Chanting "they don't represent us," tens of thousands in Madrid railed early Sunday against Spain's government and austerity cuts -- venting their anger on the first anniversary of the so-called May 15 protest movement.
Many ignored a government deadline to disperse by Saturday night from the central Puerta del Sol plaza, prompting police to clear the square by 5 a.m. on Sunday (11 p.m. on Saturday ET), the interior ministry said.
About 30,000 attended the Madrid protest, and 18 were detained for resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, the ministry said.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, demonstrators were a loud and vibrant presence in the square -- as a large number of police, stationed at a nearby government building and along side streets, looked on and let them be.
Throngs of like-minded demonstrators also gathered over the weekend in Barcelona and about 80 other cities around Spain.
Barcelona saw about 22,000 protesters, while Valencia had 8,000 and Seville had 2,000, authorities said. All the demonstrations were cleared by Sunday morning, the interior ministry said.
The coordinated events marked the return of the "indignados" -- or the outraged, as the protesters became known -- who led Europe's first serious and significant grassroots movement against austerity and government budget cuts.
The indignados certainly made their voices heard and will continue to do so. But with Spain's unemployment rate reaching 25% and and the austerity cuts only making that worse, it's just a matter of time before the bond market comes knocking, and Spain will become the latest eurozone country to need a bailout.
How will the eurozone react with France and Greece, too? We're about to find out. If there's one thing that could hand the United States over to the GOP, it's a European collapse that drops America back into recession territory.
We'll see.
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