Los Indignados: Emotional Expressions for Political Change

The Indignados movement has been a prominent feature of Spanish politics for almost two years now. They have gathered hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets, thus embodying one of the largest contemporary Spanish movements, and also making use of the advances in communication technology, such as Facebook and Twitter. There are several, distinct features about the Indignados. First of all, they are a quite fragmented movement, with many different claims and demands. Second, they do not adhere to any particular party or union, as many social movements historically have been. This raises the question of what constitutes the binding ties within the movement, which are their mechanisms of belonging? The name Indignados, referring to a feeling rather than a specific claim, could be seen as an overall symbol for a uniting cause which is developed more with regards to passions than rational calculations. In this paper, I argue that the Indignados is a highly emotional movement, and that current forms of democratic participation schemes, centred on elections and participation built around rational behaviour, fail to acknowledge the form of emotional political expressions used by the Indignados. I further argue that this is an issue for legitimacy creation in democratic settings, excluding certain groups from the established political debates, inspired by the recent turn to emotions in social movement theory. The paper starts out with a brief theoretical review, positioning the argument as a continuation of the return of emotions in social movement theory. I then proceed to empirically show the emotional nature of the Indignados movement based on my field research in Madrid, as well as online material such as Facebook and Twitter. I conclude with a few remarks on the need for a new reading of democratic legitimacy, allowing for emotional expressions of political opinion.