on the battlefront, another to those from across the world who joined the International Brigades; there is also one statue commemorating the Holocaust – as Hitler rose to power in Germany, many European Jews responded to the call of the Republicans to join their forces and fight fascism. There are also a scattering of other individual headstones. 159

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‘It would be difficult to identify the bodies,’ Roger explains to me as we stand on the grass’s edge, ‘but it could be done by opening all of this and taking out the DNA of the bones. The thing would be to see whether they have degraded or not.’ Roger’s role as an expert for the serious crimes unit for the police means he spends his day either at a crime scene or in a laboratory searching for evidence of life. Over the last decade, his commitment to identifying and detecting the traces humans leave behind has not only occupied his professional life but his personal life too. In 2010, at an archaeology conference on excavation work in some of the mass graves then recently opened, he met Marc Antoni Malagarriga, a Catalan software developer in his fifties. The pair instantly bonded as they shared what hundreds of thousands in Spain share: a vanished family member. Both had relatives (Roger a great-grandfather, Marc an uncle) who went missing during the war and remain unaccounted for. Years of research by both men have led them to suspect where their relatives’ remains lie, and, as unaccounted graves look set to be opened once again in the near future, the pair have spent the last decade building an invaluable tool that could help many Catalan families identify their loved ones. Following their fortuitous meeting, and recognising the challenge of trying to identify the remains of a body that has been underground for decades, the pair established a DNA bank with a scientist from the University of Barcelona. After years of work, blood samples of many Catalans who one day want to be able to identify their missing relatives are sitting in a fridge in a laboratory of the university. 160

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Roger and Marc were motivated by how normal the process of identifying the dead has become following conflicts in other countries around the world. Roger explains to me as we stand alone in the quarry how forensic scientists have used DNA sampling to identify the victims of large losses of life in Guatemala, Argentina, Rwanda, even in New York following 9/11, in ruins and in communal burial sites. He begins to explain how activists were able to identify the DNA from bones in mass graves and thus identify the bodies from Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ during the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Then he digresses, talking about the moment in 2014 when an Argentinian judge denounced the crimes of Franco’s regime and opened the door for former ministers to face trial. It’s clear from talking to Roger for just a minute that his DNA bank hasn’t been motivated just by the progress of other forensic scientists abroad, but by the injustice of Francoism and the injustice of the post-Franco settlement. ‘To understand what’s happening now in Catalonia, the most simple thing is to say that the fascism of Franco has never gone away. It’s been hiding.’ He thinks the Spanish refusal of and clampdown on Catalonia’s request for a referendum is typical of Spain’s past. In most other countries a referendum would be permitted, but dialogue with Spain is impossible. The only solution to all of this is independence, to break away from all this; all the parties that represent the past of Spain. Parties that continue Francoism. Look, we’re Republicans of the left. For a long time we have wanted to break from this country and become a European country. 161

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What also motivates Roger is having been brought up in the political landscape of Catalonia, historically a place that has had a wider diversity of parties than in Spain. Roger’s family have always voted for the ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia), and therefore have always been in favour of independence. The ERC, a centre-left, pro-independence party founded in 1931 shortly before the Second Republic was declared, combined its social democratic ideas with those of independence. Following the Civil War, thousands of its members were killed, imprisoned or went into exile. Lluís Companys was an ERC politician, something Roger reminds me of as he points to the memorial behind us in the quarry. In the 1980s and 1990s, the ERC went through periods in opposition in the regional parliament. It had some success in the polls before the financial crisis, but it was after 2008 and a local campaign for a referendum that the party began to make gains in the polls. In 2010, it had ten seats in the regional parliament, in 2012 it gained nineteen, and by 2018, with its leader in jail, it had won twenty-nine. While there are other groups in Spain working to identify the remains of those still unaccounted for, it is the personal and political histories in Catalan movements like Roger’s that have provided the inspiration to argue for independence. It was only a matter of time before those with similar views to Roger acted on the injustice of the post-Franco settlement, and in doing so helped bring life and energy into an old party. I first met Roger in 2016 when he showed me the DNA bank in the university. Back then he would talk about the merits of independence, but without the force and conviction that he 162

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has today. Now he talks about ‘la lucha’ (the fight) and a future in which he’s ‘excited to fight democratically, in the streets and in elections’. As his list of moments of historical injustice lengthens, his passion and energy to overturn them show little sign of letting up. The same could be said for the pro-independence bloc in Catalonia, which thinks that independence from Spain is the only way forward for the region. It does not seem that this constitutional question will be going away anytime soon.

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CHAPTER 5

THREE TIMES A REBEL CREATING AND DEF ENDIN G THE REPUB LI C

Mercè began speaking as if there were no time to spare. ‘We’re trying to build a project that is a common project,’ she says. ‘There are lots of groups that use this building because, the feminist movement …’ she breaks off and restarts her sentence. ‘Look. We must always talk about the feminist movement in the plural, okay? Feminisms. Understand?’ The building in question is Ca La Dona (Catalan for the House of the Woman). A space for women in the city to meet, build networks and exchange ideas with the aim, as their website states, ‘to transform the world and reject every type of violence that patriarchy generates’. Ca La Dona, buried away in the heart of Barcelona, was renovated in 2017 with the help of the city council. Part of the Citizen Heritage programme, it’s the first of its kind to encourage citizens to both use public buildings as a hub for activism while also managing the day-to-day life of the building, helping to further institutionalise and normalise political activism in the city. The city council refers to Ca La Dona as Barcelona’s ‘feminist meeting point’. Behind the large, single glass pane windows at the building’s front, there are over 1,700 square metres of clean, smartly restored space where activists can share their campaign ideas and tactics. On the ground floor there’s a library of material 167

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relating to the lives of women in Catalonia and Spain; on the roof there’s a solar-panelled garden with watermelons and tomatoes and views of the city’s medieval cathedral. All of these fittings are set within a building with as rich an architectural history as you’re likely to find in Barcelona: the building is held up by a Roman aqueduct; there are walls built with stone from the ninth, eleventh and twelfth centuries; and there’s a grand medieval staircase in the middle. Mercè

is

an

anti-capitalist,

intersectional,

pro-

independence feminist and a member of Feministes per la Independència, a group that sees independence as an opportunity to build a country free of ‘patriarchy, capitalism and militarism’. A relatively small team of activists, they are just one feminist group of many that use Ca La Dona, and while not all groups here are in favour of independence, they all seek to work together in a joint grassroots-led political project. At Ca La Dona, Mercè is a library archivist. A retired academic of classical languages, she has been one of a handful of volunteers who have created and maintained the archive – the section in the building she immediately takes me to when I visit one morning. Pulling aside a thick bright-purple fireresistant curtain, she reveals eight floor-to-ceiling archive shelving units. Spinning a wheel, she splits the units apart and disappears among rows of old pamphlets, magazines, newspaper cuttings, meeting agendas, notebooks and posters, returning with a ring-bound folder of black and white photos. The photos, protected behind a clear layer of film, were shot in 1976 and capture Catalonia in the immediate aftermath of Franco’s rule: an audience with thick fringes and mullet 168

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haircuts dressed in high-waisted flared jeans is packed tightly into a university auditorium. Seated on the floor, the crowd of women face a banner that reads Primera Jornada Catalana de la Dona (First Conference of Catalan Women). ‘Before the 1970s there was very little activism,’ Mercè explains to me. Everyone had to leave Spain because of Francoism, the Francoist repression, and the dictatorship. So the feminist movement picked up from 1976 onwards. The movement had to gather all the women from the war of 1936, all the women from the following decades – the women who had been in exile or their daughters born in exile. Back then we weren’t talking about independence from Spain. The reference to Catalan in the title of the meeting was more about language than statehood. In the 1970s we were talking about basic human rights: the right to drive, the right to purchase things without a father or a husband present, the right to an abortion, the right to childcare.

The year 1976 was an important moment for the rebirth of many political movements across Spain. As the political structures of authoritarianism fell, basic political freedoms returned. But for Mercè, another set of jornadas, held six years later, was the catalyst for her support as a left-wing feminist for Catalan independence. ‘In 1982 another political group appeared that spoke about the intersection of sex, class and a homeland,’ explains Mercè. ‘The figure that gave voice to this movement was Maria Mercè 169

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Marçal, a great poet, a great Catalan writer.’ Clearing her throat, Mercè recites two lines from a poem of Marçal’s, two lines that for her have served as the motivation for supporting the independence of Catalonia over the last decade. ‘To fate I am grateful for three gifts: having been born a woman, of low class and an oppressed nation.’ Lifting her head from the poem, Mercè holds up her hand and repeats: ‘Three times a rebel: a woman, of low class, of an oppressed nation.’

THE DIVERSITY OF THE PRO-INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT While the campaign for a referendum has been seen as dividing Catalonia down the middle, within the pro-independence camp itself there has been a degree of political plurality, consensus and unity. The claims made by nationalist campaigns often appear simplistic and mobilise a narrow section of society, but the reasons why many pro-independence Catalans give for their support are complex, and those who make up the campaign come from a wide cross-section of society – a fact reflected by the plurality of political parties that campaigned for independence, as well as those in prison. Many within the movement have made political compromises in pursuit of a national campaign. Mercè, who would never vote for a centre-right party, and who was one of the first out on the street to protest against the cuts to public services, is a supporter of the pro-independence bloc and of her exiled centre-right President. How is it possible for a nationalist movement to form? 170

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The motivations for building a common project at Ca La Dona stem from radical grassroots left-wing forms of organisation – or ‘radical routes’, as Mercè puts it. Here at Ca La Dona, collaborating and preserving unity by reaching a decision only by unanimous consent is in the organisational DNA of the group. When I ask Mercè about the patience needed to make such a project operational, she fills her lungs and looks up to the ceiling. ‘It’s so hard to always try to find agreement. You often meet and can’t find it, so you wait until next time and see if anything’s changed.’ The motivations of the broader independence movement, however, are different. While Mercè’s political commitments have lasted longer than the occupancy of the building, the independence movement’s commitment to forging a level of inclusivity on a proindependence agenda has emerged as a result of a distinct political strategy over the last decade. When the Catalan government began plans to hold a referendum, raising the possibility of a unilateral declaration of independence, they were threatening to break the law. The conditions under which a referendum can be held in Spain make it virtually impossible for a region’s representatives in Madrid to have the power to force through the legislation required to hold a referendum. First, Congress must sanction a referendum; then there needs to be a two-thirds majority in both Houses or an election; and then you need another two-thirds majority in both chambers to finally hold a referendum. Even amending the Constitution is difficult; however, this hasn’t stopped the document being amended in the past. In 1992 and 2011, the Spanish Constitution was amended to 171

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accommodate the political and economic policies of the EU. In 1992, an amendment was made to allow European citizens to vote and run in municipal elections in Spain. In 2011, the European Central Bank began purchasing Spanish bonds and an amendment was passed to limit the amount of debt the Spanish state could take on. The obstacles to constitutional reform are so great that, for many pro-independence Catalans, Spain’s institutional barriers became a reason early on to believe that a unilateral declaration of independence was the only option. Indeed, the Constitution was viewed by some as an illegitimate document governing Catalans, as it was created in a very specific set of historical circumstances and was not voted on by those born after 1978. The Catalan pro-independence movement was therefore always going to lose the constitutional battle in Spain, but could it win the political and moral argument? The focus on using the democratic tools available became the movement’s weapon in the fight with Spanish institutions as Catalan politicians turned regional elections into a plebiscite, held informal votes on independence and mass protests. The movement used nearly every tool at its disposal to put political pressure on Spain’s government. How could a government ignore the clear will of at first a large minority calling for a referendum and later around 80 per cent of Catalans who agreed in opinion polls that a referendum should take place? That is not to say that history is an absent force in the unity of the independence bloc: the commitment to democratic methods of campaigning runs deeper than political strategy. A shared understanding of the past is one feature that unites many 172

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of those in the movement. While the rise in support for nationalist leaders around the world campaigning for more borders and walls often expresses a desire for the continuation of some idyllic past, the memories held by pro-independence Catalans of the past are not formed by nostalgia but by fear of what once was. Mercè can remember what it was like to not be allowed to speak Catalan in public. She can remember what life was like in an autocratic state, and she still holds the perception of the Spanish right and the state itself being tied to a set of political forces that were responsible for violating those civil liberties. The violence of 1-O simply reaffirmed her suspicion. Furthermore, Mercè is part of a generation that came of age when democracy bloomed in the shadow of authoritarianism. In Mercè’s understanding of how her world progressed, her activism and political mobilisation were key in advancing her rights. For people like Mercè, her Catalan identity is synonymous with disobedience and defiance. The campaign’s emphasis on rights can be seen in Puigdemont’s and other leaders’ evocation of the work of Martin Luther King and their calls for a ‘march of civil rights’ in September 2018, invoking the tactics of the US civil rights struggle of the early 1960s. These comparisons have had different degrees of success and have been a source of ridicule for many in the Spanish press. For Mercè, and indeed for the pro-independence campaign, the use of nationalist sentiments and arguments isn’t a defence of an anachronistic political ideology. Erecting barriers in this context is an act of defence of her political rights. Fighting in the name of democracy, which the independence campaign has sought to do, is a fight that Catalans like Mercè, who see 173

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their place in society as marginalised, can unite behind. She may disagree with the politics of the movement’s leaders, but with a shared commitment to the rule of law and democratic processes, faced by an opponent they suspect of authoritarianism, then they can stand united. The idea of Catalan nationalism and the hope for a Catalan republic becomes not just an argument to safeguard the elements of life people feel are at risk, but to imagine a future while tapping into a sense of belonging that is rooted in the past. It’s not simply Mercè’s idea of herself as Catalan that motivates her but her idea of herself as a working-class woman. The dream of a future society founded on a commitment to and defence of civil rights is important; but, when combined with a radical project of creating a new state and the opportunity to start from scratch to rid the country of the excesses of capitalism and the violence of patriarchy, it is a project that makes perfect sense for Mercè. Part of this Catalan unity has also been created through the annual performance of the region’s day of Catalonia, La Diada, on 11 September. Americans see 11 September as a traumatic day when the World Trade Center was hit by two planes; Chileans remember the day as the date when Allende was overthrown and killed. For Catalans, 11 September 1714 was when Catalonia fell after the siege of Barcelona by Philip V. As the royal War of Succession played out, Catalonia found itself on the losing side. Since 2013 La Diada has been a creative, public display of the campaign for independence. In 2013, a 480kilometre human chain was formed from the French border to the south of the region; in 2014, 1.8 million people created 174

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a giant mosaic of the Catalan flag in the middle of Barcelona. It has been notable how differently newspapers in Barcelona and Madrid (with the exception of El País) have reported these moments of public protest and how they describe the agency of the people in the street. In Madrid newspapers, they are depicted as manipulated masses, while in Barcelona ‘they constitute a conscious concentration of people with a clear political aim’. Of course, public displays of Catalan unity are not new. Castells, the traditional performances in which people stand on each other’s shoulders and make remarkable human towers, have been another source of building momentum for the campaign. One of the reasons for this unity has been the form of Catalan nationalism that has developed over the last ten years. While other nationalist movements around the world over the last decade have used ethnocentric forms of nationalism, Catalonia’s focus on democracy, inclusion and rights has meant that a civic form of nationalism has defined the Catalan movement’s rise. That said, the movement did find itself compromised after it elected Quim Torra in May 2018, once it became clear that Puigdemont was not able to run a government in exile. Articles written by Torra resurfaced which argued that those who expressed objections to the Catalan language and culture were ‘carrion-feeders, vipers and hyenas’ and ‘beasts in human form’. In a series of embarrassing reports, it was revealed that Torra had argued that ‘there is something Freudian in these beasts, a rough patch in their DNA’.1 For some Catalans, the perceived fragility of their civic rights had long been at the forefront of their minds. For others, however, it took the violence of 1-O and the ensuing judicial 175

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response to cement that view. To understand how the sentiment has spread I met up with a man who helped the region vote. Adrià, a functionario (civil servant) in his forties with two daughters, was one of the 2,000 to 3,000 Catalan volunteers who ensured that every Catalan had a ballot box in which to deposit their voting paper in order to express their view. Adrià is of the left but wasn’t politically active before the referendum. ‘Spain is a failed state. It’s a country that doesn’t serve anybody. It’s badly made,’ he tells me one lunchtime on the rooftop of his building in the Eixample. Adrià hadn’t always been in favour of the independence of Catalonia and still maintains that, if a referendum were held under normal circumstances, he may still vote no. But faced with a mounting challenge from the Spanish state to stop him and his neighbours from voting, Adrià decided to become more involved in the campaign. ‘Catalonia es mol petit [Catalonia is very small]; everyone knows everyone, so when I decided to help organise the distribution of the ballot boxes, it was easy. I just asked someone, who knew someone else, who knew someone else – eventually I reached the person in charge. It was crazy that the Spanish intelligence services didn’t find us. It’s not like I was hiding.’ While access to the referendum’s logistics group was easy, Adrià’s identity as someone trustworthy did have to be confirmed, and the messaging group he was added to for information about the operation was encoded. After Adrià expressed an interest in helping with the organisation of the referendum, he was told to travel to a flat in Zona Franca, in the south of Barcelona, where from an apartment full of ballot boxes he was given two boxes to put in his 176

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car and drive to Ripollet, a small town on the edge of the city. While Adrià claims he wasn’t hiding the ballot boxes, many people were. Stories of ballot boxes being hidden in the base of tree trunks or in garages circulate now like proud legends. ‘Was I scared? No. Look, nobody could have thought about what was going to happen later. It was impossible to predict.’ What Adrià is referring to is the legal challenge that the Spanish state brought against those who had organised the referendum. Adrià had thought that the possible consequences of participation would be a fine or temporary suspension of his job. He hadn’t been prepared for the scale of the legal challenge that awaited Catalan politicians, a challenge that felt particularly personal to Catalans, given that the politicians were claiming to be carrying out the will of those who voted. Since the vote, the trial and the increased police clampdown on activists in Catalonia, Adrià has been gripped by fear, so much so that he has made plans to flee Spain if the police come knocking at his door. ‘I don’t have enough money for the lawyers’ fees or to face a fine.’ Adrià has therefore found an apartment big enough for his family across the French border in Perpignan. Sitting on his roof terrace in the sun, with the hum of the traffic below, it feels like a trip down memory lane. But Adrià still talks about 1 October as if it were yesterday as he recounts the story of the police violence, the ‘tension’ before the referendum and the fear of the families who slept in his local polling booth. He also recalls the excitement on the day of the referendum – the knocking on doors, dividing food responsibilities, waiting to stand up to the police. 177

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These experiences have bound many people who were not involved in the independence campaign closer together since the referendum. New memories of political action against the Spanish state have been created communally, on top of the ones many already shared – Adrià’s father spent several years in a concentration camp in France following the Civil War. Involvement in the referendum and the subsequent fear have reaffirmed one thing for Adrià: that the rise of Catalan nationalism is open and inclusive. ‘To be Catalan isn’t a question about race or ethnicity. It’s about having a democratic culture,’ he tells me before I leave.

COMMITTEES IN DEFENCE OF THE REPUBLIC ‘We need to be able to trust you. I’m sorry, but sadly it’s necessary.’ This was the reply I received from Oriol (not his real name), a member of one of the most controversial movements in Spain, the Committees in Defence of the Republic – CDRs for short – that have emerged across Catalonia since 1-O. I replied with a link to my website, which seemed to do the trick. In return I received an invitation to meet at Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia for an evening of ‘action for those in prison and in exile’. The next evening, a Monday night, at Vila de Gràcia, Barcelona. On one side of the square the sound of laughing children chasing one another around a water fountain echoes around the large plaza, accompanied by the clink of wine glasses, cutlery and plates from the diners sitting under 178

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parasols outside cafés and restaurants. Tomorrow is a regional holiday and the tables on the terraces in the square are full. The other side of the square is a different story: between the peach and red clock tower and the bright-blue council offices, there is a group of a hundred people solemnly gathered in a circle. Their heads are bowed and their hands placed either behind their backs or crossed tightly over their chests. They stand around nine black and white photographs placed under a row of nine yellow roses slumped in empty green beer bottles. Each photograph and each rose represents one of the leaders currently imprisoned in a jail outside Madrid. Charged with offences that range from sedition and rebellion to inciting violence and public disorder, messages from some of them are read out from the screen of an iPhone down a microphone in an unceremonious tone. Above the photos and roses is a poster. In Catalan it reads ‘Lliure Presos Políticos’ (Free Political Prisoners). Posters are not just on the floor: they are held in hands, too, and carry messages in English, such as ‘Franco is Back’, ‘Europe Wake Up!’, ‘Help Catalonia’, ‘Democracy or Fascism’. Once I reach the edge of the circle, I send a message via the encrypted communication service that I was asked to download to say that I have arrived and am next to the square’s small Japanese bakery. Then I wait. I hadn’t encountered this level of caution from any other activist from any other movement in Spain during my travels, but the members of this social movement have good reason to be suspicious of outsiders. Since forming out of the networks that defied the Spanish state, police and intelligence services and coordinated the historic illegal 179

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referendum, CDRs have organised campaigns of peaceful civil disobedience and non-violent resistance across the region. In just the two months following the referendum, the movement was responsible for 193 road and rail blockages and for decorating streets in cities, towns and villages across the region with yellow ribbons – a symbol of support for those in prison or in exile – transforming public spaces into a battleground of resistance. With over 250 branches in the region, some more active than others, it is this one in Gràcia that, according to the police, has been the most active.2 Beyond ‘defending a republic’, their efforts have centred on maintaining momentum for the referendum result and campaigning on behalf of those in prison and those in exile. The Spanish police and justice system have taken an uncompromising position on their activities. A few weeks before we met, Adrià Carrasco, a twenty-five-year-old CDR activist, had surfaced in Brussels having evaded the Spanish police in April 2018 after they attempted to arrest him at his home. Adrià had participated in protests that stopped the flow of traffic and the Spanish police charged him under terrorism legislation. He told the Catalan media that ‘in Spain, there are no guarantees of a fair trial … We are being used as scapegoats to scare people … We need to get rid of the ghosts of Francoism.’3 Speaking about his decision to flee the country, he said, ‘I knew they were coming for me. I grabbed some trainers and trousers, the first I found, and left.’4 Adrià Carrasco was able to evade the Spanish police, but fellow activist Tamara Carrasco was not so lucky. Arrested in her home near Barcelona’s airport, she faced charges of terrorism and rebellion. 180

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As I wait by the bakery, without a reply to my message, I begin to sense the presence of a small group of men in their early sixties shuffling towards me until one walks over with an extended hand. ‘Chris? I’m Oriol. Welcome to our revolution.’ Despite the apprehensive messages I had received, Oriol, who has an untrimmed grey beard, thick, black glasses and curly hair, is surprisingly relaxed. A chain smoker, he wears a smile and quickly becomes animated, immersed in my questions about the event – so much so that he doesn’t notice that the readings in the circle have finished and an acoustic guitar and flute have begun playing, marking the start of a rendition of the Catalan national anthem, Els Segadors. Someone taps him on the shoulder and points to the musicians. He pauses midsentence, raises his right arm, clenches his first and sings ‘Catalonia triumphant shall again be rich and bountiful. Drive away these people, who are so conceited and so arrogant. Strike with your sickle! Strike with your sickle, defenders of the land! Strike with your sickle! Now is the time, reapers. Now is the time to stand alert.’ The group marks the end of the anthem with a collective, deep ‘Lliure’ (Freedom). Those sitting at the other end of the square momentarily glance over before turning back to their food. The group meet weekly, but as the national day of Catalonia (La Diada) is tomorrow, attendance is particularly high, Oriol tells me. Tomorrow’s Diada will be special, as its creative display will not be shown its outward spectacle but in its silence. Like the last few years, around one million will gather on a major road in the centre of Barcelona, and as the clock hits 17.14, representing the year when Catalonia lost 181

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its independence in the War of Succession, the crowd will fall deadly silent. In the last few days, newspapers have discussed how those in CDRs are planning to bring Catalonia to a stop, not just for the late afternoon, but for the days that follow: plans for the occupation of a square as well as major roads have been floated, plans that build on recent pieces of activism. Just over a month ago, members from the movement occupied La Model, an ex-Francoist prison in Barcelona, the site of years of torture and repression during the dictatorship that has only recently been decommissioned. Lasting just one night, the occupation of the prison failed to gain momentum. But nevertheless, in the build-up to this year’s Diada, there’s a palpable sense of tension in Barcelona. These Monday evening public meetings, according to Oriol, began after the referendum in a spontaneous manner. Once they were finished, participants often walked down to La Diagonal, Barcelona’s major road and the site of the demonstration tomorrow, and stopped the flow of traffic until moved on by the police. Now, however, there is a regularity to the meetings and an expectation of what is to come next. ‘We can’t trust Spanish justice. We live in a false democracy,’ Oriol says. ‘If you can’t trust your justice system you don’t have a country. So the best way to control our fear is to be together and to fight against it. We were never going to stay at home after the referendum.’ A new tactic the police have used in response to CDRs is to record activists’ names should they suspect their involvement with the group’s activities, meaning that no one that night was carrying an ID card. 182

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Oriol is telling me this as he unpacks two yellow spray cans from his bag, which he hands out to another activist, again in his early sixties. He also distributes stencils that read ‘Catalan Republic’ and ‘Free Catalan Prisoners’ from his backpack. They then all follow someone carrying a ladder and find a space clear of graffiti on a wall and leave their message. Others hand out ribbons, paper and stickers and the group begins to cover the benches in yellow stickers and tree trunks in yellow tissue paper, and they cover a bin in yellow stickers. There is a mischievous glee on everyone’s faces as they graffiti buildings with a sense of both spontaneity and ritual. Once our end of the square has taken on a yellow tinge, the group divides into smaller groups and begins to disperse around the narrow streets of Gràcia. I follow Oriol’s group west, emerging onto a bigger, busier road outside the labyrinth of Gràcia where the group becomes more cautious. We cross Carrer Gran de Gràcia, the largest road in the neighbourhood, and turn down a small street. Halfway along it, a woman from the group shouts ‘La policía!’ Everyone stops, waiting to see if the police car she has seen will follow them. Those involved in the protest tonight looked like they are the kind of people with a lot to lose. The police car doesn’t materialise and the group continues to another square, this time with a large market in its centre. Some people clap and offer messages of support as they pass the sixty-year-old graffiti artists. But not all. With the smell of fresh paint thick in the air, a well-dressed man in his late twenties leans towards the group and yells, ‘Why do you have to do this?’ Following Oriol’s initial hesitancy about meeting, at the end of the evening I receive an invitation to attend his pre-La Diada 183

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meeting and barbecue where CDRs from across the region will get together before setting off to join the silent demonstration in the afternoon. The next day, I walk back into the twisting lanes of Gràcia and to one of the neighbourhood’s smallest squares, Plaça de Raspall. From a few streets away I can already smell the meat grilling on the five large barbecues in the middle of the square, and I see Oriol, cigarette in hand, attaching wires to the back of a speaker and directing a crew of helpers. Between the trees and lampposts hang yellow posters emblazoned with the words ‘Desobediència es el camí’ (Disobedience is the way). There are six rows of tables and chairs for over 1,000 activists filling the square. Shops have closed but one of the ateneus – Catalan social centres run by the neighbourhood that have existed across the city for more than 100 years – is open and serving drinks. Spaces for local people to meet and host cultural activities, the ateneus are often the hub of a neighbourhood and today they have loaned all their chairs to the Gràcia CDR for the meal. Close by, a woman from Girona has travelled to the city to sell badges of the Catalan flag to raise money to cover the legal fees of some of the activists arrested by the police. As the battles between politicians escalated and Catalan politicians risked decisions that would land them in court, ordinary Catalans have become central to the life of the campaign. Following disputes within political institutions and courts, from late 2017 onwards, it has been the battle over public space that has defined the conflict between Spain and Catalonia. That battle for public space has at times shown signs of escalating into violence – a fact the activists here think is largely due to aggression from right-wing activists. Prior to 184

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La Diada, the police warned that some CDRs were planning to carry out their protests with ‘a certain degree of violence’.5 While in Gràcia they entirely denounce violence, some on the pro-unity side have accused Catalans of committing acts of symbolic violence in their use of the Catalan flag in their campaign. They have been accused of changing the meaning of the flag into a modern pro-independence symbol – and that, it is claimed, is an act of violence in itself. The previous day, before I met Oriol and his fellow CDR activists, 2,000 people in favour of the unity of Spain and against Catalan independence marched through Barcelona. While the majority of protesters were peaceful, incidents of violence weren’t absent from the demonstration, as a group of bystanders was assaulted by protestors in a homophobic attack while drinking outside a café. Incidents like this meant that the day was marked by an atmosphere of agitation and tension, much as there had been the night before. Leaving the plaza, we join streams of people walking to La Diagonal, and, at 17.14, around one million Catalans stand together in silence, dressed in yellow with ribbons tied to their tops. As the event ends and people disperse, the yellow mark they have left can be seen. Each tree trunk and branch, each store front, each bin, each bench, each letter box, each paving stone has been marked with a yellow ribbon. Four hours later I return to La Diagonal. Instead of the city’s cleaning services removing the ribbons to reopen Barcelona’s central avenue for the city to return to work the following day, there are people in masks. In their hands are knives and scissors that they are using to hack away at anything yellow 185

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and stuff it into black bags. Groups of right-wing activists (those from the CDR prefer to call them fascists) have recently taken to the streets after each night of CDR-related activism to remove what they have added to public space. Named GDR – Grupos de Defensa y Resistencia – and Cuerpos de Brigadas de Limpieza, they cover their faces (and sometimes wear hazmat suits) to ‘clean Catalonia of its yellow garbage’, as their Twitter profile boasts. Spain is more fragmented and polarised than it has been for decades. The voices in this book help begin to explain why. Hopefully, they also help illustrate how, out of the struggles of recent years, positive forms of political action and change have emerged across the country. The vast array of political and social movements that has been building for years has been at the centre of the biggest political shifts the country has witnessed for decades. These shifts originate in divisions between separatists and those who want to keep the country together; between traditionalists and radicals; between new political parties and old traditional politics; between the rural heartlands and the city. As the decade draws to a close, wherever you look there is still evidence of the activism that has shaken the country’s status quo. While the intensity of this activism will grow and fade along with political crises, the rise of the Catalan independence movement, the radical left and now the far right shows no sign of ceasing its impact on mainstream Spanish politics any time soon. The depth of the division between region and state can be seen in the word often used to describe the political clash over Catalan independence: ‘ruptura’ – not a dispute or disagreement, but a rupture in the social and political relations between 186

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the north-east region and Spain. If this breakdown was created by 1-O, it was consolidated by the four-month trial of independence leaders in Madrid. In May 2019, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention criticised the imprisonment of three of the nine Catalans held in jail since October 2017. The team of human rights experts said that the detention of the two civil society leaders Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez and of Catalan Vice-President Oriol Junqueras was ‘arbitrary’ and that the state’s legal case against the trio ‘put pressure on them because of their political opinions regarding the independence of Catalonia and [was designed] to prevent them from continuing with that aim in the political arena’.6 The Spanish government refuted the accusations and called into question the independence of the report and the independence of the group of human rights experts. On 14 October 2019 nine Catalan leaders were found guilty of sedition, misuse of public funds and disobedience. The longest prison sentence of the nine leaders was handed down to the region’s former vice-president Oriol Junqueras. Convicted of sedition and misuse of public funds, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison and banned from holding public office for the same amount of time. The second longest prison sentence was handed down to the former foreign minister Raül Romeva, he along with the former labour minister and regional government spokesman were both sentenced to 12 years in jail for the same charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. The two social movement leaders, Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez, were both sentenced to nine years in prison, having been found guilty of sedition. The European arrest warrant for Puigdemont was also reactivated. 187

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Unsurprisingly, on the day of the announcement of the verdicts, Barcelona was brought to a halt as half a million marched through the city. In an example of how fluid, creative and constantly evolving the grassroots campaign has become across the region, a new social movement named Tsunami Democràtic helped mobilise thousands of people to flood Barcelona’s airport, bringing the airport to a standstill. For the next five nights, protestors violently clashed with riot police in the centre of the city. The Catalan president, alarmed by the growing perception that the movement was being rebranded as violent rather than peaceful, and worried that it would lose its moral authority in its battle with Spain’s institutions and right-wing parties, distanced the independence movement away from those taking to the streets. While the polling figures in favour of independence may decrease, and the campaign against independence grows, the social movement for independence has grown so large that it will carry on defining relations between region and state for years to come. In the meantime, the independence movement will continue to use all political means at its disposal to put pressure on Spain, via Europe, in a bid to allow the region to hold a referendum. One of the latest examples of that strategy was seen in the 2019 European elections, in which Puigdemont won a seat as a Member of the European Parliament, only to be denied the right to take up his seat. The tensions resulting from the failed independence bid of 2017 and the underlying anti-Catalan sentiment in Spain, which is based on an idea of Spanish nationalism that doesn’t 188

T hree t i m es a re b e l

recognise the different national and political identities of the regions, have energised the far right and allowed them to take their place in the halls of power once again. In response, the centre-right parties have moved further to the extremes. However, the lived history of so many citizens from different periods of Spain’s recent past will ensure that any lurches to the right will not go unchallenged. On 24 October 2019, following years of campaigning, Franco’s body was finally exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen and transported by helicopter to a private family vault in a cemetery outside Madrid. In a private family ceremony, Franco was reburied next to his widow Carmen Polo. While the Spanish state no longer accommodates an enormous shrine to the former dictator, the unresolved traumas of the past will continue to resurface in other forms. The attempt to rehabilitate the Valley of the Fallen into a truly national memorial now enters a new phase. The 2010s began with the radical left in the ascendency. The decade ends, however, with the far right, after having been contained for years, even during one of the worst economic crises Spain has ever experienced, revitalised and back in the political mainstream. The PP’s alliance of the right has broken, and as the party signals a move to the right on economic, migration and abortion policies, the question of how to put the far right back in its box seems to have been answered by a move in their direction. The general elections results of November 2019 in which Vox became Spain’s third-largest party with 52 seats – an increase from 24 in April’s elections – not only reveals the fracturing of the right, but also asks serious questions of Sanchez’s political judgement for his role in failing to 189

C hapter 5

provide Spain with a stable government and rolling the dice in 2019 by holding the country’s fourth general elections in as many years. Sanchez has undoubtedly helped create the space for the far-right to grow further. The decade does however end where it began – with PSOE back in power, now with the support of Podemos in coalition. But the re-emergence of PSOE should not be seen as a resumption of normal political affairs. Many of the underlying conditions of economic decay and social instability throughout the country remain. In 2013, when Podemos filled the Palacio Vistalegre in Madrid with thousands of supporters chanting ‘Sí se puede’ (Yes we can), it would have been difficult to imagine that in 2018 the former bullfighting arena would fill with supporters of Vox, this time under the slogan ‘Viva España, viva la Policía Nacional, viva la Guardia Civil y viva el Rey’, but Podemos’s strained political progress has helped open the door to the far right. Podemos’s failure to become the biggest force in Spanish politics could be attributed to the mismanagement of expectations. The party’s underachievement comes down to it failing to adopt an inclusive political strategy that distanced it from the old radical left. Too much control has been amassed by its leader, Pablo Iglesias. Meanwhile, the best attempts at radical transformation have come not from national political parties but from city-based movements. Crucially, on the left, while the initial optimism about the new parties has subsided, the people who helped create the political space and underlying political culture that allowed them to emerge are not disheartened. They continue their work irrespective of political cycles. 190

NOTES

Introduction 1 K. Calvo and H. Garciamarín (2016) ‘¿Qué ha pasado con la movilización social? Continuidad y cambios en la protesta social en España’, Zoom Político 28, p. 2. Accessed at www.fundacion alternativas.org/laboratorio/documentos/zoom-politico/que-hapasado-con-la-movilizacion-social-continuidad-y-cambios-en-laprotesta-social-en-espana. 2

‘Spain’s 40-year itch’, Politico, 31 October 2018. Accessed at www. politico.eu/article/spains-40-year-itch/.

3 P. Preston (2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain, London: HarperPress, p. 520. 4 N. Lloyd (2015) Forgotten Places: Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, p. 334.

Chapter 1. Madrid 1 S. Mann, ‘Madrid’s residents are being forced out of the city centre. Blame Airbnb’, CityMetric, 31 May 2017. Accessed at www. citymetric.com/business/madrid-s-residents-are-being-forced-outcity-centre-blame-airbnb-3048. 2

L. Meyer and S. C. Fanjul, ‘Is Madrid headed for the same tourism trap as Barcelona?’, El País (in English), 3 April 2017. Accessed at https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/04/03/inenglish/1491205767_ 176177.html.

3

Meyer and Fanjul, ‘Is Madrid headed for the same tourism trap as Barcelona?’

4 ‘¿Dónde viven los extranjeros en Madrid? Este y sur, las zonas más diversas’, El Economista, 1 March 2018. Accessed at www. eleconomista.es/madrid/noticias/8974344/03/18/Donde-viven191

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los-inmigrantes-extranjeros-en-Madrid-Este-y-sur-las-zonas-masdiversas.html. 5

‘Spain: protests and the suffocating embrace of the law’, Amnesty International, 24 April 2014. Accessed at www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ news/2014/04/spain-protests-and-suffocating-embrace-law/.

6 ‘Antonio Gonzalez Pacheco’, Trial International, 17 January 2018. Accessed at www.trialinternational.org/latest-post/antoniogonzalez-pacheco/. 7 C. Fominaya (2014) ‘Debunking spontaneity: Spain’s 15-M/ Indignados as autonomous movement’, Social Movement Studies, Volume 14, Issue 2, p. 154. 8 C. Fominaya (2014) ‘Debunking spontaneity: Spain’s 15-M/ Indignados as autonomous movement’, Social Movement Studies, Volume 14, Issue 2, p. 154. 9

Fominaya, ‘Debunking spontaneity’, p. 154.

10 Fominaya, ‘Debunking spontaneity’, p. 154. 11 P. Preston (2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain, London: HarperPress, p. 512. 12 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 471. 13 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 511. 14 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 152. 15 ‘Spain’s radical right is here to stay – but did it ever leave?’, The Nation, 10 January 2019. Accessed at www.thenation.com/article/ spain-vox-radical-right-populism-catalonia/. 16 ‘Vox wants to build a wall to stop immigrants coming to Spain and they want Morocco to pay for it’, The Local, 29 March 2019. Accessed at www.thelocal.es/20190329/vox-wants-to-build-a-wallto-stop-immigrants-coming-to-spain-and-they-want-morocco-topay-for-it. 17 ‘Make Spain great again’, Foreign Policy, 27 April 2019. Accessed at www.foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/27/vox-spain-elections-trumpbannon/. 18 No-Do is short for Noticiarios y Documentales (News and Documentaries).

192

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Chapter 2. From the plaza to parliament 1 K. Calvo and H. Garciamarín (2016) ‘¿Qué ha pasado con la movilización social? Continuidad y cambios en la protesta social en España’, Madrid: Fundación Alternativas. Accessed at www. fundacionalternativas.org/laboratorio/documentos/zoom-politico/ que-ha-pasado-con-la-movilizacion-social-continuidad-y-cambiosen-la-protesta-social-en-espana. 2 ‘El salario medio cae a 1.878 euros brutos al mes tras años de subidas’, La Vanguardia, 8 November 2017. Accessed at www. lavanguardia.com/economia/20171108/432717131839/salariomedio-sueldo-espana-2016-epa.html. 3 G. Vidal (2017) ‘Challenging business as usual? The rise of new parties in Spain in times of crisis’, Western European Politics, Volume 41, Issue 2, p. 268. 4

Vidal, ‘Challenging business as usual?’, p. 268.

5 ‘Spanish cities host historic marches to demand end to gender discrimination’, El País (in English), 9 March 2018. Accessed at www. elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/09/inenglish/1520582403_009413. html. 6 ‘Women’s Day: equality in freedom’, El País (in English), 7 March 2018. Accessed at www.elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/07/inenglish /1520433316_735217.html?rel=mas. 7 ‘Women in Spain earn 13% less than men for similar work, new study shows’, El País (in English), 9 March 2018. Accessed at www. elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/07/inenglish/1520413367_221769. html. 8

‘The gender no-pay gap: women in Spain do twice as much unpaid work as men’, El País (in English), 12 February 2018. Accessed at www. elpais.com/elpais/2018/02/13/inenglish/1518514387_016558. html.

9 ‘A temporary beach cemetery in Valencia, to mark 739 women killed’, El País (in English), 9 March 2018. Accessed at www.elpais. com/elpais/2018/03/09/inenglish/1520588794_324922.html. 10 ‘Gender violence rate rises in Spain for second consecutive year’, El País (in English), 1 June 2017. Accessed at www.elpais.com/ elpais/2017/05/31/inenglish/1496243416_419062.html. 193

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11 ‘Violence against women in Spain highest ever in 2017’, The Local, 12 March 2018. Accessed at www.thelocal.es/20180312/violenceagainst-women-in-spain-highest-ever-in-2017. 12 ‘Five women killed in four days as gender violence spikes in Spain’, El País (in English), 12 February 2017. Accessed at www.elpais. com/elpais/2017/02/23/inenglish/1487840255_431872.html. 13 ‘The successes and failures of Spain’s fight against domestic abuse’, El País (in English), 25 November 2015. Accessed at www.elpais. com/elpais/2015/11/25/inenglish/1448449401_599926.html. 14 Amnesty International (2018) Wrong Prescription: The impact of austerity measures on the right to health in Spain, London: Amnesty International, p. 6. Accessed at www.amnesty.org/download/ Documents/EUR4181362018ENGLISH.PDF. 15 Í. Errejón and C. Mouffe (2016) Podemos: In the name of the people, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p. 45. 16 Errejón and Mouffe, Podemos, p. 41. 17 ‘La anestesia democrática del nacionalismo español’, CTXT, 18 April 2018. Accessed at ctxt.es/es/20180418/Firmas/19083/ nac ionalismo -Espa%C3%B1a-Ignac io -Sanchez-Cuenc aCatalunya.htm. 18 ‘University public funding recovery is “slow and fragile” says EUA’, The Pie News, 14 December 2017. Accessed at www.thepienews. com/news/research/european-university-association-hei-funding/. 19 ‘La precariedad se ceba con los jóvenes: triple temporalidad y el doble de jornadas parciales que el resto de trabajadores’, El Diario, 19 November 2018. Accessed at www.eldiario.es/economia/ precariedad-jovenes-trabajo-temporal-jornada_0_837466495.html. 20 ‘Seven facts that show the dark reality of Spain’s economic recovery’, The Local, 29 January 2018. Accessed at www.thelocal. es/20180129/the-reality-of-spains-economic-growth. 21 ‘España es el tercer país en pobreza infantil en la UE’, El País, 15 April 2017. Accessed at www.elpais.com/politica/2017/04/13/ actualidad/1492085400_707384.html. 22 ‘Political positioning and ideology of Spanish young people’, European Youth Portal, 23 May 2019. Accessed at https://europa. eu/youth/es/article/51/66283_es. 194

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Chapter 3. The Valley of the Fallen 1 ‘Puigdemont to Swiss TV: “Franco nominated the king’s father”’, El Nacional, 14 March 2018. Accessed at www.elnacional. cat/en/news/puigdemont-swiss-t v-f ranco -king_248091_ 102.html. 2

E. Moradiellos (2017) Franco: Anatomy of a dictator, London: I. B. Tauris, p. 27.

3 Moradiellos, Franco, p. 29. 4 Moradiellos, Franco, p. 183. This opinion of Franco as an authoritarian rather than a fascist ruler is also found in the analysis of Spanish historian Antonio Cazorla Sánchez. ‘The regime could be deadly murderous, but Franco’s Spain was not Hitler’s Germany, and the party of the right, the Falange, never had a portion of power and mobilisation capability that the Nazi party displayed. Unlike Germans under the Third Reich,’ he writes, ‘[and] throughout the dictatorship, Spaniards had few incentives to participate in voluntary or community associations. The state’s main function was to control rather than to mobilise’ (A. Cazorla Sánchez (2009) Fear and Progress: Ordinary lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). Furthermore, Stanley G. Payne, a historian of Spanish fascism, suggests that Franco’s ability to rule on a fascist platform was inhibited by the fact that Spanish citizens were largely either ‘politically democratic’, already mobilised by unions or, like the landowners in the countryside, ideologically committed to Catholicism (S. Payne (1999) Fascism in Spain, 1923–77, Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press). Therefore, while fascism was emerging as a force across the continent, ‘in Spain, as in eastern Europe’, Paul Preston writes, the rise of a rebellion ‘would be rightist and military, not fascist, in character’ (P. Preston (2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain, London: HarperPress, p. 470). 5 The term ‘fascist’ in Spain today is a slur associated more with an undemocratic attitude than an overtly racist and anti-Semitic ideology; however, of course, these elements were heavily present in Franco’s Spain. 195

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6 M. Kurlansky (2000) The Basque History of the World, London: Vintage Books, p. 256. 7 Moradiellos, Franco, p. 94. 8 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 472. 9

This idea comes from Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 509.

10 S. Balfour (ed.) (2005) The Politics of Contemporary Spain, Abingdon: Routledge, p. 151. 11 X. M. Núñez Seixas in Balfour, The Politics of Contemporary Spain, p. 138. 12 H. Graham (2012) War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s long twentieth century, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. 13 Graham, War and its Shadow, p. 131. 14 Graham, War and its Shadow, p. 129. 15 J. Cercas (2018) The Imposter, translated by Frank Wynne, London: MacLehose Press, p. 230. 16 ‘Victims of Francoism fear historical memory cuts under PP government’, El País (in English), 20 September 2011. Accessed  at www.elpais.com/elpais/2011/09/20/inenglish/1316496042_ 850210.html. 17 The general idea comes from O. Encarnación (2008) Spanish Politics: Democracy after dictatorship, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 179. 18 ‘La Fundación Francisco Franco pide 13 años de cárcel por una acción en el pazo de Meirás’, El Salto Diario, 6 July 2018. Accessed at www.elsaltodiario.com/memoria-historica/la-fundacion-franciscofranco-pide-carcel-por-una-accion-en-el-pazo-de-meiras. 19 S. Alonso and C. R. Kaltwasser (2014) ‘Spain: no country for the populist radical right?’, South European Society and Politics, Volume 20, Issue 1, pp. 12–13. 20 Alonso and Kaltwasser, ‘Spain’, p. 13. 21 ‘Spain: no country for old fascists’, Politico, 26 December 2016. Accessed at www.politico.eu/article/spain-politics-far-rightpodemos-rajoy-pp-populism-vox/ 22 ‘Miles de personas marchan por la “España vaciada”, que entra en la precampaña’, El Confidencial, 31 March 2019. Accessed at www. elconfidencial.com/espana/2019-03-31/la-espana-vacia-sirve-deprecampana-a-los-partidos-en-la-manifestacion-de-madrid_1914378/. 196

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23 ‘Isaura Leal: “La Estrategia Nacional frente al Reto Demográfico se centrará en las personas para garantizar la igualdad de derechos y el acceso a los servicios públicos de todos los ciudadanos y ciudadanas”’, La Moncloa, 3 October 2018. Accessed at www. lamoncloa.gob.es/serviciosdeprensa/notasprensa/territorial/ Paginas/2018/031018retodemografico.aspx. 24 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 520. 25 Moradiellos, Franco, p. 14.

Chapter 4. Fear of the night 1 L. Medir (2015) ‘Understanding local democracy in Catalonia: from formally institutionalized processes to self-organized social referenda on independence’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, Volume 28, Issues 2–3. 2 ‘Catalan referendum: dangerous use of force by Spanish police confirmed by Amnesty’, Amnesty International press release, 3 October 2017. Accessed at www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ catalan-referendum-dangerous-use-force-spanish-policeconfirmed-amnesty. 3 ‘The Nobel Peace Prize 2012’. Accessed at www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/peace/2012/summary/. 4

In bizarre scenes in 2019, Oriol Junqueras and three other jailed leaders were allowed to temporarily leave jail to be sworn in as elected parliamentarians following the ERC’s best showing in the general elections. Their political positions were then immediately suspended as they were facing trial. As they were sworn in, other members of parliament from the far-right Vox party shouted across them in the chamber to try to drown out their oaths to uphold the Constitution, after which they were returned to their cells.

Chapter 5. Three times a rebel 1 S. Jones (2018) ‘Quim Torra sworn in as Catalan president amid xenophobia claims’, Guardian, 17 May. Accessed at www. theguardian.com/world/2018/may/17/quim-torra-sworn-incatalan-president-xenophobia-claims. 197

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2 ‘La policía alerta de que grupos radicales planean actuar “con cierta violencia”’, El País, 11 September 2018. Accessed at www.elpais.com/politica/2018/09/10/actualidad/1536602583 _913151.html. 3 ‘Exiled activist: “We are being used as scapegoats to scare people”’, Catalan News, 6 September 2018. Accessed at www. catalannews.com/politics/item/exiled-activist-we-are-being-usedas-scapegoats-to-scare-people. 4

‘“It was survival” says activist wanted by Spain on leaving country’, Catalan News, 8 September 2018. Accessed at www.catalannews. com/politics/item/it-was-survival-says-activist-wanted-by-spainon-leaving-country.

5

‘La policía alerta’, El País.

6 ‘Spain says UN findings on Catalonia tainted by “conflict of interest”’, Irish Times, 31 May 2019. Accessed at www.irishtimes. com/news/world/europe/spain-says-un-findings-on-cataloniatainted-by-conflict-of-interest-1.3911175.

198

FURTHER READING

Amnesty International (2018) Wrong Prescription: The impact of austerity measures on the right to health in Spain. London: Amnesty International. Balfour, S. (ed.) (2005) The Politics of Contemporary Spain. Abingdon: Routledge. Cazorla Sánchez, A. (2009) Fear and Progress: Ordinary lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Cercas, J. (2012) The Anatomy of a Moment. London: Bloomsbury. Cercas, J. (2018) The Imposter. Translated by Frank Wynne. London: MacLehose Press. Encarnación, O. (2008) Spanish Politics: Democracy after dictatorship. Cambridge: Polity Press. Errejón, Í. and C. Mouffe (2016) Podemos: In the name of the people. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Graham, H. (2012) War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s long twentieth century. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Hancox, D. (2013) The Village Against the World. London: Verso. Hochschild, A. (2017) Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. London: Pan Macmillan. Hooper, J. (2006) The New Spaniards. London: Penguin. Hughes. R. (2001) Barcelona. London: Harvill Press. Iglesias, P. (2015) Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the future of democracy in Europe. London: Verso. Kurlansky, M. (2000) The Basque History of the World. London: Vintage. Lloyd, N. (2015) Forgotten Places: Barcelona and the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 199

Further read i ng

Minder, R. (2017) The Struggle for Catalonia: Rebel Politics in Spain. London: C. Hurst & Co. Moradiellos, E. (2017) Franco: Anatomy of a dictator. London: I. B. Tauris. Orwell, G. (2013) Homage to Catalonia. London: Penguin Classics. Payne, S. (1999) Fascism in Spain, 1923–77. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Preston, P. (2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and extermination in twentieth-century Spain. London: HarperPress. Preston, P. (2016) The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. London: William Collins. Preston, P. (2016) The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, revolution and revenge. London: William Collins. Tóibín, C. (2006) Homage to Barcelona. London: Picador. Tremlett, G. (2012) Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a country’s hidden past. London: Faber and Faber.

200

INDEX

1-O (1 October 2017), 15, 16, 87,

Arenys de Mar, 151–2

139, 140–41, 173, 178, 187

Arenys de Munt, 137–8, 142

15-J (15 June 1977), 13

Assemblea Nacional Catalana

15-M (15 May 2011), 14, 16,

(ANC), 138, 150

29–30, 37–40, 43, 53–56, 57,

Autonomous Movement, 33

69–70, 79, 92, 125

Aznar, José María, 117

18-J (18 July 1936), 13 20-N (20 November 1975), 13

Balfour, Sebastian, 117

23-F (23 February 1981), 14,

Banc Expropriat, 10–12

67–8 8-M (8 March 2018), 75, 80, 82–3, 86

Banco Madrid, 49–50 Bannon, Steve, 51 Barcelona, 3–4, 5, 130, 175 see also Ca La Dona; Cerdà,

abandoned buildings, 10, 32–5,

Ildefons; Colau, Ada;

37–8, 47, 90

Eixample; Gràcia; Montjuïc

Abascal, Santiago, 51

Bárcenas, Luis, 72–3

abortion law, 4, 189

Bilbeny, Gloria, 152–4

activism, 5–6, 12, 16, 25, 30, 39,

Bilbeny, Jordi, 135–7, 139, 151–3

41, 49, 75, 83, 125, 138,

Bilbeny, Pere, 154

151–2, 167, 169, 173, 182,

Billy the Kid see Pacheco, Antonio

186–7 Ahora Madrid, 122

González Brexit, 71; comparison to

Airbnb, 10

Catalonia independence

Alfonso, Daniel de, 71

referendum, 146–7, 156

Amnesty International, 30, 79, 141, 150

Ca La Dona (House of the

Amnesty Law 1977, 13, 30–31 Amnesty Law 1981, 68

Woman), 167–8, 171 campaign groups, 5, 39–40, 119,

Andalusia, 50–51, 53, 124

167, 180 201

i ndex

Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP), 138–9, 144

Cercas, Javier, 67, 120 Cerdà, Ildefons, 6

Carabanchel, 25–8

Cifuentes, Cristina, 93

Carrasco, Adrià, 180–81

Ciudadanos, 35, 69–70, 72, 87,

Carrasco, Tamara, 181

122, 124–5, 136

Casado, Pablo, 93

Colau, Ada, 10–11, 152

Catalan National Assembly

Comisión 8M, 75

see Assemblea Nacional

Committees in Defence of the

Catalana Catalonia, declaration of independence, 144–5, 154;

Republic (CDR), 178–86 Companys, Lluís, 149–50, 162 Complutense, La Universidad,

history of, 135–7, 139; independence leaders, 15,

89–92 Congress of Deputies, 65–6,

124, 128, 145–6, 150–51,

67–8, 74

187–8; independence

conservatism, 103

movement, 4, 12, 14, 86–8,

constitutional nationalism,

102–3, 125, 127, 129–30, 135, 139–40, 142–3, 146,

118 constitutional reform, obstacles

151–63, 169–72, 174–5, 186–8; opposition to

to, 15, 171–2 constitutional settlement, 55, 85,

independence, 143–5, 155,

139, 156

161, 172; relationship to

constitutional unity, 144–5

European Union, 155–8

Convergència Democràtica de

Catalonia independence referendum, 15, 70–71,

Catalunya, 139–40, 143 corruption, political, 4, 42, 71–3,

119, 137–9, 140–42, 152, 176–8; comparison to Brexit

93, 120, 125 crash, financial, 5, 8, 12, 27–8, 43,

referendum, 146–7, 156; comparison to Scotland

69, 129 Cuerpos de Brigadas de Limpieza,

independence referendum, 154, 156 CDR see Committees in Defence

186 Cuixart, Jordi, 150, 187 CUP see Candidatura d’Unitat

of the Republic

Popular

Centro Social Okupado Autogestionado (CSOA),

democracy, radical, 54–60, 70,

34, 45

138 202

i ndex

Democratic Convergence of

of, 4, 13, 18–19, 102–3,

Catalonia see Convergència

107, 109, 116, 119–23, 136;

Democràtica de Catalunya

loyalty to, 68; military coup,

Díaz, Jorge Fernández, 71

13; proposed reburial of, 107,

Díaz, Susana, 14

121–2, 188; rule of, 47–8,

Diplocat see Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia

109 Francoism, 109, 131, 161, 169,

Duke, David, 51

180; sociological, 119, 131 Francoist architecture, 120–21,

Eixample, 6–8

123

El Escorial, 101, 104–5, 111

Francoist symbols, 121–22

El Valle de los Caídos (Valley of

Fundación Nacional Francisco

the Fallen), 101–2, 105–7, 110–15, 120–22, 126, 188

Franco, 122–3 Funespaña, 46–7

En Comú Podem, 10, 65, 83–8 ERC see Republican Left of Catalonia

Galician Nationalist Bloc, 123 García Puig, Mar, 65–7, 74–6,

Errejón, Íñigo, 82, 91–2 evictions, 4, 11, 30, 42

78–9, 80–88 gentrification, 9–11, 21, 23, 35 Global Justice Movement, 40, 41

Falange, 18, 48, 102, 137–8

globalisation, 8, 40–41, 52

fascism, 4, 19, 86, 102, 109,

Gràcia, 8–10, 178–85

118–19, 159, 161

Graham, Helen, 117, 119, 131

Faulkner, William, 103, 111, 113

Gramsci, Antonio, 81

Felipe VI, 136, 141–2

grassroots movements, 5–6,

Feministes per la Independència,

10, 25, 34, 41, 44–5,

168

49–52, 75, 171; anti-

Feminist Strike see 8-M

austerity, 10, 12, 80–81, 83;

flag, Catalan, 152, 175, 184–5;

pro-independence, 9–10, 12

Spanish, 86, 138

Grupos de Defensa y Resistencia

Fominaya, Cristina Flesher, 41–2

(GDR), 186

Fraga, Manuel, 117

Guernica, child refugees, 17–18

Franco, Carmen, 123

Gürtel case, 72–3

Franco, General Francisco, 107–10, 115; death of, 13,

Habermas, Jürgen, 118

110; grave of, 112–14; legacy

hegemony, 81–3 203

i ndex

Herrida, Roger, 159–63

left, radical, 9, 14, 42–3, 103, 171,

Historical Memory Law 2007, 121–2

187–8 legal advice, 33, 35–6

Hogar Social, 49–52

Ley Mordaza, 30

horizontalism, 40–41, 43, 46,

LGBT rights, 45, 80

55–6, 70, 92

Lloyd, Nick, 18

housing market, 10, 25–8, 35, 42 Madrid, 5, 27, 44, 122, 141, identity, Catalan, 173–5; Spanish,

143, 175 see also 15-M;

130

Funespaña; La Dragona; La

Iglesias, Pablo, 85, 91–2, 189 immigration, 11, 27–8, 51–2,

Elipa; Lavapiés Malagarriga, Marc Antoni,

125 inequality, 6–7; gender, 74–6; intergenerational, 95–8

160–62 Malasaña, 94–5 manteros, 23–5, 31, 36

International Brigades, 18, 159

Marçal, Maria Mercè, 169–70

Izquierda Unida, 70–72, 80

Marco, Enric, 120 Martín, Lucía, 81, 84

Jot Down, 95

Más Madrid, 92

Juan Carlos, 67–8, 141

Mas, Artur, 144

Junqueras, Oriol, 151, 159, 187

Mbaye, Mame, 23–5, 29, 32, 36,

Junts pel Sí (Together for Yes), 139–40

53 Medir, Lluís, 138 MeToo, 83

La Diada, 174, 181–2

Montjuïc, 158–9

La Dragona, 44–9

Montón, Carmen, 93

La Elipa, 44, 46

Moradiellos, Enrique, 131

La Huelga Feminista (Feminist

Mouffe, Chantal, 82

Strike), see 8-M

Mujeres de Negro, 40

La Manada, 77 La Quimera, 32–5, 36–7

nationalism, 16, 86, 88, 118, 129,

La Tuerka (The Screw), 91

170, 173–5, 178, 188

Laclau, Ernesto, 82

No-Do, 52

Las Trece Rosas, 47–8

Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel, 117

Lavapiés, 23–5, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 52–5

Òmnium, 138, 150 204

i ndex

Pacheco, Antonio González, 31

Primo de Rivera, José Antonio,

Pacto del Olvido, 13

102, 114, 117, 121

PAH see Platform for People

protests, legislation against,

Affected by Mortgages

29–30; political, 4–5, 14–15,

Partido Popular (PP), 49, 68–9,

38, 54–6, 69

72, 87, 93, 102, 117–18, 120,

PSOE see Partido Socialista

121–22, 124, 155, 188–9

Obrero Español

Partido Socialista Obrero Español

Public Diplomacy Council of

(PSOE), 13, 69, 71–3, 82, 93,

Catalonia (Diplocat), 157

120–22, 189

public services, 4, 7, 46, 139, 170

Patio Maravillas, 37–9, 44, 60

public spaces, 120–21, 158, 180,

patriotism, 129 see also

185–6

nationalism

Puigdemont, Carles, 102–3,

Philip II, 104

142–50, 156, 175, 188 see

Platform for People Affected by

also Catalonia, independence

Mortgages (PAH), 42, 81

leaders

pluri-nationality, 85 Podemos Feminismos, 80

Rajoy, Mariano, 68, 72, 73,

Podemos, 65–6, 69–75, 80, 81–3,

121–2, 140

91–2, 97–8, 102–3, 125, 136,

Ramos, María, 97

155, 189

Real Democracy Now, 39–40,

political norms, changing, 41–3, 85 Politikon, 93–8

54–5 Reconquista, 51 Republican Left of Catalonia

Ponsatí, Clara, 156–7 Popular Alliance, 116–17

(ERC), 139, 159, 162 right, radical, 14, 16, 50–51, 103,

Popular Unity Candidacy see Candidatura d’Unitat

124–5, 187–9 Rivera, Albert, 70, 136

Popular populism, 16, 81–2, 124

Sánchez-Cuenca, Ignacio, 87–8

poverty, 95–6

Sánchez, Jordi, 150, 187

PP see Partido Popular

Sánchez, Pedro, 72–3, 93

precarious employment, 94–8,

sexism, 83–4

125 see also unemployment Preston, Sir Paul, 18–19, 47–8,

Simón, Pablo, 95–8 Sindicato de Manteros y Lateros

131

de Madrid, 25 205

i ndex

Smith, Ortega, 52

Tejero, Lieutenant Colonel

social centres see squats, secondgeneration social collectives, 5, 27, 29, 57, 93–4

Antonio, 67–8 think tanks, 93–4 Together for Yes see Junts pel Sí Torra, Quim, 175

SolLawyers, 35–6

tourism, 9–10

Spain, autonomous communities,

trade unions, 5, 75

139; demographic changes,

Traficantes de Sueños, 53, 56–7

129–30; dictatorship, 5, 16, 19, 30, 109, 121, 169, 182;

Uber, 10

economic conditions, 43,

unemployment, 4–5, 43, 95–8,

46, 50, 90, 129, 188; health

125 see also precarious

care, 79–80; loss of colonies,

employment

14; political system, 4, 14,

Unidos/Unidas Podemos, 71–2, 76

69, 71–4, 91, 130, 186–7;

universities, place in Spanish

transition to democracy,

politics, 92–3

12–14, 31, 41, 68–9, 103,

Urbán, Miguel, 103

116–20

urbanisation, 7

Spanish Civil War, 13, 14, 18–19, 47–8, 101, 105, 121, 127,

Valderas, 126–31

136, 152, 159, 162

Valley of the Fallen see El Valle de

Spanish parliament, diversity of, 69–70; trust in, 74

los Caídos violence, gender-based, 10–11,

squats, second-generation, 11–12, 32–5, 36–7, 39–41,

76–9, 83 Vox, 50–51, 69, 87, 124, 129, 189

44, 57–9 Such, Jon Aguirre, 38–9

war graves, 121–2, 159–62

206