Party Systems in Southern Europe during the Great Recession: Cleavages and Party Strategies in Greece and Italy after the Eurozone Crisis

The necessity to implement austerity measures, as a means to restore Eurozone debtor countries’ credibility among international investors, has yielded a new cleavage in these countries that cuts across the classical left-right axis of competition. Strong opposition against austerity is voiced both from the left and from the right of the political spectrum. As austerity measures have a depressive impact on economic growth in the short-run, parties in government and parties in the opposition use different narratives in order to, respectively, justify them or oppose them. This paper analyzes comparatively how the new cleavage generated by Eurozone crisis politics, which we term here ‘the austerity cleavage’, has affected the dynamics of party competition in two countries that have been hit by the crisis and are subject to strict externally imposed economic consolidation strategies: Greece and Italy. This paper argues that the impact of the new ‘austerity cleavage’ in both countries is filtered through the prior structures and traditions in each party system that create specific opportunities for established or new parties to pursue advantages in the new political context. In addition, although the ‘austerity cleavage’ has arisen with a similar timing in both countries, the fact that Greece was under the supervision of the “troika” (European Central Bank, European Commission, International Monetary Fund) substantially increased the polarization along the new cleavage. Thus, while the crisis has had broadly similar effects on the two party systems (changing strength relationships between parties, rise of new relevant parties, and realignment of the stakes of party competition around the ‘austerity cleavage’), the specific content, direction and intensity of these effects is conditioned in each country by the interrelationship between prior party system dynamics and each country’s relative position inside Europe’s political economy and institutional architecture.