May Revolution
The May Revolution was a direct reaction to Spain's Peninsular War. In 1808, King Ferdinand VII of Spain abdicated in favor of Napoleon, who granted the throne to his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. A Supreme Central Junta led resistance to Joseph's government and the French occupation of Spain, but eventually suffered a series of reversals that resulted in the Spanish loss of the northern half of the country. On February 1, 1810, French troops took Seville and gained control of most of Andalusia. The Supreme Junta retreated to Cadiz and dissolved itself, and the Council of Regency of Spain and the Indies replaced it. News of these events arrived in Buenos Aires on May 18, brought by British ships.
Precarity
In 2001 the Italian collectives and networks identifying with the global justice movement, as they were preparing for the Genoa counter-summit just months away, inaugurated in Milan a new kind of first of May, MAYDAY, spelling it like the international call for rescue, and explicitly centering it on the street representation of the so-called "precarious generation." It employed carnival-like techniques of agitation (allegorical wagons, media subvertising, colorful actions etc.) in imitation of gay prides and love parades of the 1990s. Italian activists meant it as a revival of the wobbly traditions of May Day, and consequently as a break with traditional union representation and social-democratic compromise that had allowed precarity and social insecurity to spread unchecked to reach critical levels in all of Europe, thus repeating the experience of UK and US economies with a few years' lag.