Plaza protests could end Zapatero's reign

The several thousand protesters of a new angry generation gathered in Plaça Catalunya, Barcelona's main square, bashing pans in South American fashion. They were a far cry, in size and sound, from the numbers who had gathered to celebrate FC Barça's recent third consecutive Spanish football league victory.

But as Spanish authorities geared up to disperse protesters from squares in Madrid and across the country ahead of local elections on Sunday, the "Spanish Revolution", backed by hundreds of thousands online, increasingly resembled an expression of accumulated frustration; of the widening distance between citizens hit by unemployment and the economic and political forces of power.

With unemployment rising to above 21 per cent, and no immediate prospect of improvement, those tired of Spain's rabble-rousing and often corrupt political class poured out to occupy city centre plazas across the country, and hijacked the campaign ahead of tomorrow's municipal and regional elections. Many young people connected to Twitter and Facebook appear inspired by the Arab spring, others by Jose Saramago's book Seeing, in which a population casts blank votes.

Some protesters, including the official campaign movement Democracy Now, have called for voters to cast a vote. While the use of new technologies and hard-hitting phrases have taken the spotlight off mainstream parties, a blank vote or a vote for minority parties to protest against a two-party system was ironically expected to assist the anticipated victory of Spain's opposition conservatives.

Campaign organisers, including Democracy Now, formed using Facebook, and which calls for electoral reform, urged voters to opt for lesser parties.

Before the protests, polls showed the opposition conservatives in pole position for clear victory, with up to 40 per cent of the vote.

The swing could even lead to early general elections planned for 2012, polls suggested, also stating that in Socialist strongholds such as Andaluca, the opposition conservatives were heading for a landslide victory. The splintered youth vote, a key part of socialist prime minister Jose Zapatero's election victories, could go to extremes on the left and right. In the regions, there are far more than two political parties.

In the Basque country, the new Basque coalition Bildu is expected to obtain 18 per cent, a result that many Basques believe could help prompt the final end of terror group Eta.

Thousands of mayors and town councillors, and 824 members of regional parliaments for 13 of the 17 semi-autonomous regions, are to be elected tomorrow.

Before Spain's disillusioned leftist social movements used online tools to take to the streets, Mr Zapatero, who has already announced he will not be standing at the next general election, had dug his own political grave by playing down the scale of the crisis and its impact on Spain. Spain's jobless rate hit 21.19 per cent in the first quarter of this year, the highest in the industrialised world. For the under-25s, the jobless rate in February was 44.6 per cent.

Despite a recent increase in exports in industrial areas in Spain, the government's adoption of liberal economic measures, including labour reform aimed at improving the economy, there's little sign of any economic growth.

Furthermore, the upshot of the elections is expected to unveil further instances of the alleged "hidden debt" that first emerged in Spain following the regional elections held in Catalonia last autumn, resulting in moderate conservative Catalan nationalists knocking out the Socialist-led coalition. Jointly, elections to municipal and regional governments account for over half the budget of Spain's welfare state.Town halls and regional governments are expected to increase the pace of spending cuts after tomorrow's election, as the country battles to rein in its budget deficit.

The 2011 Catalan regional budget foresees a 10 per cent cut in expenditures and includes downsizing of public-sector companies and cutbacks in health services.

As protesters queued at a makeshift soup kitchen on Plaa Catalunya, Spain's Red Cross released figures yesterday showing that demand in food and shelter from those in need has increased in Spain by 29 per cent. It is a leap that has prompted the concerns over the development of a new underclass.

Barcelona's nominally conservative daily newspaper La Vanguardia, claimed that the latest findings reveal the emergence of new generation of poverty.