As the European Elections unfolded last week, many activists and progressive forces around the world paid particular attention to the municipal elections taking place at the same time in Spain. For years, Spain has been a beacon for the possibilities of progressive change at the municipal level. This explains the shock that came with reading headlines or tweets announcing the electoral defeats of political projects built around a new form of municipalism. The defeat of these political projects, known as Fearless Cities or Cities of Change, was particularly painful in Madrid, and in Barcelona, where Barcelona en Comú had put a lot of effort in building an international movement and network of Fearless Cities.

However, this defeat is mainly a perception for now, as the tight results mean that complex negotiations will happen, where the new municipalists will have a strong voice, even with possibilities to keep the mayor’s office, albeit with less power than four years ago.

Still, in light of these developments, we need to ask: what went wrong with the municipalist project in Spain? This text aims to give some insight into these electoral results. It attempts to unpack what happened in Spain for those aiming to better understand the context, and to draw some lessons for their own similar, or comparable projects.

The three souls of the new municipalist projects

The new municipalist platforms that came to power in 2015 resulted in one of the more remarkable political successes of the “left” forces of the last decade. This was achieved right when Podemos as a political party was on the rise in Spain, Syriza was at the height of its influence in the midst of the negotiations with the Troika to end austerity in Greece, and social democratic parties were in free-fall in the EU. Their success was presented by Podemos as the first stage of a major assault on state-level power. However, that picture was not completely accurate. Podemos had a strong influence in the constitution of the municipalist projects, but the new municipalists were much more than that.

There are a few good texts about what elements define the new municipalist practices, particularly from the Barcelona en Comú perspective. However, in this text I propose an alternative angle to understand their success and their apparent defeat last week. I argue that we must focus on which forces made a victorious dynamic possible under the umbrella of the new municipalism in record time. Only then can we better understand last week’s outcomes.

The new muncipalist projects enabled the convergence of three main groups: first, traditional “left” forces – understood as mainly Izquierda Unida (IU) and the old Communist party; second, grassroots activist veterans of the anti-globalisation movements of the 2000s, hardened by the massive mobilisations and action as part of the anti-austerity 15M ; and third, the mass of unmotivated social democratic voters that were looking for a left and progressive alternative to the status quo in the aftermath of the Troika-driven policies. The first two were the core organizers of the new municipalist movement, with various degrees of influence depending on the municipality. The latter was an important mass of voters whose influence would be decisive in the elections. When these three souls were dancing together, a process of “desborde” (overflow) would unfold, meaning that the political campaign would escape the control of its protagonists, and be appropriated by the general public who would in turn re-shape it to their own image and wishes. A comparable process happened with the Mayoral Campaign of Manuela Carmena in 2015.

One of the most important theoretical and dialectical debates within Podemos the last years has been to what extent the political project had to build a discourse closer to one of these three groups. One of the main reasons behind the current crisis facing Podemos has been an inability to articulate itself around all three consistently. There were passionate and deep differences of opinion among the most politicised sectors of the party, and the tendency to make these tensions public exacerbated the internal crisis. For those looking in from the outside, the debates were confusing. This was used strategically by the party’s opponents, and likely contributed to the loss of support. The new municipalist projects, thanks to their focus on local politics and day-to-day problems instead of grandiose debates about political theory, were best suited to face these tensions. As we will see, those places that were able to hold the “three souls” together have been the most successful ones.

What happened?

The best way to sketch the current landscape is to look a bit closer at each of the most paradigmatic cases.

Barcelona and its mayor Ada Colau have deservedly garnered most of the attention globally. Barcelona en comú developed a solid campaign. Its project included all three souls. It included the traditional left and Podemos – with Pablo Iglesias joining the campaign. It incorporated grassroots activists, who brought enormous imagination, and PR successes like public support for Colau from Bernie Sanders and Naomi Klein among others.

The movement deployed a successful political message centred on how to make the city a better place for all, and a process of desborde, which attracted many social democratic voters and others, unfolded. Last week’s outcome only appears to be a defeat because out of a total of 756,000 they got 4833 less votes than, and the same number of city councilors (10 each of a total of 41) as, their main rival, the Republican Independent Left (ERC). The ERC was the only rival capable of getting more votes in the city, and for very particular reasons. The ERC based its campaign on attacking Colau, and on the need for a capital for an eventual Catalan republic. The imprisonment of their leadership in Madrid as a consequence of the push for independence only dramatized their message. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, Barcelona en Comú is calling to form a government together with the ERC and the social democrats.

Madrid is a complex story. Here the defeat is also only relative. Manuela Carmena’s party, Mas Madrid, has obtained 19 out of 57 council seats and 31% of the vote. Her party’s main rival, Partido Popular, garnered 15 council seats and 21% of the vote. Carmena’s mayorship is in trouble only in the case of a tenuous alliance between the conservative right and the liberal right who are ready to form a pact with the new far right party Vox. An alliance of this kind would be unthinkable in France or Germany, but not in Spain. However, the division of the three souls explains why Madrid is in this situation.

Carmena came to power with Ahora Madrid, the new municipalist platform that in 2015 gathered the three souls of the movement. However, an internal split with the grassroots activists and traditional left, who for instance advocated a default on the huge public debt of the city, led Carmena (a former judge and vocal against institutional disobedience) to create her own municipalist group under her direct control – Mas Madrid. IU Madrid, Anti-capitalist Madrid and a number of the grass roots municipalists created their own party outside Mas Madrid, Madrid en Pie Municipalista. To make things more complicated, regional elections in Madrid were conducted at the same time, exacerbating the internal crisis of Podemos as regional, local and national allegiances were tested to their limits. The perceived infighting and bickering undermined momentum.

In sum, a cohesive municipalist project uniting the three souls was not possible in Madrid. Some would call it the typical division characteristic of the left, but here the issue is not about a mere aggregation of the votes of the different groups, since they would be enough to form a majority. The problem here is that when there is no synergy among the “three souls” the dynamics of desborde (overflow) do not happen. This translates into passivity on the part of a significant number of people. When you feel you are part of the something big and open, you go the extra mile to make another call, another meeting, another meme, the next tweet, a drawing that captures the feeling of your neighborhood, as was the case in 2015. These small bites do make a difference, especially in left and progressive groups who vote based more on conviction and ideals, than those on the other side of the spectrum. Lack of motivation can explain how the poorest neighborhoods of Madrid had less participation this time, while the richest ones did mobilize and made a difference by voting for one of the three right wing candidates.

Cadiz is the only relevant municipality with a municipalist candidate that has kept its leading position, even winning more seats. Its representation grew from eight to 13, of a total of 27. Four years ago, the charismatic leader José Maria Santos, known by all as Kichi, was the only one from the new municipalist platforms that came directly from the Podemos rank-and-file, although from the Anti-capitalist arm and not the “central” headquarters. The leadership of Kichi has been able to keep the three souls of the municipalist project together, under the flag of Adelante, the brand of Podemos in Andalucia under the control of the Anti-capitalists. Cadiz was the “poor” southern cousin of the municipalist projects, with an inheritance of huge debt from the previous mayors, and much smaller capacity to address it. Kichi´s management reduced Cadiz´s debt with suppliers from 265 to 44 million Euros, and average payment occurs now in 30 days instead of 130. These changes might seem small from a broader revolutionary perspective, but they do change people’s lives, especially small businesses that depend on their deals with the administration. Kichi has consistently defended the need to remain humble and close to the people. He was at the center of the heated debate within Podemos after Iglesias bought a villa worth 600.000 euros. In the midst of the media scandal that unfolded, (exacerbated also by the many opponents of Podemos), Kichi wrote a letter expressing that “the ethical code (of Podemos) is a guarantee to live like the common people”.

Zaragoza. The new municipalist platform that was created in 2015, Zaragoza en Común has plummeted from nine to three out of 31 council seats. Here, the main reason is that Podemos and IU presented a different platform than Zaragoza en Común, obtaining two councilors. Social democrats grew substantially, capitalizing on the charisma of the new President of Spain, Pedro Sanchez. Unfortunately, similar to Madrid, an anticipated pact amongst the three right-wing parties would mean the end of a progressive mayor in the city.

Valencia was a special case because Compromís, an older party, holds office. Compromís is a left progressive party from the Valencia region with a nationalist character although not pro-independence. Before the creation of Podemos and the new municipalism, Compromis was the main voice against corruption in the institutions run by the governing Popular Party. Compromis’ leader, Monica Oltra, was expelled from the Regional Parliament on several occasions, due to her interventions about the corruption scandals there. These interventions made her very popular. The new municipalist platform Valencia en Comú, with three councilors out of 33, together with the support of the social democrats, was key to giving Compromís the mayor´s office in 2015. Valencia en Comú decided to disappear and join Podemos and IU this time round, but they did not get enough votes for a council seat this time. However, Compromis keeps the mayor´s office due to higher support and its alliance with the social democrats. Despite its different nature, Compromís has employed strategies and tactics that municipalist projects have used elsewhere; like reducing its debt by half, reducing the number of cars in the city, welcoming refugee ships, and increasing social spending. Compromís Municipal will govern for four more years.

Have these projects been transformative?

We can define transformation as the process of a cocoon becoming a butterfly; this is a process that cannot be reversed. After learning the election results Ada Colau declared that they had “broadened the horizon of what is possible”. Indeed, the seed of the new municipalist projects will continue to grow. Amsterdam plans a Fearless Cities Conference in 2020, Belgrade will host one in a few days.

Cities are slowly gathering more power and influence. A week before the latest G20 in Buenos Aires, for instance, the first Urban20 gathered. There, the leaders of the 25 largest and most influential cities came together to put city agendas on the global map. Cities are demonstrating that they are capable of raising the minimum wage, reducing emissions or enforcing more accountable business practices on firms like AirbnB and Uber, even better than states. This dynamic can only grow. Colau’s administration in Barcelona created the biggest public energy utility of Spain, focusing on renewable energy. It is hard to imagine that a future administration would try to undo this. Carmena has reduced the debt of Madrid by almost half, a staggering 2.14 billion Euros. Similar dynamics happened in many other new municipalist governments. This puts paid to the myth that left and progressive administrations hurt the economy, or that they create debt that efficient right-wing administrations then have to solve. The inverse has been proven. If others after them create new debts, the population will take note. The last financial crisis ensured that voters know how dangerous debt is.

The results of Spain’s municipal elections were not what progressives around the world expected. We must wait and see how the political field will reconfigure itself, an open process at the time of writing, in Barcelona and Madrid. We must, however, examine the details so that we can draw the lessons needed to expand progressive political influence at the local level in a way that can tackle global issues such as unaccountable financial power and global warming. We live in a moment of crisis and opportunity, and the Spanish experience shows that it is possible to incorporate veteran left parties, grass roots activists and disfranchised social democratic and progressive voters into broader transformative processes. How to do that sustainably will depend enormously on the local context, and it is the task of the new municipalists to create the tools and narratives to accomplish it.

Do not forget that ¡Si se puede! It is possible!

Republished from OpenDemocracy.net.

Header image: Fearless cities: Ada Colau with Manuela Carmena | CC BY-NC 2.0

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Having reached the halfway point of their first mandate, it seems like a good time to ask whether and how the jump from the streets to the institutions has helped advance the demands of the social movements from which these candidacies derived their legitimacy. Have the possibilities for emancipatory systemic change grown and multiplied in this time? Or has neoliberal institutionality converted and absorbed an entire generation of its opponents into its structure? These are complex questions. To begin to answer them, we might first consider the scale of the challenges facing these cities in the current stage of global capitalism. We’ll focus first on the signature issue on which many of the activists who became politicians built their legitimacy: the right to decent housing.

The Great Wall of Money

Walking around Sants or similar working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, you’re likely to see several flyers offering to buy apartments. Some are handwritten, others are printed out in Arial or Comic Sans fonts. They contain little information besides a first name and a phone number. Some are simply anonymous. But though their appearances may vary, they tend to lead to the same phone numbers.

An investigative report by the autonomous weekly La Directa revealed that these flyers can be traced back to a handful of companies that have been buying up entire residential blocks, often with renters still living in them. They then persuade tenants to leave their homes, renovate the building and either sell it or rent the flats out at higher prices. How the companies persuade tenants to leave varies. They might offer cash, drastically raise rent or simply refuse to renew a rental contract. When tenants resist, they hire companies like Desokupa (“Unsquat”) to forcefully remove them, providing gainful employment to beefy fascists and often breaking the law in the process.This practice tends to be depicted in the media as a local problem in which a handful of unscrupulous businesses exploit loopholes and legal grey areas to turn a profit. But it goes far beyond Barcelona. Companies like these are the shock troops of a massive rent bubble that is affecting all of Spain’s major cities. According to leading Spanish property website Idealista, rental prices increased across the country by 15.9 percent in 2016 alone, with year-over-year growth rates approaching 20 percent during the first trimester of 2017 in places like Barcelona, San Sebastian and the Canary and Balearic Islands. At the neighborhood level, the numbers are simply staggering. In places like the Sant Martí and Sant Andreu districts of Barcelona, rental prices have increased by over 30 percent relative to the same time last year.

Few can deal with such sharp increases. As a result, longtime residents are being displaced from their neighborhoods by what real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield has dubbed “The Great Wall of Money,” a massive pot of capital for global real estate investment worth about $435 billion. As former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Raquel Rolnik describes it, the Great Wall of Money is a floating cloud of finance capital seeking to materialize in a way that evokes colonization. “I deliberately use the term ‘colonization’ because it involves territorial occupation and cultural domination,” she explains in a recent lecture at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. “This colonization has just one objective: to extract rent by opening up new frontiers that are capable of generating interest for finance capital.”

While the use of colonization as a metaphor is problematic for its erasure of slavery and genocidal violence, what is certain is that governments thirsting for foreign investment are competing to land this capital in their countries despite its distinct lack of interest in the lives of residents. In Spain’s case, the country recently attracted the Wall of Money by becoming an emerging market for real estate investment trusts, or REITs. These are companies owning income-generating real estate that can be either residential or commercial. The vast majority of that income must be derived from rent and paid out to shareholders as dividends.

REITs were introduced as a legal form in Spain in 2009 under a Socialist Party government. Initially, they were unsuccessful due to a corporate tax rate of 19 percent. But in 2012, Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government exempted REITs from this tax. It was after this reform took effect that rental prices took off across the country. Alongside developments like the rise of rent-extracting platforms such as Airbnb — which blur the line between residential and commercial properties or formal and informal economies — the central government’s measure breathed new life into the very sector that provoked Spain’s economic crisis in the first place. The work of managing its most dire effects was left to the municipal governments.

Cornered by the State and the Market

It is safe to say that, in Spain, the degree of conflict between city governments and the territory- and rent-seeking finance capital of the Great Wall of Money is at its highest in Barcelona. This is unsurprising, since it is here that both the Spanish housing movement and the municipalist wave were born. Barcelona is also where the link between the movements and the electoral platform is most robust, and the line between activists and representatives is haziest. At the local level, this is common knowledge that can be written off as a talking point. For outside observers, however, it is helpful to consider what this looks like on any ordinary day.

Recently, Barcelona En Comú councilwoman Gala Pin went on the agenda-setting Catalan morning show Els matins and confronted the co-founder of MK Premium, the most prominent of the property vultures identified by La Directa’s investigative report. In a heated exchange, she characterized MK Premium’s work as violencia inmobiliaria, or “property violence.” Her choice of words matched the discourse of the housing platform she helped lead before becoming a representative, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Mortgage Victims Platform (PAH). As a result of her choice of words, she was accused of demagoguery by the right-wing opposition and sued by MK Premium for slander.

Pin’s nods to the housing movement go beyond mere rhetoric. She often uses her large following on social media to make evictions visible and boost efforts to stop them. “Tomorrow we have five evictions,” reads a typical post. “Despite our efforts, we need collaboration to stop one. Arc del Teatre Street, 9:30am.”

These posts have been criticized in some radical-left circles as either being propagandistic or preemptively deflecting blame for the evictions that do take place under Barcelona En Comú’s watch. Others argue that Pin and other council members using this approach are simply being transparent about the limits of institutional power and calling on people to overcome them when this is unjust. What is clear is that the approach is effective. The resulting mobilizations have stopped numerous evictions, and even more have been stopped by the network of housing offices that the city government revamped to mediate between tenants and landlords.

“Occupy and Resist.” A squat in Barcelona. Photo by Oriol Salvador

This is just one example of how tension between social movements, local representatives and public administration can be used to strengthen resistance against the impositions of higher-level institutions and economic forces. And Barcelona is not the only city where the municipal government has become more porous to pressure from below. Manuela Carmena’s Ahora Madrid, for instance, have opened the city’s participation system up to citizen-initiated proposals and, like other cities, allocated a portion of the city coffers to participatory budgeting. In Valencia, where progressive green coalition Compromís governs with the support of Valencia En Comú and the Spanish Socialist Party, the city is undertaking a massive shift towards a pedestrian and bike-centered model of sustainable urban mobility. And in Zaragoza, grid electricity is now 100 percent renewable and energy spending has been reduced by nearly 15 percent.

All of these cities have disproven the European Union’s “no alternative” dogma about austerity by increasing social spending and expanding the public housing stock while maintaining balanced budgets and, in some cases, even reducing deficits. They are also pressuring the central government to take in more refugees, and some are defying Rajoy’s racist 2012 healthcare reform by providing universal healthcare regardless of one’s documentation status. In Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, city governments have repeatedly expressed their desire to close immigrant detention centers, citing human rights violations and taking symbolic and legal actions against them as a result.

These are by no means revolutionary measures. Taken together, they amount to a straightforward social-democratic program combined with green urbanism and participatory governance. But in Europe’s current political climate, polarized as it is by neoliberal technocracy and the ultra-nationalist far right, this is nothing to sneeze at. What makes their defense of the most basic social advances of the last several decades all the more noteworthy is that it has been carried out by minority governments in a highly fragmented political system.

But this success is fragile against the power of the state and the whims of the market. To impose austerity on cities with left-wing governments, the central government merely has to enforce the legislation it passed in 2013 to dramatically reduce municipal autonomy. Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro has already made his intent to do so abundantly clear. Meanwhile, the rent bubble continues to expand, pushing residents out of their homes and further from the urban center. Cornered by these looming threats, cities cannot afford to limit their efforts to holding the fort — they must also push back.

A Dynamic of Conflict and Complicity

In early June 2017, several neighborhood marches converged at the Plaça Universitat in the center of Barcelona. From there, a crowd of three thousand people ambled through Sant Antoni, Poble Sec and the Raval, three of the areas targeted by the Great Wall of Money. At several points, they stopped in front of specific housing blocks where tenants were resisting the efforts of speculators to kick them out. When they reached the end of their route, protesters cracked open a block of ten flats that had been abandoned for eight years and squatted it.

The march was the latest action in a growing cycle of struggles against the new property bubble. Organized by a platform called Barcelona No Està en Venda (“Barcelona Is Not For Sale”), it brought together several neighborhood assemblies that have sprung up in the last two years to fight displacement by illegal tourist flats and rising rent. It also included the Sindicat de Llogaters, a local Renters’ Union that took shape in early 2017, as well as the anarcho-syndicalist CGT union, the Barcelona Federation of Neighborhood Associations, the Neighborhood Assemblies for Sustainable Tourism and the PAH.

Actions like these set the agenda of public debate, forcing governments and political parties to demonstrate their priorities. In this particular case, it wrested the microphone away from the establishment press, which had hoped to frame recent conflicts between the City of Barcelona, Airbnb and the tourism lobby as one of “touristophobia,” to borrow the term introduced by El País. Instead of complying with an anti-tourist framework — which has racist, classist and xenophobic undertones — the social movements have centered conflict on the property bubble and gentrification. For the most part, Barcelona En Comú have adopted this framing, albeit in confrontation with some sectors of the movement regarding how to target speculators.

This dynamic of conflict and complicity between movements and left-wing parties is particularly visible in Barcelona because the city’s long history of bottom-up organizing has produced a thick social fabric. During the institutional turn that gave way to Barcelona En Comú, the biggest risk was that the transfer of notable activists from the streets to the institutions would produce something like a “brain drain,” gutting and weakening the social movements. But a look at the social conflicts that have taken place since that turn reveals a somewhat different scenario.

Barcelona En Comú has been relatively effective in translating the demands of the social movements that its individual members came from into public policy proposals. They have been less effective in dealing with the demands of movements they had little experience with previously, such as the city’s street vendors and public transport workers. As a result, these movements have emerged as protagonists in the city’s current structure of social antagonism. How the tensions they produce are resolved remains to be seen.

In Madrid, however, there is far less complicity between the social movements and the municipal platform, and far more confrontation. Though its system of primaries was more open than Barcelona En Comú’s, the confluence of organizations that gave way to Ahora Madrid is much more fractured. Moreover, their consensus candidate, current mayor and former judge Manuela Carmena, comes from a much more institutional background than those leading municipalist platforms in other cities.

The difference shows. Carmena has bucked the party’s program on several occasions, using the cult of personality around her and Spain’s “presidentialist” model of municipal governance to isolate herself from criticism by the more radical organizations integrated into Ahora Madrid, such as Ganemos and the Anticapitalistas wing of Podemos. The most disturbing symptom of this divide is the fact that El Patio Maravillas, the squat where Ahora Madrid was conceived, is set to become a block of tourist flats. Here, the gap between the movement and the institution broke ground for the Wall of Money.

Municipalism with a Purpose

For Spain’s municipalist platforms, the problem is that municipalism on its own is not an ideology. It is a form of governance. It can just as well be capitalist or communist, totalitarian or libertarian, nationalist or internationalist. Left open, it is just a brand to fill with capital or an excuse to transfer blame to other instantiations of administrative power. Moreover, an overly simplistic understanding of municipalism risks steamrolling over the conflicts between differing types of municipalities and the power imbalances produced by decades of urbanization and globalization. This is particularly relevant when we consider the profound cultural and political cleavage that has emerged in the Global North as a result of urban extractivism, which pits progressive growing cities against nativist depopulating villages.

To break with the narrow limits and toxic relationships of the neoliberal status quo and avoid becoming a mere vehicle for the reproduction of administrative and territorial self-interest, an emancipatory municipalism requires a horizon to walk towards. This is precisely what social movements provide. In every injustice that they denounce lies a way the world should be and a set of values and practices suppressed by the current social order. From a leftist perspective, these are none other than mutual aid and solidarity.

Materializing values as practices is a cultural and ideological task more than it is a technical one. The logic of governance, in contrast, is mostly technical. As such, it is centered on control and predictability. To avoid being subsumed by that logic of control and predictability, it is not enough for the new representatives to take on the demands of the movements that put them in power. They must instead nurture all of the movements growing in the cracks of the institutional architecture they’ve inherited, as it is precisely these cracks that the Wall of Money seeks to fill with concrete.

The beauty of the Spanish municipal platforms’ electoral victories two years ago was that their very existence was not predicted by the technical logic of governance. This is why municipal gatekeepers view them as a democratic error. What they have now is an opportunity to dismantle that architecture and open it up to the people, movements and memories that have been repressed, erased, exploited or ignored until now. Going forward, their challenge will be to create more uncertainty for speculators and less for those who hope to inhabit the city.

Carlos Delclós is a sociologist, researcher and editor for ROAR Magazine. His research interests include international migration, social stratification, fertility, urban sociology, social movements and cultural theory.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #6, “The City Rises“.

Lead Illustration by Luis Alves

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Carlos Delclós, a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement, writes about new generation of activist-politicians advancing the municipal agenda in Spain.

What the Spanish media ignore about this new generation of activist-politicians is why they became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles and their willingness to spearhead radical democratic participation.

On Sunday, May 24th, the two parties that have ruled Spain since the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s were dealt yet another substantial blow, this time in regional and municipal elections. Nationwide, the ruling Popular Party saw support fall from the nearly 11 million votes they received in 2011 to just under 6 million this year. But while much has been written about the impact emerging parties like the anti-austerity Podemos or the right-wing Ciudadanos have had on the established parties, what makes Sunday’s results so remarkable is not what those parties did on their own, but what happened between several political actors at the municipal level.

In Barcelona, the prominent anti-evictions activist Ada Colau won the city’s mayoral race. In Madrid, once a stronghold of the Popular Party, the former judge Manuela Carmena also has a chance to govern, depending on whether her platform and the deteriorating Socialist party are willing to strike a deal. In the four largest cities, it is quite possible that the mayor will belong to neither of the two major parties. The same is true in Galicia’s major cities, Santiago and A Corunha. In Cádiz, Spain’s unemployment capital, another new, anti-austerity platform finished a close second.

Much of the right-wing Spanish press is already attributing these spectacular results to a cult of personality around the people leading these platforms, accompanied by the typical references to populism and Venezuela, with an occasional shout-out to North Korea for extra flavour (as if the resort to these arguments weren’t the epitome of populist rhetoric). What they ignore is why those faces became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles, their independence with respect to the established parties and their willingness to spearhead bottom-up processes seeking a confluence between new or smaller parties, community organisations and political independents around a set of common objectives determined through radical democratic participation.

The Spanish hub of the Doc Next Network’s Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project has been documenting this process since it began, through video and other media. Below, you can see a helpful infographic that shows just some of the ingredients with which the new municipalist candidacies Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid) and Barcelona En Comù (Barcelona in Common) cooked up their municipal recipes. They include more obvious reference points like the indignados movement, but also feminist struggles, the copyleft movement or the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, among many others.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés

Radical municipal politics is not an altogether new concept, especially not in Spain. In Catalonia, the Popular Unity Candidacies of the left-wing independence movement have had a notable presence in smaller towns for several years (they also quadrupled their 2011 results on Sunday, for what it’s worth). At the southern end of the country, the Andalusian village of Marinaleda is a well-documented experiment in utopian communism that has been going on for over three decades now.

In fact, the so-called father of libertarian municipalism, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, was strongly inspired by the Spanish municipal politics of the 19th and early twentieth century, as well as the Swiss Grey Leagues and the New England townships, when he wrote his influential “New Municipal Agenda”. While he hardly intended to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution—especially not in large urban belts and port cities—in the text, Bookchin outlined four main coordinates: a revival of the citizens’ assembly, the need for confederation with other municipalities, grassroots politics as a school of genuine citizenship and the municipalisation of the economy. Underlying all of these coordinates is “a recovery of a new participatory politics structured around free, self-empowered and active citizens”.

All of these coordinates chime with the program and praxis of the new municipalist candidacies. In the newspaper they handed out as part of their campaign, Barcelona En Comù used almost as much space describing their process (30,000 signatures asking them to run for election, 1,000 campaign volunteers, 200 events organised by self-organised neighbourhood assemblies, 100 meetings with various community organisations in just 10 months of existence) and their vision (“a standard-bearer of social justice and democracy”) as they do outlining their program. The program itself includes 600 measures, ranging from modest but much-needed reforms (e.g., opening up more bike lanes, more social housing), to more radical ones (a guaranteed municipal income, coining a municipal currency).

Several questions remain about the conflict between the ambitions of the new municipalist candidacies and the daunting, path-dependent inertia of an institutional reality that threatens to swallow them whole. Many of those questions are addressed by some of the candidates themselves in the film Municipal Recipes, which you can watch below.

In it, they discuss the thought process that led them to make the jump into the electoral arena, how they hope to care for the city, how to make it liveable, the relationship between citizens, social movements and institutions, and the pitfalls of representative democracy, among other key issues. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable process. Tellingly, one of the most frequently used words in the film is “tension”. As Pablo Carmona of Ahora Madrid puts it, regardless of whether they achieve something like Bookchin’s New Municipal Agenda, they have opened up “a new model of social conflict” in Spain.

Recetas municipales. Una conversacio?n sobre el cuidado de las ciudades from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

(Click CC for English subtitles)

Municipalrecipes.cc is a campaign carried out by Lucas Tello, Nuria Campabadal, Mario Munera and Guillermo Zapata, coordinated by Sofía Coca.

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Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement.

Lead Image by Jordi Boixareu

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