From Protest to Policy Proposals for Democratic Innovation in Five Spanish Municipalities

The starting point of this paper lies on the comprehension that the Indignados movement in Spain was not only a social protest phenomenon but a process of led-citizens’ re-configuration of the liberal representative democracy. As a matter of fact, one of the iconic transformations that have been taking place in Spanish politics over the last decade consists in the appearance of movement-parties challenging the political scene by winning local elections. As a consequence of this political shift, many mid-size municipalities and crucially the two biggest cities Madrid and Barcelona are now governed for four years by coalitions that were strongly rooted in anti-austerity, anti-eviction and pro-democracy struggles (Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comú, respectively). Now the crucial question arising is how and to what extent the new local governments have managed to translate the social movements' democratizing practices, proposals and expectations into government decisions and policies. Do they have introduced local democratic innovations stemming from social movements' democratic experimentations? What dilemmas, conflicts and contradictions have emerged between the new local governments' democratizing policies and the local social movements, on the one hand, and within social movements themselves, on the other? This paper is based on a research project that has collected empirical findings from five Spanish cities which have been ruled by ‘Ayuntamientos del cambio’ (city government for change’): Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Valencia and Córdoba. Original research carried out over the last three years comprises 95 semi-structured interviews with local councilors, officials and consultants, 55 semi-structured interviews with representatives of social movements and 11 focus groups with activists and expert groups. All the interviews and focus groups were transcribed and they dealt with four local policy dimensions which were crucial in the radical discourse and demands of the urban social movements, that is, housing, managing and control of the public space, remunicipalization of local public services and citizen participation in local policy decision making. In particular, this paper will critically address the democratic governance transformations that have may occurred in the five municipalities. The comparative analysis will concentrate upon two related goals: firstly, it intends to provide a thorough account of the local government’s endeavor to enhance citizen engagement in local affairs whilst it tries to keep responsive to the urban social movements from which the ‘new-municipalist’ candidatures came out; and secondly, it aims at critically discussing the main structural constraints, ideological dilemmas and organizational contradictions faced by the local coalition governments when attempting to put in practices new political recipes for local democracy regeneration.