"Indignados/Podemos in the Midst of a Double Legitimation Crisis: From Prefigurative Movement to Electoral Strategy"

In the May 2014 European Parliament elections, a new party Podemos polled 1.2 million votes in Spain, 8% of the national votes, netting 5 Euro MP's; and by the summer entered into an electoral coalition Ganemos targetting the 2015 local elections, and calling for a Foundation Assembly this autumn of its "circle" of 800 constitutent assemblies.The paper shows the rootedness of Podemos in the anti-austerity 15 May (15-M) Indignados movement articulating the claims of Spain's 50 % youth unemployed (the Precariat), occupying Madrid's Puerta del Sol since 2011. The paper, using polling data from Spain's CIS, argues that this prefigurative movement turned party reflects both a legitimation crisis of the embourgeoisement policies of the welfare state, as well as a  second legitimation crisis in the drastic decline in trust of the complicit political class and financial elites ("the Cast")  in the unravelling Post-Franco transition state's new order led by the Bourbon King Juan Carlos I. There is now talk of a Third Republic for Spain, and how far Spain has actually transformed from an estate society into a class society involving a democratization of parliament's role. Ultimately the paper understands the Indignation as constituted by heteronomous social subjects of rights proceeding rhizomically as well as instiutionalizably in a historical trajectory opening up normative space  for rights claims that characterize a new sense of "the social," resisting  the "social washing" rhetoric of "the Cast' for a Third Way, and counterpointing the horizontal democratic experimentation of the councils to a wobbly constitutionalism.