“For a real democracy”: people take to the streets across the Canary Islands on 26 September

A citizens’ self-organised call is urging people to take to the streets on Saturday 26 September at 12 noon across the Canary Islands, under the banner “in defence of real democracy”. The call is accompanied by the manifesto “Defending what we share”.

The text reflects on the erosion of rights and argues that “rights are not always destroyed by banning them”. It adds that sometimes it is enough to “empty them of meaning” or make them “slow, expensive, humiliating, suspect and inaccessible”.

The manifesto says rights are weakened “when poverty becomes a source of blame, migration a threat, freedom over our bodies an excess, difference a problem, care a weakness and protest disorder”. It also warns against the idea that “some lives matter less and can therefore be treated with less humanity”.

The document also questions the use of fear and inequality, and the way people with less power are treated. “It is not freedom to use fear to govern or to turn hatred into an identity. It is not freedom to humiliate those with less power,” the manifesto says.

The call also refers to the workings of institutions, justice and public debate. The text says that “when an investigation turns into a public accusation” or “when suspicion acts as a pre-emptive conviction”, a climate is created in which “the fear of speaking begins to dictate what can be said and what is better left unsaid”.

“And to justify the narrative of false liberation, the media begin to manufacture the climate. Deciding which pain deserves compassion and which deserves contempt. Which anger is legitimate and which should be ridiculed. Which violence is condemned and which is justified. Which life is presented as a citizen and which as a problem.”

In the Canary Islands, they point out, “housing drives people out”, “work does not guarantee a living”, “young people learn to say goodbye” and “bureaucracy turns rights into a test of endurance”.

The document also mentions issues related to housing, benefits, care and working conditions. Rights, it stresses, “fall away when a benefit arrives too late to make amends. They fall away when an older person waits alone. They fall away when a worker keeps hotels running in which they could never afford to stay”.

The organisers say the mobilisation “is not a campaign”, “is not a party label” and “is not an empty flag”, but rather about “stopping them from stealing from us the very idea that we have the right to live with dignity”.

The manifesto concludes by calling on people to take to the streets on 26 September. Its goals include “a Canary Islands where living is not a race to exhaustion”, “where housing does not drive people out”, “where work does not destroy” and “where migration does not dehumanise”.