Poor Peoples' Participation in the Protests against Austerity Measures in Portugal

Portugal has been severely hit by the economic crisis and although the first large protest only occurred in 2011, the protests are closely related to this crisis and many claims are directed against the various austerity policies that mostly hit poorly resourced people. Large protest events in Portugal, however, are often followed by large phases of absence of larger street protest and while some activist groups of poorly resourced people have become stronger despite long phases of absence of large protests, others have become inactive or persist on a very low level of activity and only very few activists. The paper tries to explain these phenomena in two parts: In a first part the paper relates the occurrence of larger protests to external factors that varied during the time period March 2011 to January 2014: 1) suddenly imposed grievances by political decisions up to one week before the demonstrations, 2) division between the elites, 3) repression of social movements or participants at the protest event before the respective demonstration, 4) media attention until the day of the protest. The aim of this part is to explain the varying success of demonstrations in terms of numbers of participants. There is no protest survey data on these events, so we cannot make statements about the protestors' socio-economic backgrounds. As part of my fieldwork in Portugal I observed - amongst other groups - two movement groups of poorly resourced people: the precarious peoples' association and the unemployed people's movement. In the second part of my paper I thus focus on participation of poorly resourced people in these two movements over time. Based on participant observation and interviews with activists, I show how these movements attracted and kept participants and how their success in doing so was related to the protest events against austerity measure.