Streets on fire: how a decade of protest shaped the world
In March 2011, I asked a class at an unemployed training centre in Madrid who would be prepared to emigrate to find a job. They all raised their hands. Youth unemployment in Spain stood at 43% – higher than both Egypt and Tunisia. Everyone in the room said most of their friends were unemployed. One in five of those under the age of 30 in Spain were still looking for their first job. Almost every young person I spoke to believed their lives would be harder than their parents’.
“This is the least hopeful and best educated generation in Spain,” Ignacio Escolar, then 35 and author of the country’s most popular political blog, told me. “And it’s like a national defeat that they have to travel abroad to find work.”
Why, I asked him, had they not taken to the streets? “It’s like there is oil on the streets,” he said. “All it needs is a small spark and it could blow.”
The last decade has been a combustible one. Across the globe, millions of protesters have marched, sat down, sat in, camped out, occupied, filled jail cells, rioted, looted, chanted, petitioned, lobbied and hashtagged. These protests have toppled despots and overthrown governments, transformed geopolitics, led to the death or transformation of old political parties, and the birth and ascendancy of new ones.
