One symptom, one diagnosis, one treatment? The naturalization of economic decisions in Mario Monti’s, José Luis Zapatero’s and Mariano Rajoy’s narrative of the Eurozone crisis

The Eurozone crisis and the remarkable convergence – after a short Keynesian parenthesis – of centre-left and centre-right political parties towards the same austerity policies have raised the question of the “strange non-death of neo-liberalism” (Crouch 2011), which appears to be unchallenged, if not reinforced, by the economic crisis (Blyth 2013; Hay & Payne 2013; Schmidt & Thatcher 2013). It has also raised concerns about the significance of democracy itself, since the changes of government do not seem to translate into different policies anymore (Schäfer & Streeck 2013). Against this backdrop, this paper explores the way in which Italian and Spanish heads of governments have framed their economic policy choices as natural and inevitable decisions. Based on a comparative discourse analysis of a centre-left (Zapatero), a centre-right (Rajoy) and a “technical” (Monti) leader, this study aims at improving our understanding of the way in which Southern European political elites have used specific discursive registers in order to prevent political contestation in the context of the crisis. In this paper, I intend to tackle the following research question: which are, regardless of national and partisan borders, the common features of the pro-austerity discourse? Based on a previous research on Mario Monti’s speeches, I hypothesize that the discourse of legitimation of austerity measures relies on a specific combination of discursive registers: the common sense, the emergency and the natural register. Moreover, I argue that all these registers contribute to naturalize the economic decisions and to obscure their political nature. The paper will also investigate the consequences of this discourse for the legitimacy of the mainstream political parties and its relation to the emergence of anti-systems parties/movements in the Italian and Spanish national arenas. The paper relies on a two-step methodology which combines the use of quantitative (lexicography) and qualitative (metaphor and narrative analysis). It consists first in identifying and comparing the general lexical patterns and themes in each actor’s speeches with the lexicographic tools provided by lexicographic software (occurrences, concordances, specificities, factor analysis). Then, the coding of these patterns shall allow me to highlight the sequencing and the relations between the topics in each actor’s narrative, as well as the rhetorical forms that support them.