Demokratische Revolution oder im Treibsand der Institutionen?

In Spain, alliances of movement actors and parties were founded in many cities after the local elections in 2015, as radical democratic responses to the crisis of representative democracy and austerity politics. These so-called municipalist lists were able to build a bridge between the movement and the state at the local level, but after the end of the legislative period they were voted out of office in many places or are confronted with the contradictions of institutional policy. This article examines the possibilities and limitations of these municipalist experiments using the example of Barcelona en Comu. By linking the empirical results to approaches of materialist and feminist state theory, developments can be made more comprehensible and the structural conditions for progressive city governments become clearer.