Redefining the Crisis/Redefining Democracy: Mobilising for the Right to Housing in Spain's PAH Movement

Abstract

European anti-austerity movements are challenging fundamental assumptions about the role of the market and the state. In Spain, the twin claims of the movements are a demand for ‘real democracy’ and an end to austerity measures resulting from the global financial crisis. I argue that these demands are intertwined. Using critical discourse analysis, I explore the Platform of Those Affected by Mortgages' controversial escrache campaign to show how social movements actively resisting austerity measures transcend the specific issues around which they mobilise to contest hegemonic definitions of crisis and of democracy, laying the groundwork for the reconfiguration of Spain's political landscape.

Keywords::

• Anti-austerity Protest
• PAH
• Escrache
• Global Crisis, Housing
• Ada Colau
• 15-M
• Indignados

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Antonio Montañés Jiménez for his help in searching for and coding the data. Thanks to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship for funding. Thanks also to the editors and anonymous reviewers of South European Society and Politics for their helpful criticisms and feedback. Finally, I thank the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, for hosting my Marie Curie Senior Research Fellowship, which made this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. According to the United Nations Report on the Right to Decent Housing, recent research estimates that approximately 70 per cent of foreclosures in Spain are related to the employment crisis (2012, p. 11).

^2. The total is constantly updated on the PAH's website: www.afectadosporlahipoteca.com

^3. This stands for ‘Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence’.

^4. In slang the term means to reveal a public personage's bad actions or intentions, thereby damaging their public image.

^5. In Spain the term afectados (affected) is used in place of ‘victim’ to avoid the connotations of lack of agency of the latter term.

^6.Manifestarse is also the word for ‘protest’ in Spanish, so this has a double meaning here.

^7. The wording of the question was: ‘Do you agree with these types of campaigns as long as they are peaceful, to try to get politicians to vote for certain issues according to their own values even if they go against the opinion of their party?’ Support from PP voters dropped from 87 per cent in March to 68 per cent in April.

^8. The Madrid municipalist platform Ahora Madrid (formerly Municipalia and Ganemos Madrid) also had a remarkable electoral result, falling just one councillor short of the PP, which has ruled in Madrid for over 25 years. Ahora Madrid's candidate for mayor, Manuela Carmena, a former judge and human rights lawyer, became Mayor of Madrid on June 13, 2015. Like Barceloan en Comú, Ahora Madrid is closely associated with the 15-M and includes candidates from a number of small alternative left parties.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Flesher Fominaya

Cristina Flesher Fominaya (Department of Sociology, University of Aberdeen, UK and Department of Sociology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth) has a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. She is an editor of Social Movement Studies, and a founding editor of Interface Journal. Her latest book is Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings Are Changing the World (Palgrave Macmillan).