Hundreds or just a handful: the protest against Sánchez at La Mareta

The La Mareta protest: hundreds on the banner, a handful on the beach

The president's holiday residence in Lanzarote is hardly Puerta del Sol. Costa Teguise, the municipality where La Mareta is located, has fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, many of them tourists. Even so, a call to protest against Pedro Sánchez gathered a group of people that, depending on who is counting, ranged from the "hundreds" on the banner to the "barely a handful" seen in the images. The gap between the two is the perfect summary of this new way of doing politics: protest as spectacle, attendance as an excuse.

The first videos that circulated suggested the place was packed. Soon after, the same social media showed an almost empty beach and a small group of protesters. One video that spread was removed or censored on some platforms, fuelling the controversy. Those who want to see a crowd see one; those who suspect a staged event count on the fingers of one hand.

The demographic desert of the protest

It is no coincidence that the choice of venue was itself a message. La Mareta is the president's holiday retreat, and the idea of showing him discontent on his own turf carries a hint of mockery that the organisers knew well. But logistics work against it: in an area with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, mobilising thousands requires machinery that clearly did not work. The comparison with other recent protests, such as the march of 70,000 people towards Ceuta over migrant minors, only underlines the disproportion between the media noise and the actual turnout.

The banners and slogans, however, did not stay on the beach. The protest became an excuse to air other grievances: migration management in the Canary Islands, the cost of presidential security, the sense of impunity of someone going on holiday while everyone else is drowning. All of that hung in the air, even if the event itself was only a partial success.

The video nobody can explain

The removal of the video adds the conspiratorial ingredient every protest needs to survive. When content disappears from platforms, it is instantly read as censorship, and censorship is always better fuel than indifference. Thus, the La Mareta protest has ended up becoming a meme: some see it as the beginning of the end, others as a summer anecdote. Reality, as almost always, lies in between: a handful of people with placards who achieved what many fail to achieve with thousands: making the news.

What is unclear is whether this kind of action pays off. The recent history of Spanish politics shows that mass rallies rarely change a government; the ones that did had something more behind them than outrage: they had a specific trigger. Here the trigger is diffuse: fed-upness, discomfort, anger. And with an enemy resting by his pool, the cartoon is perfect, but the effectiveness is nil.

The question left hanging: how many people does it take for a president to listen? Hundreds, thousands, or none, because the political circuit is already too well shielded for a beach in Lanzarote to change it? Meanwhile, the summer goes on, the beach is still there, and the video, censored or not, has already done its job.