Spain: from the indignados rebellion to regime crisis (2011-2016)

Since 15 May 2011 Spain has progressively entered a political and regime crisis in which the main institutional pillars of the political system constructed in 1977-1978 during the transition from the Franco dictatorship to parliamentary democracy suffered from serious wear. This can be analysed following Gramsci's notion of hegemony crisis whose main features fit well with the current situation in Spain. The regime crisis has passed through different stages – the last being the emergence and rise in the polls of Podemos, which emerged in a context marked by the deepening of the crisis and the difficulty of securing significant social victories. To understand the meaning of this current regime crises it is useful to read history, following Walter Benjamin as an open process full of bifurcations with no linear trajectory. Spanish regime crisis opens for the first time since the seventies the possibility of a social and political change whose final sense is still uncertain.