Protecting the Commons, Resurrecting the Idea of Politics as Public Good: The Mobilizations of the Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy and of the Indignados Movement in Spain against Institutional Corruption

The quality of democracy had been deteriorating long time before the economic crisis struck. The widespread implementation of austerity measures following the crisis has only highlighted the incapacity of European democracies to propose economic alternatives. This univocal response to the crisis has pointed out the increasing dependence of democratic politics on financial markets in the direction of what Lessig called a process of institutional corruption. In other words, a process of collusion between politics and economic powers seems to have deteriorated the democratic governance over the last decades. Facing such a process of institutional corruption, it is not surprising that political protests have spread around the world precisely in the most difficult years of the economic crisis and austerity. In the variety of their tactics of contention and claims, the “Five Stars Movement” and “Indignados” have publicly denounced the corruption affecting their national political elite. Why have these movements regarded the “institutional corruption” of democracy as one of the main targets of their protests? Have these movements proposed any political alternative? Our hypothesis is that these mobilizations have been putting forward a new conception of politics based on the defense of common goods. In a nutshell, we think that these mobilizations have constituted the first instances of movements aimed at the “resurrection” of politics in its ancient etymology of public interest. In order to respond the research questions, this paper combines a frame analysis of the main documents and websites of both movements with semi-structured interviews with the activists.