La crise de la représentation démocratique

Democratic society has historically been constructed around a separation of the civil and political spheres and a relation of communication between these two spheres. In Spain a serious economic crisis began around 2007; and this crisis, along with the crisis in communication between the two spheres produced a very powerful response from civil society: the indignados. Three other factors contributed to the emergence of this movement: the rise in level of education of the new generations, the spread of new technologies of communication and what amounted to an epidemic of social mobilisation. After the analysis of the first instants of the response of civil society, tis article considers the relation of the movement to conventional politics and concludes by endeavouring to discover the consequences of the irruption into the political sphere of the new party which has emerged from the social mobilisation: Podemos.