Spanish Protests Scale to the Political Sphere

One of Spain’s most charismatic and media savvy political leaders, the Benedictine nun and physician Teresa Forcades, shot to fame in 2009 after she slammed the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry for pushing what she called a dangerous vaccine for swine flu. More recently, she published a book in which she called for the suppression of political parties because they were undemocratic.
In April, she joined up with Arcadi Oliveres, an economist who promotes degrowth, a philosophy that advocates cutting production and consumption, to launch a political movement called Procés Constituent in Spain’s Catalonian region. Not a political party itself — it’s more of a lobby that aims to unify the left and the disaffected in Catalonia — this group’s manifesto calls for the nationalization of banks and energy companies and an independent Catalonian state outside of NATO.
“What Teresa Forcades and I laid out is the belief that the economic, social, and political situation in Catalonia, Spain, and Europe was truly a disaster, and it was necessary to change things,” Oliveres told me. “Unfortunately, we realized that the so-called conventional parties had almost no desire to change.”