Depoliticising austerity: narratives of the Portuguese debt crisis 2011–15

Abstract

The relationship between the Euro crisis and austerity policies is often understood in terms of broadly deterministic explanations centred around economic imperatives and, in the case of bailed out countries, the conditionality of international lenders. Applying a multi-lens framework of depoliticisation to the case of Portugal between 2011 and 2015, this article instead refocuses analysis on the discourse employed by national politicians, in their construction of crisis narratives, to build the political authority to pass reforms. The Portuguese case is particularly effective at demonstrating how depoliticisation, ‘relocates politics and the political rather than annihilating it’.