Alternatives from Below: Ethnography of a political interstice between street mobilization and institutional assault

Abstract

What has been generically called "institutional assault" constitutes a period and a laboratory of political practices in Spain of enormous complexity, which has its origin in the last year of the second anniversary of 15M and crystallizes with the birth of Podemos and the different "candidacies of popular unity" present in the municipal elections of 2015. However, this space for collective action is extremely heterogeneous and diverse, and therefore it becomes necessary to pay attention to its different elements. In the present article the analytical focus is focused in its first phase, still embryonic and interstitial, that goes from May of 2013 to June of 2014, and where a series of experiences antecedents of what later were initiatives as well known as Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Común, etc. From an ethnographic work centered in Madrid, we will review one of those experiences, Alternatives from Below, as an empirical example of the dynamics in tension and the lines of escape existing in the transit of the street to the electoral struggle.