15-M anniversary. Demotix/Betsabe Donoso. All rights reserved.Much has been written about the birth of Podemos. There have also been many lines written about the 15-M (15 May) movement and about this breath of fresh air that brought so many of us to the streets.
Much has been debated about what happened to this movement, and whether it disappeared due to the fatigue that came with camping out in all the major squares of Spain for a month. The exhaustion was not only physical; it was above all intellectual and political. Defending the stand of the camps in the thick of it, against all the odds, was, I believe, one of the toughest experiences to have faced those of us born in the eighties and nineties.
The decision to transfer the process—while not turning it off— to neighbourhoods was one of the most complex decisions we had to confront: opting for the pragmatic stance of not letting it be seen that the camps were slowly dying out as participants returned to their everyday lives, while up against the desire of not giving into those who had been saying that we were illegally occupying the public spaces.
