Be Inside and feel Outside. On Political Representation in Spanish Current Public Debates

In a recent interview, a former activist of the Spanish ‘indignados’ movements, which serves as a spokeswoman of the Madrid’s City Council, was asked about her personal relationship with institutions: “It is a difficult question”, she said. “You must know where you are […]. I haven’t been appointed […] to be an activist, people does not cast their votes for that. [But] I feel that I’m going to be an activist forever. […] You can be inside and still be an activist”. Rita Maestre, as other activists and (by now) politicians like her, jumped into the political arena with high-level theoretical skills. They claimed to be the genuine representatives of the many subaltern voices of the silent people that experienced the worst side of the economic crisis. Some of them pledge for a new party that would be a non-party at all, a decentered network of popular “circles” joined as an ephemeral electoral coalition. What happened then is that their theoretical approaches on participation and representation were severely challenged by day-to-day politics. My aim in this paper is not to ascertain this transformation, but to explore its theoretical shadow on public discourses, throughout a bunch of significant examples. In other words, I wonder if some learning in the use of political concepts has occurred. How did they theoretically elaborated the transition from the streets to the houses of government?