Surrounding Spain's Parliament

    Last night's protest against the austerity budget under debate in Spain's Parliament went off without incident last night, as participants told me it would. That came as a contrast to the violent scenes which hit front pages around the world after police dispersed a much better attended protest on 25 September, about which The Guardian's Giles Tremlett wrote an excellent in-depth article (with a modest contribution from myself).
    To be fair, follow-up rallies held to protest police handling also went off without incident, although the protestors (and journalists) were unable to get anywhere near the Parliament building and thus branded MPs as quite literally out of touch with the people they were elected to represent.
    What are they complaining about? Along with the "Indignados" (indignant ones) movement which sprang up after thousands camped out for weeks in central Madrid (also known as 15-M, because it all began on 15 May), last night's organisers think professional politicians generally do not represent them and the gulf has become painfully evident now that one in four in this country are out of work.
    In particular, organisers wanted to meet face-to-face with MPs and quiz them over austerity measures. They estimated one euro in four proposed in the 2013 budget would go to debt payments, while cutting social spending to narrow the deficit would not only be painful, but depress the economy further and make unemployment worse. Thus protestors chanted, "We don't owe, we don't pay."
    At 10 p.m. the MPs had all left the chamber and organisers asked every one to go home, which they did. Amongst other things, for residents of central Madrid this meant we could sleep without ear-plugs because police helicopters were no longer buzzing rooftops, as they have often done for a year and a half now.
   Although left unsaid, every one here recalls that Spain's Parliament building was the scene of a botched coup in 1981 when disgruntled army officers stormed the chamber and kept MPs hostage for the night. Several assumed at the time they would be shot, until it became clear the morning after that the coup had failed.
   For some, recalling the coup shows that however bad things may be in Spain now, the country has come a long way since it was a backward, impoverished and isolated dictatorship and managed to make the Transition -- usually capitalised -- to modern democracy and EU membership at a speed which surprised every one.
   For others, the Transition was incomplete and left flaws in Spain's democracy whose failings have now been shown up by the crisis.
   Meanwhile, for the fifth year in a row now, Spaniards know things will not get better next year, and maybe not the year after that, either.