Between Grexit and Utopia: EU Legal Theory in the Mirror of los indignados
After Syriza’s recent victory in the Greek parliamentary elections, the EU is licking its wounds. Tsipras, the new Greek Prime Minister, has pledged to end the rule of austerity and wants to renegotiate with the so-called troika (European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF)). Representatives of the Northern Member States stress that Greece is to honour all agreements and should repay every penny it received. In the meanwhile, the Podemos-party is eager to copy Syriza’s success in the upcoming elections in Spain. The developments in Greece and Spain should be understood against the background of the protest movements known as los indignados, the outraged. These protests started on 15 May 2011 in Spain. Just as in the Arab countries, the protests consisted in the occupation of major squares in such cities as Madrid and Barcelona. The protesters were angry about several things, including the way in which European austerity measures made their situation only worse and the general loss of autonomy over their lives. One demand, however, lies at the very core of the existence of los indignados: the reinvention of democracy under a horizontal and inclusive guise.1 On this topic, the protest movement and the EU seem, in the words of one commentator, ‘lost in communication.’2 Reports regarding one rare meeting between a high official of the EU and four indignados suggest that the latter completely reject the democratic character of EU institutions. They argue that ‘politicians don’t represent us.’3 Behind this statement lies a juxtaposition between representative democracy and its institutions on the one hand and ‘real democracy’ and participation on the other hand.4 The democratic challenge presented by los indignados thus cuts deeper than the EU’s democratic deficit understood as an institutional problem. The latter issue might be solved by giving the European Parliament more competences and a greater influence on the political process. From the perspective of los indignados, however, this would only exacerbate the prob-