Four million on the streets of the Spanish state

[Ed George]

Even allowing for the fact that the mobilisations yesterday were huge
everywhere, those that took place in the Spanish state were especially
impressive. By taking a figure somewhere between the most conservative
and the most over-optimistic in each case, we get the following picture
for the mobilisations of yesterday:

------------------------------
    Madrid     1,500,000
    Barcelona  1,250,000
    Valencia     350,000
    Zaragoza     250,000
    Sevilla      200,000
    Bilbao       200,000
    Las Palmas   100,000
    Vigo         100,000
    Oviedo       100,000
    Cádiz         60,000
    Tenerife      50,000
    Logroño       30,000
    Valladolid    25,000
    Santander     25,000
    Albacete      25,000
    Pamplona      25,000
    Santiago      25,000
    Murcia        25,000
------------------------------

Given the timing and location of the different demonstrations, it is
unlikely that there will be many people in the above list that will have
been counted twice. So it seems as if around at least four million
people took to the streets in the Spanish state yesterday: around *10
per cent of the entire population*. This was an enormous mobilisation;
to see anything comparable to this you have to go back to the days of
the Second Republic.

It seems to me as if something of a rubicon has been crossed therefore.
The first consequence of this is that - following as it does from the
Presitge oil-spill fiasco - it really seems to make the government of
the Partido Popular un-reelectable (Spansh state general elections will
take place next year). On a wider scale it seems to indicate a break in
the degree of acceptance of US political global hegemony here in Spain.
If this is the case, of course, this means taking very seriously the
kind of strategic questions that Michael Keaney has recently been
raising on this list.

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