'Aren’t there any alternatives'? Power and Discourse in Portuguese Austerity Politics

This paper analyses the margin of maneuver of Portuguese executives since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis (2010-2015). To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, we triangulate different types of data: 1) face-to-face interviews; 2) investigations by journalists; and 3) IMF and EU official documents. Lastly, we compare our findings to the official discourses of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos-Coelho. We show that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bailout have limited the executive’s autonomy, they have also strengthened their independence from other national actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets - later associated with the conditions of the bailout - concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favored policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. Finally, contrary to our expectations, we did not find a wide gap between Prime Ministers’ official discourse and this state of affairs – thus showing limited evidence of discursive depolitization.