In early 2012 the largest Portuguese trade union (CGTP) called a general strike to protest against the Government’s austerity programme, which is being driven through a deep recession and in the context of high unemployment. Like their Greek and Spanish counterparts, Portuguese citizens have a great deal to protest about. And to an extent, protest they have. In 2011, Portugal witnessed what was arguably one of the largest public demonstrations since the revolutionary period that marked the transition from dictatorship to democracy (1974-1975). Organised by a group of young people in their 20s, the 12 March 2011 demonstration brought together as many as 200,000 people under the banner of the Geração à Rasca – the ‘Desperate Generation’. Yet, while in some cases impressive in their breadth and inclusiveness, these collective outbursts have been sporadic, and have had great difficulty sustaining mobilization. While the transnational wave of protest that characterized 2011 was also felt in Portugal it seems that, on the surface at least, it was not able to mobilize as widely and with as much commitment as parallel social movements in other austerity-blighted countries. Is this a consequence of Portugal’s ‘weak civil society’, of a supposed ‘mild-mannered’ political culture, or can we find other structural and conjunctural and political factors that explain this apparent passivity? In this paper we use a database of protest events that occurred in Portugal since 2010 to map the nature of this particular cycle of contention over the course of three eventful years, analyzing its features in the light of other work on the evolution of the Portuguese political system since 1974, its institutional features and the dynamic alliances between social movements and other actors.
