Alliance Building and Eventful Performances: Spanish and Portuguese Trajectories of Mobilization in the Shadow of the Great Recession

Amidst a context of recession, many citizens organized to oppose the implementation of EU-ridden neo-liberal policies. Particularly, Southern Europe was a hotspot for popular dissent. Despite their different trajectories, comparative studies are scarce thus far. Portugal experienced its largest non-trade union or political party led demonstration in March 2011, which gathered around 10% of population to protest against the negative prospects of a precarious generation. Only a couple of months later, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards mobilized to claim against the political status quo and austerity policies being implemented. While standards of extra-conventional mobilization remained high over the subsequent years in Spain (until we observe a declining trend, in 2014), Portuguese levels of collective mobilization remained low, with rare –never persisting over time– shocks. Why so? What does explain different timing and trajectories of contention under the shadow of austerity? We argue Spanish movement(s) contained radicalization attempts and postponed institutionalization through specialization via sectorial fights and the building of strategic alliances between new organizations and major unions, essential to deliver recurrent eventful performances. By contrast, Portuguese challengers were coopted by opposition left-wing parties, which fostered internal divisions and made coalitions impossible. Two original self-collected Protest Event Analysis datasets are used, and information from +20 interviews allow to conduct a mixed methods empirical design.