Although people warned me about going near them, the protests are really not dangerous at all. I have seen major protests in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. There was even a small one in the plaza in front of my school in Alcalá but that one has already finished while the others are ongoing.
Who are the protesters and what are they protesting? The people who are protesting in Spain are mostly young Spaniards who cannot find work. The unemployment figure in Spain is currently 20% and most of those unemployed are young, college-educated people. However this figure is not accurate, because a lot of young Spaniards find work and are paid under the table, yet continue to receive unemployment benefits for a maximum of 2 years. This an exacerbating factor in the collapse of the Spanish economy.
Despite the fact that most of the protesters are upset and protesting due to the collapse of their economy, the things they are demanding from their government are actually non-material. Although the demands of the protesters are all somewhat different, their is one theme: more democracy, less corruption.
Pictures from the protests in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid
To citizens of the U.S., this may seem a bit non-specific and whiny but in Spain, there actually is a crisis of democracy and corruption. Their political system, for example, takes into account the voters much less than the political parties. An example of this is that the citizens of Spain do not actually elect their president, instead, they elect their preferred party into the congress and then the congress elects the president. Furthermore, the citizens of Spain do not elect specific members of political parties to be in the congress, instead, the members of each political party arrange themselves on a political party list of candidates in order of the most powerful and then for example, if 25% of the citizens of Spain elect the popular party to be in the congress, then the first 25% of the list of 37 political party members will then be elected to congress. One problem with this method is that there is a very strong discipline of the vote, meaning that members of a political party almost ALWAYS vote together, because they are more accountable to the each other than to the citizens that they represent.
Furthermore, it is a historic fact that Spain is home to severe political polarization. You may think that Barrack Obama is a socialist or that he is more like a communist than a republican, but the truth is that in the U.S., there actually is no political left. There WAS during the 1920's when labor unions and leftist political parties called for the protection of the worker and retribution from big businesses, but since McCarthyism, true socialism and communism have become insignificant in the U.S. political sphere. In reality, democrats and republicans share very similar ideologies and therefore, there is much more voting against one's party in the U.S. than their is in Spain. In Spain, there are a multitude of relatively popular political parties ranging from anarchists to communists (who believe in land distribution and everything) to fascists to neo-Nazists and when you have so many extremely different political parties, there can be true hate between them making civil wars and independence movements and ongoing threat in Spain.
What could be some consequences if the Spanish economy collapsed? Something quite interesting is that while Obama has been trying to create better national healthcare for the U.S., he has also told the president of Spain, Zapatero, that he needs to eliminate Spanish social health programs. This is because Spain is in economic turmoil and is currently being bailed out by the European union, which is being bailed out by the U.S., which is being bailed out by China. Therefore, Spain will most likely be the first to lose its social health programs. Furthermore, the large rate of unemployment of the youth is also putting a huge strain on the tax income that is supposed to be for the currently retired.
Another possible consequence of an economic collapse is social unrest resulting in civil wars or the sedition of autonomous regions from Spain. This kind of severe consequence is of course less likely, however, it is worth noting that there are many regions of Spain where it is more favorable to think of oneself as part of that region as opposed to being part of the country as a whole. Therefore, people in those regions often times resist speaking Spanish and instead, speak their own languages and barter with the government for more independence. For example, the terrorist group of País Vasco, ETA (now less of a threat than in the 90's but still existent) committed unspeakable acts of murder and torture all for the sake of becoming independent from Spain.
Despite animosity between political parties and between the states and the federal government, I have learned to appreciate the sense of unity in the U.S. Unlike in Spain, the people of the U.S. are united by the ideas present in our constitution and in the declaration of independence as well as the American dream. Happy fourth of July!
P.S. I am curious to know more about this dangerous algae in Grand lake
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