Spanish hit streets after tweets

Spaniards have marched and pitched tents in central Madrid for a fourth night to protest budget cuts, bank bailouts and the country's electoral system before regional voting on Sunday.

Thousands of people filled Puerta del Sol, where demonstrators have used Twitter to attract supporters to a makeshift camp in the central Madrid plaza, mirroring the use of social media that fuelled the recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt. People held banners declaring the plaza ''Tahrir Square'' in reference to the Egyptian revolution.

Spain's Socialist government, which faces regional and local elections on Sunday, turned against its traditional base to push through the deepest budget cuts in at least three decades and overhaul labour and pension laws. The collapse of Spain's debt-fuelled property boom left the country with an unemployment rate of 21 per cent, and 45 per cent of young people out of work.

''The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,'' Pepa Garcia, a 34-year-old unemployed actress, said yesterday at the Puerta del Sol.

''People should be indignant; some banks are getting rescued with our money while we're almost drowning.''

The protest movement wants changes to the voting system to make it more representative and less dominated by the two main parties.

Polls show the Socialist Party will suffer a setback in most of the regional elections. It will be beaten in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, which it has controlled for three decades, and may lose Barcelona for the first time since Spain's return to democracy in 1975..

The Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has angered traditional supporters by slashing public sector wages, freezing pensions and seeking to change wage-bargaining rules as part of efforts to cut the budget deficit and shield the economy from the sovereign debt crisis.

 

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