The 2011 movements of the squares, the ‘aganaktismenoi’ and ‘indignados’ as they came to be known in Greece and Spain respectively, brought to the forefront old and unresolved debates on the Left. During the crisis it became evident that the traditional Left failed to capture the popular imagination. As part of parliamentary politics, and together with the rest of the political establishment, the left had itself lost legitimacy, at least among a large part of society, and non-representational alternatives started to be entertained. The debates emerging from the movements were a response to the failure of the existing economic paradigm and an alternative economic vision challenging neo-liberal capitalism took front stage. Yet, at the heart of the movements was the realization that, without a political alternative compensating for the democratic deficit in the respective countries, such an alternative would be impossible. Resistance to the economic programmes of the troika (the IMF, the EU and the ECB) had to come from the ‘people’, the political actor who had been excluded from the decision-making process. Although the crisis was identified as economic, there was a sense in which the crisis concerned politics as well – indeed the crisis was of a general character to the extent that it could not be limited to a particular part of society
