When Spain's "Indignant Ones" protest movement began eight months ago, it was widely seen as a young people's initiative, with no coherent ideas, which would soon die out. Yet while the movement is now less visible on the streets, it is increasingly reverberating in academic circles, where economists are challenging the dominant free-market thinking.
The austerity policies with which European governments are trying to solve the euro crisis are on the wrong track, say Fernando Luengo and Nuria Alonso, two Madrid economy lecturers who helped to launch the EconoNuestra initiative. The platform, which opposes "market fundamentalism" and proposes "a different vision of the economy," was launched less than two months ago. Yet its manifesto has already been signed by about 1,000 people, including more than 200 academic economists.
An alternative school of economic thought is also emerging in other countries such as France, Italy, Greece or Britain, said Luengo and Alonso, who teach at Madrid's Complutense and Rey Juan Carlos universities respectively, in an interview with dpa.
The Indignant Ones' protests were sparked partly by Spain's record unemployment - currently at more than 21 percent - which brought 80,000 people to the streets all over the country mid-May. The date of May 15 gave the movement the other name it is known under, 15-M.
The first rallies were followed by others, as well as by protest camps at city squares and neighbourhood assemblies debating democratic reforms. The Indignant Ones sparked or encouraged similar movements around the world, and simultaneous rallies were staged in dozens of countries on October 15.
Assemblies and occasional rallies are still being held. The Indignant Ones are also increasingly focusing on problems in the housing sector, with protesters preventing the expulsion of people unable to pay mortgages, and squatters occupying empty buildings.
The apparently heterogeneous movement is far from directionless, says Luengo, the likes of whom are trying to give it a more solid theoretical basis. Academia is dominated by thinkers supportive of the current economic policies, who are funded and backed by the financial and media powers, Luengo and Alonso said.
"But the 15-M has encouraged critical economists to start getting organised," Luengo says. Spain, for instance, focuses on trimming its 8 percent budget deficit with draconian spending cuts, and is planning a reform to make the labour market more flexible, in an attempt to restore investor confidence and to ward off an eventual EU-led bailout.
Such measures ignore the root causes of the financial crisis, transferring the burden of combating it to ordinary citizens while reinforcing the privileges of the financial powers whose speculative practices sparked it in the first place, Luengo and Alonso said.
Cuts in areas such as health and education are leaving citizens increasingly unprotected, while public money is being channelled to banks, which use it to speculate on government debt, Luengo says.
"Financial markets and some political powers are delivering a strategic battle" to extend their control over society, a situation which is leading to the increasing privatisation of social services and "weakening the public sphere," the two economists said. Increasing numbers of Spaniards, for instance, are taking private health insurance while tens of thousands have been left without medical care for not affording to pay social security fees.
Meanwhile, "there is no talk at all" about reforming the functioning of financial markets and about placing them under stricter controls, Luengo notes. Social inequalities are now higher in Spain than at any time since 1995, according to an OECD study. Not only do the current policies deepen inequalities, but the austerity also undermines consumption and paralyses Spain's economy, which is slipping into a recession, Luengo and Alonso say.
A growing number of politicians - including German Chancellor Angela Merkel - are now admitting that austerity alone cannot revive European economies. "It is a mistake to focus only on cutting the budget deficit. A certain amount of deficit is even compatible with a dynamic economy," Luengo says. He advocates tackling inequalities with measures such as taxing financial transactions and the wealthiest, as well as fighting tax evasion. Leaders like Merkel, however, may not want to go that far.