Critical event analysis of protest and counterprotest in the Greek anti-austerity campaign, 2010-2015

Since the beginning of the debt crisis, an impressive series of large protests and general strikes occurred in Greece against austerity policies. The main trade unions declared consecutive general strikes and the political parties and organizations of the left mobilized in mass protests to overthrow the various bailout agreements. The high frequency of protests that were synchronized at the national level, the high number of participants, the broad cross-class coalitions that involved a large number of challenging groups and the general public, account for the emergence of a sustained anti-austerity campaign in Greece that lasted for almost five years (2010-2015). Inside the protestors camp existed and acted many groups that competed for political hegemony. There were even plenty of instances of violent clashes among anti-austerity demonstrators themselves. However, throughout this period there was only one clear-cut and significant counterprotest. The week before the referendum of July 2015, to be decided whether Greece should comply to one more EU bailout package of austerity measures and neoliberal reforms, several thousand protesters mobilized in favor of austerity while at the same time even more thousand protesters, backed also by the SYRIZA government that had declared the referendum, mobilized against the continuation of austerity. The result of the referendum was in favor of the anti-austerity camp by a wide margin but the government decided to ignore this result and with the parliamentary help of the right-wing and centrist political parties acted in favor of the austerity camp. Drawing on the newly introduced method of Critical Protest Event Analysis, in this paper we will closely examine the interactions between protests and counterprotests in this rather illuminating paradigm from Greece. Critical Protest Event Analysis goes far beyond mere charting and descriptive quantification, to provide meaningful explanatory propositions regarding movement-emergence, trajectory, and outcomes. Staring off from the key observation that the ontology of social movements is not essentialist but relational, it claims that, for our analysis to be comprehensive and meaningful, we need to take political mediation, understood as the political content and strategies of protest organizations and allied political parties, into serious account. By doing so we will be able to trace the different and sometimes competing political contents and mediations that took place and interacted during the whole time-span of the anti-austerity campaign, and have led to the seemingly deafening success of a single pro-austerity counterprotest. The findings of this paper derive from the three-year funded HFRI research project “EPOCA – Hollowing Democracy, Party Politics and Social Protest during the Great Recession. The Case of Greece, 2008-2018” held at Panteion University in Greece.