Europe | From rage to disillusion

Ten years after Spain’s indignados protests

Politics are still broken

|MADRID

ON MAY 15TH 2011 some 20,000 mainly young, middle-class Spaniards occupied the Puerta del Sol, in the heart of Madrid, angry at austerity and the sense of entitlement among politicians and bankers. Organised through social media and calling themselves los indignados (“the indignant ones”), it was a new kind of protest movement, one that would be swiftly copied elsewhere, notably by Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London later that year.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “From rage to disillusion”

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