This is no democracy, we want real democracy : capitalist crisis and utopias in Portugal

The economic and financial crisis which affected Portugal in 2011 launched representative democracy in a serious legitimacy crisis. Huge demonstrations and different forms of protest rocked the country between 2011and 2013. This presentation will discuss how the crisis of peripheral capitalism in the Eurozone opened the gate for new democratic alternatives to the traditional representative form of democracy that governed Portugal since the constitution of 1976. Theanalysis is based upon 67 short interviews and 6 in depth interviews with activists and protestors, which focus on their perspectives on the state of democracy in Portugal, how they perceived the influence of the crisis in Portugal, how they conceive their idea of democracy as an alternative, and how they project democracy in the past and the future.The main reasons behind the rejection of liberal democracy are the perceived lack of social rights, accountability, legitimacy, freedom of speech, sovereignty,participation and respect for the constitution. From these, a wide range of different conceptions of democracy emerge. This presentation distinguishes and elaborates three more developed democratic conceptions encountered during the research: the acampadapre-figurative autonomous movement, the occupy movement influenced by the Spanish 15M; the radical trade union democracy in which the Lisbon Dockers union took the lead and the left parliamentary alternatives presented by the PCP and the Left Block.The paper then discusses if the coexistence of these different democratic alternatives is a mere empirical phenomenon or a political goal? How does this diversity relate to crisis? And what are the emancipatory possibilities of the different existing alternatives to the status quo of representative democracy as we know it