Pass it on. It spread first across the city and then the country, multiplying itself through cellphones, e-mails and the Internet. You have one new message. “Today at 6pm, Genova Street, to find out the truth. Pass it on.”
And they did, in their thousands.
Genova Street is the location of the conservative Partido Popular (PP) headquarters in Madrid, the party in power in Spain until March 14. From 6pm the day before, until long into the evening, 5 000 people gathered in the Spanish capital to vent their anger at what they saw as a deliberate government cover-up regarding the perpetrators of the recent bombings.
The message stretched far beyond Madrid. By that evening PP branches across Spain were being harangued on the night before the general election by demonstrators not allied to any political party. In Spain, the PP appeared on television to denounce the demos; the number of protesters subsequently soared.
There were 7 000 protesters in Barcelona, 1 500 in Galicia and hundreds more in city centres across the country. Most remarkable of all, the protests were organised in just a few hours, via SMS and e-mail, by a disillusioned electorate that had decided to take matters into their own hands.
It was a political extension of the phenomenon nicknamed “smart mobs” by American author Howard Reingold — and it’s happened before. In the Philippines, SMSs helped whip up public opinion and led to widespread protests, which ended in the eventual toppling of the president, Joseph Estrada, in 2001. The day after suffering their own impromptu smart mobs, the Spanish government was defeated at the polls.
The protests themselves came about thanks to a quirk in Spanish politics. Political campaigning is banned the day before an election.
Following the bombings in Madrid, the prime minister extended this amnesty to the four days before the vote. However, this meant that the socialist opposition couldn’t easily question the PP’s claim that the Basque separatist group Eta was responsible for the attacks.
It would have been politically convenient for the PP if this had been true. But now it seems the government’s original hypothesis was highly flawed.
As more facts emerged, many people felt they had been deliberately lied to by their government. By 3pm, the first messages had been sent, talking about a non-party gathering against the PP.
According to cellphone operators in Spain, 20% more SMSs were sent that day. Forwarding messages to everyone in your phone or your e-mail address book is now a matter of a few simple clicks — so groups of people can be mobilised quickly and effectively, even if, as in this case, no one can be sure who has organised the protest.
The technological enfranchisement didn’t end there. The main government-owned television channel TVE practically ignored the demonstrations that evening, so people were relying on the Internet to keep them informed about what was going on.
Ignacio Escolar, a freelance journalist and blogger based in Madrid, is calling the phenomenon, “the first 21st-century protests in Spain”. — Â