Crisis, Austerity, and Transformation: How Disciplinary Neoliberalism is Changing Portugal 1498543871, 9781498543873

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Crisis, Austerity, and Transformation

Crisis, Austerity, and Transformation How Disciplinary Neoliberalism Is Changing Portugal Edited by Isabel David

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-4387-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-4388-0 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Abbreviations Introduction Isabel David

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I: The Impact of the Crisis 1

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Portuguese Economy: How (Not) to Get Away with Financial Crisis and Economic Adjustment Programs Carla Guapo Costa

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Tourism Gentrification in Lisbon: The Panacea of Touristification as a Scenario of Post-Capitalist Crisis Luís Mendes

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II: Resisting the Crisis 3

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The Anti-Austerity Protest Cycle in Portugal: The Ambiguous Relations Between Social Movements and LeftWing Political Parties Dora Fonseca Digital Activism, Political Participation and Social Movements in Times of Crisis José Alberto Simões, Ricardo Campos, Inês Pereira, Mafalda Esteves, and Jordi Nofre

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The People’s Assembly of Algés: Heterotopia and Radical Democracy in Crisis-Stricken Portugal Marcos Farias Ferreira and João Terrenas

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The Crisis on the Wall: Political Muralism and Street Art in Lisbon Ricardo Campos

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III: Beyond Crisis and Stereotyping: A Laboratory for Innovative Practices 7

Demolishing Portugal’s “Berlin Wall”: The Portuguese Left Against Austerity Policies Maria João Ferreira and Pedro Fonseca

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133

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8

Contents

When Citizen Participation Unexpectedly Grows in Quality and Quantity: A Side Effect or an Inherent Consequence of “Austeritarian” Approaches? Giovanni Allegretti

Conclusion: What Can We Learn from the Crisis? Isabel David Index About the Contributors

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179 185 191

Abbreviations

BE = Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) CDS-PP = Democratic Social Center-People’s Party (Centro Democrático Social-Partido Popular) CDU = Unitary Democratic Coalition (Coligação Democrática Unitária) EC = European Commission ECB = European Central Bank EEC = European Economic Community EMU = Economic and Monetary Union EPP = European People’s Party EU = European Union GDP = Gross Domestic Product IMF = International Monetary Fund MoU = Memorandum of Understanding NATO = North-Atlantic Treaty Organization NGO = Non-Governmental Organization PCP = Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português) PEV = The Greens (Partido Ecologista Os Verdes) PS = Socialist Party (Partido Socialista) PSD = Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata) US = United States of America

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Introduction Isabel David

Discussions of the austerity measures passed as a response to the crisis of sovereign debts and subsequent bailouts in Europe (Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Ireland and Spain) have been usually framed in terms of their economic impact. A large bulk of analyses have also concentrated on the destruction of the social model (see Burgi 2014; Petsemidou and Guillén 2014). The impoverishment of these countries has produced cataclysmic macro-political changes, with the emergence of anti-systemic political parties like Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, to mention the most significant (see, for example, Matthijs 2014; Bosco and Verney 2012). Under this context, the Portuguese case and its specificities remain little known to an international audience. While a number of studies have emerged in Portuguese language (see Pinto, Magalhães and Sousa 2013; Carmo and Rodrigues 2014; Freire, Lisi and Viegas 2015; Freire, Lisi and Viegas 2016), the reduced literature in the English language focuses on political representation and the political system at large (see Freire et al. 2016; Lisi 2013; De Giorgi and Santana-Pereira 2016; Lisi 2016). Thus, little attention has been paid to developments on the micro and meso levels, that is, on the processes of everyday social interactions and agency of individuals and communities/organizations, where major changes are also taking place. This volume seeks to fill this gap and opens a new research agenda by analyzing these changes in the Portuguese context, offering a comprehensive overview of all dimensions of transformation brought about by austerity. As such, the volume argues that “disciplinary neoliberalism” has radically transformed the social and political paradigm in Portugal. Portugal has been portrayed as the Eurozone’s “good pupil” by German Minister of Finances Wolfgang Schäuble by obediently adopting all prescribed austerity measures during the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) years (2011–2014) (see Afonso 2013). In the process, the nation’s fragile social and economic fabric has been destroyed. Massive emigration, particularly by young people, the increase in poverty and a foundering economy have triggered a collective framing of the crisis and

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austerity as unjust and punitive of a society that, at the beginning, believed in the neoliberal narrative of the benign effects of the cuts. This reframing unleashed an unprecedented wave of social and political mobilization in an otherwise traditionally apathetic society, characterized by low levels of political participation since the inception of democracy, in 1974 (see Freire and Magalhães 2002). This resistance needs to be addressed as a direct effect of austerity policies and properly analyzed for what it really represents: a process of re-politicization and re-democratization. This transformation, in fact, emerges as the common conclusion highlighted in most of the contributions to this volume. These mobilizations include direct democracy experiments, the growing influence of social movements (the massive March 2011 demonstrations organized by Geração à Rasca, or Desperate Generation, were a direct inspiration for the creation of the Indignados movement in Spain), solidarity economy and the major political change in the country’s forty-two years of democratic rule: an alliance of the left-wing parties (Portuguese Communist Party, Left Bloc, the Greens and Socialist Party), unthinkable before the crisis, and which is building an alternative to austerity and reframing relations with the neoliberal European Union. This volume offers a first approach in English language to the political, social and cultural transformations taking place in the country, making Portugal, in certain aspects, a laboratory for innovative practices (e.g., participatory budgets and the alliance of the left-wing political parties) that may be used elsewhere as alternatives to current understandings of neoliberal economic and political orthodoxy. The volume paves the way for further studies on similar societal, political and economic developments taking place in austerity-hit countries. The potential to explore the changes taking place in austerity-hit countries in the European Union is huge. It is important to study how individual country dynamics are helping spread social, political and economic change, especially as politicians and activists engage in the exchange of experiences. Exploring these changes on a national level will help understand how societies respond to disciplinary neoliberalism and gain understanding of resistance strategies that can be developed, with a potential learning effect for other affected countries. DISCIPLINARY NEOLIBERALISM: THE RETRENCHMENT OF DEMOCRACY This volume borrows the concept of “disciplinary neoliberalism” coined by Stephen Gill in his work on globalization. The author draws on the 1975 seminal work by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, to emphasize the correctional nature of neoliberalism, in order to get states to conform to a type of behavior considered appropriate.

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Neoliberalism can be defined as an ideology that sees free-market competition as the most efficient and rational way of allocating resources. As such, state intervention (namely advocated by Keynesians, who view the state as a necessary actor to correct market imbalances) is considered to distort trade, private initiative and capital flows, hindering competition and generating inefficiencies. Neoliberalism rose to prominence since the 1970s mainly through the writings of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman as a response to economic stagnation and inflation. After it was implemented by the governments headed by Margaret Thatcher (United Kingdom) and Ronald Reagan (United States of America), neoliberalism quickly superseded the Keynesian consensus that had followed World War II. Gill (2015, 20) defines “disciplinary neoliberalism” as the “neoliberal politico-economic structures and processes associated with the project of capital to expand the scope and increase the power of market-based actors, structures and forces so that governments and other economic agents are disciplined and increasingly governed by market mechanisms.” The type of society that emerges from these political and economic structures and processes is termed by Gill (1995a, 399) as “market civilization,” a set of capitalist norms and practices that are contradictory. On the one hand, capitalism as ideology embodies a myth of continuous progress that provides for the ever-growing expansion of accumulation, legitimation, consumption and work. However, market civilization brings social disintegration and exclusionary and hierarchical patterns of social relations by emphasizing materialism, individualism, a short-term vision and anti-environmentalism—values that stand in total contradistinction with the known axioms of civilization. On the other hand, market civilization discourse purports to advocate freedom of initiative, but in practice relies on market discipline and political power that involves social control. The need for these mechanisms of social control stems from the fact that market civilization and its outcomes cause resistance and political counter-movements that can only be stopped by illiberal, authoritarian and anti-democratic political forms and, where necessary, formal, but not substantive, democracy. In fact, the divisive outcomes of neoliberal rule—unemployment, labor precarity, gender inequality, social polarization, poverty—prevent the generation of a consensus around it, thus requiring relations of supremacy, that is, dominance over “apparently fragmented populations” (Gill 1995a, 400). In order to secure dominance, disciplinary neoliberalism involves macro and micro dimensions of power, including the structural power of capital, the ability to produce uniformity and obedience within parties, cadres, organizations and class formations associated with transnational capital and disciplinary power as seen by Michel Foucault and Jeremy

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Bentham (i.e., involving social control through surveillance practices, or “panopticism”) (Gill 1995a, 399, 411; Gill 1995b, 1). At the macro dimension, disciplinary neoliberalism involves the “quasi-legal” restructuring of state and international political forces in a “new constitutionalism” that attempts to transform transnational liberalism/ liberal democratic capitalism into the sole model for development and politics, thus delegitimizing alternative models (Gill 1995a, 412; Gill 2012, 5). “New constitutionalism” constitutes the international politico-legal governance framework that aims at separating economic policies from political accountability, so that governments become more responsive to the markets than to citizens (Gill 1998, 8). According to the author, discourses of world order present traces of this “new constitutionalism,” which contains both new legal and constitutional practices that are related to the reconstitution of capital and labor and everyday forms of social control and discipline (Gill 1995b, 1). This means that economic globalization affects the way the outlook, expectations and social choices of individuals and groups are shaped and reconfigured across different territorial jurisdictions (Ibid., 1–2). This “new constitutionalism” includes the conditionality policies of the IMF and the World Bank, quasi-constitutional arrangements like NAFTA and the Maastricht Treaty, the Economic and Monetary Union and the regulatory framework of the World Trade Organization. These mechanisms, which are anchored on strong surveillance apparatuses, place constraints on fiscal and monetary policies, calling for independent central banks, privatizations, sound finances and reduction of government expenditure, whereby governments are made accountable to the markets and not to their citizens. National forms of constitutionalism, built on political rights, obligations and freedoms, are thus set aside (Gill 1995a, 413). This has become the norm in the Eurozone, as Gill (1998) had anticipated, where the existence of a single currency has deprived governments not only of their monetary policies (which, in case of a crisis, are one of the prime instruments for recovery) but they are also constrained to submit their budgets for prior approval of the European Commission. In this sense, the EU has become a fully neoliberal bloc whose main aim is to create an investment-friendly environment for companies (Gill 1998). This has broken the legitimation relation between elector and elected, thus destroying the traditional democratic mechanisms of accountability. Disciplinary neoliberalism thus renders the social contract obsolete, as actions of national governments and parliaments are determined by unelected agents and officials from the IMF and the European Commission as shown by the Eurozone crisis. As Gill (1995b, 22) rightfully argues, full citizenship now requires access and participation in a system of production and consumption. Thus, democracy in EU states is shifting to a mere formal, but not substantive, form of democracy, involving the transfer of powers (budge-

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tary, financial, legislative) to non-elected bodies like the EU Commission or the Council of the European Union and the elimination of labor and citizenship rights. As Habermas (2000, 47) argues, the frame of democracy is the national state. In fact, citizenship can only operate by reference to the state since it requires the law to institutionalize the results of democratically generated discourse (Delanty 2000, 42). These mechanisms are absent from international organizations and regulatory bodies. States have also become dependent on the mobility of capital and particularly on the disciplinary evaluation of rating agencies, whose agenda differs greatly from the needs of global populations or from the legitimacy bond established between governments and people. Those agencies can simply destroy a country and bankrupt it, in case of deviation from the “deflationary orthodoxy of neoliberal economics,” and hence hold the power to define the “limits of the possible” (Gill 1995b, 10–11). Operating both on a macro and micro level, panopticism involves the development of a system of control that can manipulate human beings and transform them into obedient creatures—thus disciplining them (Gill 1995a, 415–16). A sign of an increasingly controlled society is the accumulation of data bases by private companies and state institutions. Information technologies can monitor daily activities of individuals: the use of credit cards and cell phones provides instant information on location while computer algorithms provide information on personal preferences which are translated into consumption suggestions on websites and applications such as Facebook (see Guardian 2015). Thus, panopticism is effectively serving the needs of capital and consumption. These websites also make it easier for authorities to trace dissent against market society. Surveillance of activism has become an easy task, with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype and Apple, for example, providing data to United States intelligence agencies (see Daily Mail 2015). The effect is increased when combined with the “new constitutionalism” mentioned by Gill, such as the US-EU Safe Harbor Treaty (see CNBC 2016), an international treaty that provides for the sharing of personal data. The redistribution of wealth between labor and capital constitutes another component of the retrenchment of democracy and freedom, whereby severe imbalances between the haves and have nots are increasing. The most recent report by the European Institute for Gender Equality (2016), an autonomous body of the European Union, discloses that today almost 23 million children in the EU are poor and 36 percent of employed men and 25 percent of employed women are poor. According to the same report, in 2014, 122 million people in the EU were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Also in 2014, the youth unemployment rate for men was 23 percent and for women 21 percent. In Greece, the country most severely hit by the crisis and subsequent austerity, these figures were 47 percent and 58 percent, respectively. As Gill (1995a, 405) argues, oligopolistic

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neoliberalism has meant oligopoly and protection for the strong, including the socialization of their risks (which has been perfectly represented by the massive bailouts for banks in the Eurozone periphery), whereas the weak have been subjected to market discipline (perfectly summed up in the massive cuts in unemployment benefits, pensions, healthcare and education systems in the Eurozone periphery). These disciplinary trends are necessarily linked to a discursive form of power in which neoliberalism has come to permeate the political, social and economic debate and knowledge, shaping modes of thought that are antagonistic to freedom. As Gill (1995a, 406) rightfully argues, neoliberalism is being equated with economic efficiency, good governance, democracy and progress. Neoliberalism has become an ontology by successfully equating freedom with freedom to buy or freedom of enterprise, democracy with the possibility of buying and by glamourizing the capitalist lifestyle. Or by transforming public services into utilities and consumer services, whereby citizens are converted into consumers. Elections and parties have also been transformed into a market, with parties competing among themselves for the offer of services and goods in their programs, a conception advocated long ago by Joseph Schumpeter (2003). But shifting the terms of the debate does not suffice. Alternative forms of thinking must be downplayed, by arguing “There is no alternative.” In fact, the terms of neoliberal discourse have assumed multiple forms, ranging from sheer ideology purporting to symbolize freedom, to discrediting alternative conceptions or, in many cases, by depoliticizing the terms of debate, portraying neoliberalism as a mere technical solution for overspending and irresponsible governments (concealing the “moral economy” behind austerity). This epistemological closure is fundamental for securing supremacy. Gill (1995a, 399) argues that unfolding events reflect a shift to the political right. This trend was becoming already visible in the 1990s, when several socialist/social democratic parties submitted to neoliberalism by effecting u-turns in their programs. While the British Labour Party became the New Labour under Tony Blair, adopting a “Third Way,” under the influence of Anthony Giddens (see Finlayson 2003), the German Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder also tilted to the right. The same can be argued for the Spanish Socialists under Felipe Gonzalez (see Marx and Schumacher 2013). In the face of subsiding social democracy and in the absence of strong communist parties (the Portuguese case is a notable exception), resistance to neoliberalism has taken place mainly in the streets, through the action of social movements (see Flesher Fominaya 2014). This has also been the case in Portugal, where social movement activism has taken a prominent role. Whereas the far right, which presents yet another element of pressure on the current fragile democratic balance, has also surged as a response to events, it is notably absent from the Portuguese context.

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Under this context, it becomes important to analyze how these dynamics impact and manifest themselves in each country considered individually. This volume addresses this need by focusing on the Portuguese case. DISCIPLINARY NEOLIBERALISM IN PORTUGAL: THE MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING Although coined prior to the 2008 crisis and to the subsequent austerity imposed on several EU countries, the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism is especially relevant to understanding the crisis and its related impact in Southern Europe, as it accurately portrays the punitive nature of measures that governments were forced to enact, against the desires of populations, in the context of the bailouts. This is especially so in a frame of cultural prejudices against the peoples of Southern Europe that was associated with the bailouts from the outset. In fact, by making the need for austerity measures the necessary consequence of the supposedly irresponsible and lazy traits of the so-called PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain), the punitive traits of neoliberalism are reinforced, allowing for these measures to be seen as a necessary evil to correct deviant behavior. The implementation of the austerity measures in Portugal and of the instruments associated with disciplinary neoliberalism as identified by Gill provides a perfect example of the development of a “market civilization.” As the needs of capital and the markets are placed above the needs of the populations, the bailout to Portugal increased social and economic inequalities, while breaking the link between representatives and the electorate as “new constitutionalism” and rating agencies supersede democratic institutions. Depoliticization is completed through a discursive apparatus that combines technicality and lack of alternatives to austerity, securing epistemological closure. Financial crises represent a preferred moment for enforcing disciplinary neoliberalism. The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent crises of the sovereign debts in Europe have provided the opportunity to enforce disciplinary neoliberalism through the bailouts negotiated with the Troika (European Central Bank, European Commission and IMF). In Portugal, the first austerity measures preceded the MoU and were passed in March 2010. The minority government of the Socialist Party (PS, which had abandoned most of its social democratic platform in the 1990s) managed to get the parliamentary support of the Social Democrat Party (PSD, a center-right party) to pass the first Stability and Growth Program (PEC), which consisted of cuts in public spending. A second PEC was passed soon after, with further cuts in public spending and a rise of VAT. The third PEC, in September that year, introduced cuts in the wages of civil servants, again with the support of PSD.

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It was the introduction of a fourth PEC that prompted the fall of the socialist government and the negotiation of a bailout with the Troika. PEC IV aimed at reducing labor benefits (namely the duration of the unemployment subsidy), freezing the minimum wage, reducing pensions, increasing direct and indirect taxes and reducing tax benefits, reducing public spending (including in education and healthcare service) and restructuring the banking sector (Sol 2014). The measures would subsequently be introduced in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Troika. All opposition parties rejected the measures in parliament: PSD, CDS-PP (Democratic Social Center-People’s Party, a Christian Democratic party with a liberal economic approach), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP, an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party) and the Left Bloc (BE, a far-left party akin to Greece’s Syriza). The ensuing resignation of Prime Minister José Sócrates brought with it the full apparatus of disciplinary neoliberalism. The rise of interest rates and the lowering of the country’s notation by rating agencies made access to markets impossible, prompting the request for a 78 billion Euro bailout, negotiated with the agreement of PS, PSD and CDS-PP. PCP and BE refused to engage in any negotiation with the Troika (Observador 2015a). The Memorandum of Understanding (European Commission 2011) is firmly anchored on the neoliberal orthodoxy of reducing the weight of the state in the economy and society and achieving sound finances, namely the 3 percent of deficit to GDP. For this end, the document envisioned a series of “reforms,” including cuts to public spending (wages of civil servants, pensions, national healthcare service, public education, unemployment subsidies), increase of VAT, privatization of state-owned companies, public-private partnerships, flexibilization of the labor market, reduction of the number of municipalities, and 12 billion Euros to bail out banks. The extraordinary characteristic of the document is its careful wording, whereby disciplinary neoliberalism is presented as technical solutions to bring about an efficient state. The “technical” measures were skillfully complemented by a discursive apparatus from the richest EU countries, with the resurfacing of the acronym PIGS, through which stereotyping creates a psychological frame that allows for the disciplining of “lazy and irresponsible” non-complying states. The Memorandum was subsequently implemented during the PSDCDS coalition government. PSD won the June 2011 legislative elections with 38.65 percent of the votes, falling short of an absolute majority, and thus opted to join CDS-PP (which received 11.7 percent of the votes) to form a cabinet. During the four-year term of the government (2011–2015), Coelho expressed the will to implement reforms “beyond what was agreed with the Troika” (Expresso 2011a). One of the main obstacles to implementing austerity was the Constitutional Court, whose rulings blocked several reforms as unconstitutional, specifically: the elimination of two extra months paid in the summer and

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at Christmas, cuts in sickness and unemployment subsidies, the firing of civil servants, flexibilization of working conditions, the convergence of public and private pensions and cuts in wages and pensions (Rádio Renascença 2014). In fact, the 1976 Constitution, which was approved in the wake of the 1974 military coup that ended forty-eight years of dictatorship (1926–1974), created a democratic polity, with a standard welfare state, including a free national healthcare service, a free education system, the protection of workers’ rights, and unemployment and sickness benefits. The European Economic Community (EEC, now EU) accession helped secure the so-called “conquests of the revolution” (the aforementioned social and political rights), helping to stabilize the country. 1 Prime Minister Passos Coelho recognized the difficulty of implementing reforms under the existing constitutional frame, having tried to change the Constitution during his term, namely to constitutionalize the 3 percent budget deficit, a goal for which he sought PS’s support, but in vain 2 (Jornal de Negócios 2011; RTP 2011; Jornal de Negócios 2013). This intention was legitimized discursively. The government associated the constitutionalization of the neoliberal measures to securing national sovereignty: by amending the Constitution, the adoption of the measures would be an issue of national choice and not the result of EU interference (Governo de Portugal 2013, 23). Discourse, in fact, was one of the key components of disciplinary neoliberalism through which the government tried to de-legitimize alternatives to austerity (see Fonseca and Ferreira 2015). On the ideological field, the government presented the cuts in state spending and privatizations as an opportunity to expand “freedom of choice” and “strengthen civil society” (Governo de Portugal 2013). Depoliticization of the debate involved presenting measures as technical solutions (to which “there was no alternative”) to a country that had been “living above its means” in the past and needed to correct budget imbalances (Público 2015; Observador 2015b). “Refusing demagoguery,” Prime Minister Passos Coelho justified why Portugal needed to establish a “culture of work” (Expresso 2011b; Expresso 2012). Epistemological closure was completed by portraying Keynesian policies advocated by the opposition (BE, PCP and PS) as radicalism, offering Syriza’s request for a third bailout in Greece as an example of what could happen to Portugal if the country tried to pull away from neoliberal austerity (Público 2015). 3 That the rhetoric was successful could be assessed by the victory of the PSD-CDS coalition in the October 2015 legislative elections, despite increasing poverty, inequality and massive emigration. During the years of the bailout, over 485,000 people emigrated in order to escape unemployment and low salaries (Observatório da Emigração 2015). In 2013, 27.5 percent of the population was at risk of poverty and social exclusion (Rede Europeia Anti-Pobreza 2015). Also in 2013, the unemployment rate peaked at 17.8 percent, while the youth unemployment rate peaked at 42.5 percent, according to Eurostat (SIC Notícias 2013).

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While the coalition won the elections with 36.86 percent of the votes, it lost the absolute majority. PS received 32.31 percent of the votes, BE 10.19 percent and PCP 8.25 percent. The combined votes of the left-wing parties (PS, BE, PCP and the Greens) totaled 50.75 percent (Ministério da Administração Interna 2015). Following the results, the left decided to engage in the greatest political change in the country in forty-one years of democracy—an alliance, in order to fight austerity. PS and PCP held major grievances against each other since the days following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, when democracy was consolidating in Portugal; while the communists sought to create a socialist society following the lines of Moscow, PS advocated democratic socialism with a market economy (see Ramos 2010). BE was founded in 1999 from the merger of three parties (the Trotskyite Revolutionary Socialist Party [PSR], Marxist Popular Democratic Union [UDP] and former PCP members) and established links with social movements from the outset, considering itself a movement party. BE has always had major disagreements with both PS and PCP. The Greens run for elections in coalition with the communists. The fight against the expansion of disciplinary neoliberalism led the parties into reaching an agreement for a government solution, demonstrating an unseen pragmatism. BE presented three demands to PS: the end of the single social tax (a tax for purposes of social security paid by bosses and workers), of the pension cuts and of the conciliatory dismissal of workers with fixed contracts, all of which were measures that were passed by the PSD-CDS government (Jornal de Negócios 2015). PCP advanced additional demands (Sol 2015): fighting labor precarity, reversing changes in labor legislation, terminating cuts to wages and pensions, a fairer fiscal policy, amelioration of social benefits, terminating cuts in the national healthcare service, stopping privatizations, and reversing the changes made to the law on abortion by the previous government. The Greens’s demands were fairly similar, adding typical environmental platforms such as investment in public transportation, expansion of forest areas and refusal to privatize water distribution. 4 The President of the Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva (a former PSD leader), initially appointed Passos Coelho as Prime Minister. In a communication to the country, the President argued that the government should respect the international agreements to which Portugal is a party, namely the EU, the Eurozone and NATO. He added that, as President, it was his duty to prevent that “the wrong signs are transmitted to financial institutions, to investors and to the markets, jeopardizing the external trust and credibility of the country” (TSF 2015). He substantiated his views claiming that, in forty years of democracy, Portuguese governments never depended on the support of “anti-EU” forces (referring to the communists’ opposition to Portugal’s EU and NATO membership and to BE’s

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rejection of NATO membership and doubts concerning Eurozone membership). Following the rejection of the PSD-CDS program in parliament by the left-wing parties, Cavaco Silva appointed PS leader António Costa as Prime Minister, who formed a minority socialist government, with the support of PCP and BE in parliament. The government, which has already entered its second year in power, has been struggling against the “new constitutionalism” (Gill 1995a, 1995b and 1998) of the EU, namely that embodied by the Stability and Growth Pact, which seeks to maintain sound public finances. In fact, the European institutions’ (European Commission and Council of the European Union in particular) dealings with the Portuguese government are symptomatic of how disciplinary power seeks to tame those who do not partake of neoliberal governance. Greece is a case in point. Upon winning the January 2015 elections, Syriza set about to reverse the austerity policies that caused the ruin of its economic and social fabric, as it had promised during its campaign (BBC 2015). As the Greek crisis unfolded in the summer and the country defaulted on its debt, Syriza was finally forced to enact harsh austerity measures (e.g., privatizations, reforms of the health, pensions and welfare systems) in exchange for a third bailout amid German-led threats of “Grexit” (see Traynor and Henly 2015). While EU populations looked with shock upon how Greece was disciplined into neoliberal austerity, EU institutions soon after mounted heavy pressure on the new Portuguese government. The initial comments came from the European People’s Party (EPP), through its parliamentary group president, Manfred Weber, who stated that he did not “want extremists influencing legislation” (Expresso 2015a). EPP’s president, Joseph Daul, advised PS not to align with “extremists” and destroy progress made by the country, mentioning Greek Syriza (Expresso 2015b). The draft of the first budget of the new government was subsequently sent to Brussels for approval. The document sought to reverse austerity, as agreed by the four parties. The final version, which included raises in social benefits for the poor, the elderly and the unemployed, the progressive restitution of the wages of civil servants and the increase of the minimum wage (Jornal de Negócios 2016), was finally approved after amendments and the preparation of a plan B in case of failure to meet the 3 percent deficit (cf. Diário Económico 2016a; Diário Económico 2016b; Observador 2016a). Although Portugal “successfully” executed the MoU, the Troika continued to monitor the country and rejected the first draft of the budget (Expresso 2016a). Rating agencies (DBRS, Fitch and Moody’s) also pressed for changes to the initial draft (TSF 2016; Expresso 2016b; Diário Económico 2016c). Portugal’s access to financing markets is dependent on the notation of DBRS, the only major rating agency that does not qualify the country’s debt as “trash.” All three rating agencies have disclosed the

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dates in which they will perform the evaluation of the country’s performance throughout 2017 (Jornal Económico 2016). The second budget of the government, in line with the first, has been approved by Brussels with less bargaining, although the European Commission considers it risks not meeting the 3 percent budget deficit (Expresso 2016c). The Portuguese case clearly demonstrates how disciplinary neoliberal apparatuses hold the fortunes of millions. OVERVIEW OF CONTRIBUTIONS Contributions to this volume are structured around the effects of disciplinary neoliberalism in Portugal in the context of the Troika bailout. Contributors have been asked to focus on a set of premises in order to secure coherence: 1) What are the disciplinary features of neoliberalism brought about by austerity to a particular field? 2) What was the impact of this disciplinary neoliberalism on the fields focused on by the chapters? 3) What was the response/transformation observed in that field? The volume explores the macro, meso and micro levels of change in the political, economic and social fields, thus offering a global perspective of the effects of disciplinary neoliberalism in Portugal. For this end, the volume is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the social and economic impact of disciplinary neoliberalism. One of the main conclusions of this first part is that the impoverishment produced as a result of austerity measures is a global pattern that seems to cut across countries. Regardless of the differentiated patterns of development and economic traits and structures, bailed out countries are forced into a “one-size-fitsall” package of reforms that ends up producing the same disastrous consequences (see Parker and Tsarouhas 2017). In the Portuguese case, it is also very interesting to observe the acceleration of gentrification processes, particularly in Lisbon, as a result of disciplinary neoliberalism. The second part of the book focuses on social movement activism and resistance, an important development in a traditionally apathetic society and which deserves proper exploration of the degrees and modalities of the experiments that emerged as a response to impoverishment and democratic deficit. The numbers and scope are not negligible and are a clear response to the effects of disciplinary neoliberalism as decision-making processes take place increasingly in Brussels and by non-elected officials of the Troika. The magnitude of demonstrations, social movement activism and participatory democracy experiments shatters the widespread idea that the Portuguese were compliant with austerity (see Marder 2012). The third and final part builds on the previous two and advances how the country has become a laboratory for experiments that seek to create

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alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy and disciplinary apparatuses. Portugal was the first European country to introduce participatory budgets and has become the country with the greatest number of such practices (118 at the time of this writing) worldwide, as the chapter by Allegretti demonstrates. As Allegretti argues, this reflects the views of a new generation of politicians who are active on the local level of government, marking a change in socio-political profiles which is well worth studying in the future. The main teaching from this chapter relates to how and why the growth of participatory budgets coincided with the period of financial assistance to Portugal. Additionally, the final part of the volume addresses the agreement of the left-wing parties in Portugal. This is a major change in the Portuguese political system. While the radical left has grown in Europe as a result of austerity (see March and Keith 2016), the Portuguese case is telling of the strength of PCP, an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party with a fixed electorate since 1991, with a percentage of votes stabilized at circa 7 percent of the electorate (David 2017). The success, so far, of the left alliance in producing the lowest deficit of the 43 years of democracy (2.1 percent), growth above EU average, declining unemployment, growing foreign investment—all reflected in Fitch’s changing of the Portuguese rating from stable to positive—has attracted the attention of other leftist parties in Europe (Jornal de Negócios 2017). In fact, the French socialist candidate to the 2017 presidential elections, Benoît Hamon, a delegation of the Dutch Labor Party and the leader of the Socialists and Democrats, Gianni Pittella, a group in the European Parliament visited Portugal in early 2017 in order to study the feasibility of adapting the Portuguese solution as an attempt to counter the decline of the European socialists (Politico.eu 2017). The first chapter addresses the consequences of austerity for the Portuguese economy. Guapo Costa argues that the adjustment program negotiated with the Troika failed because it was ill-devised for several reasons. Firstly, it did not take into consideration the specific traits of the Portuguese economy, but rather the abstract neoliberal mantra that is applied equally to all countries in need of financial assistance. While the Portuguese economy is characterized by the predominance of micro enterprises, and lower levels of productivity and education and a higher degree of inequality than many of its European counterparts, the author explains, the adjustment program aimed primarily at the deregulation of the labor market, tax hikes and the reduction of government spending. Secondly, the Troika underestimated the severity of recession. Thirdly, and related to the previous factor, relying on exports is an insufficient condition to promote growth, as Portugal’s main trading partners, namely Spain, have also been impacted by the crisis. Fourth, the full impact of disciplinary neoliberal apparatuses presented by speculators, rating agencies, markets or hedge funds only worsened the impact of the crisis, particularly in the absence of political mechanisms for their regulation.

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Fifth, membership of the Eurozone prevented more benign answers such as currency devaluation, import taxes or restructuring the debt. Against this backdrop, the author demonstrates, prior imbalances of the Portuguese economy were only exacerbated by austerity and reforms were more apparent than real. The author demonstrates how the original main targets of reducing government spending and reducing the deficit were not met in any of the three years of duration of the adjustment program. Rather, the consequences were unseen unemployment rates, higher poverty, bigger income gaps, unevenly distributed costs between the poor and the rich and between workers and employers, much higher gross debt, and the brain drain of qualified population (particularly among the young). As such, austerity, combined with the Economic and Monetary Union and the autism of EU leaders in the face of massive discontent and poverty arising from the crisis, has only worsened the gap between northern and southern Europe. The city constitutes one of the main loci of contention and praxis of neoliberalism. This is addressed by chapter 2. Mendes argues that the cities, namely Lisbon (Portugal’s capital), have been appropriated by neoliberalism. This appropriation has been ongoing since the 2000s and presents a number of trends: the deregulation of the housing market and soil usage; the under-regulation of the housing market; speculation; market-oriented services; public-private partnerships; the business-led management of urban governance. Another contention of the author is that, unlike what is proclaimed by neoliberal theory, the state has become an instrument at the service of capital and the production of commodification by transforming cities into goods. For that end, neoliberalism fully depends on the coercive apparatus of the state, its mediation and the institutional framework it provides. The author deconstructs the fallacies of free market and competition as agents of general welfare, demonstrating how, under the neoliberal frame, risks have been socialized, that is, transferred to the public sphere, while profits/benefits have been privatized, that is, transferred to the hands of the private sector. The author argues that the appropriation of Lisbon by neoliberalism is magnified under the frame of the program of assistance negotiated with the Troika, through several instruments: the new law on urban rental (an issue specifically addressed by the Memorandum of Understanding), the Golden Visas, the new law on property investment funds, the new law on tourist lodging and the Non-Habitual Resident Program. The aim, the author shows, was to transform Lisbon into a competitive city in order to attract foreign investment, visitors and tourists, following the neoliberal logic of free-market competition. The author further demonstrates how this touristification is producing gentrification processes in Lisbon: unaffordable rents, loss of authenticity and tradition in the city center, reduced longterm rentals for locals, and the transformation of working-class neighbor-

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hoods into consumption places and tourist sites. The city is being lost by its residents in order to open the way for capital. Chapter 3 addresses the relations between social movements that emerged in the context of the anti-austerity struggle in Portugal and the left-wing political parties through the theoretical lens of Political Opportunity Structure. For this end, Fonseca conducted field research with the left-wing political parties (PS, PCP and BE) and with main social movements that were active in the first three years following the agreement with the Troika: Precarious Inflexible (Precários Inflexíveis), Desperate Generation (Geração à Rasca), 15 October Platform, Screw the Troika (Que se Lixe a Troika), Ferve and Platform of the Intermittent of Show and Audiovisual (Plataforma dos Intermitentes do Espectáculo e Audiovisual). The author contends that Portuguese social movements emerged and benefitted from the lack of credibility of political parties for failing to respond to austerity. By advancing their claims and protest actions, social movements demanded the right to participate in the very definition of the political system. While social movement activism is not a novelty in many countries, in Portugal civil society was traditionally apathetic until 2011, when the agreement with the Troika was signed. Hence, this emergence of social movements is inextricably intertwined with austerity. The author traces the evolution of the anti-austerity movement from an initial independent stance toward the left-wing political parties to an increasing cooperation with them, at which point the former progressively lost momentum and were absorbed by the latter. Conversely, the author also shows how Portuguese left-wing political parties reacted to the momentum and visibility of social movements and overcame their wariness toward them. This happened, according to the findings of the author, when social movements abandoned their hostility toward parties and became more prone to cooperating with them, particularly through the actions of Screw the Troika. The author concludes that the left-wing parties rehabilitated their image in the eyes of the Portuguese population by cooperating with social movements. Chapter 4 discusses the role played by digital and online platforms in how activism is represented and performed. For this end, the authors conducted field research on networked youth activism in Portugal between 2014–2015, in the context of the crisis and the adjustment program signed with the Troika. Their findings show that technology and digital media are among the fundamental resources used for mobilization and participation in protest actions. Despite the skepticism of a few, activists are aware of the benefits emerging from the use of these instruments, particularly in the face of what they see as the corporate control of traditional media like television and newspapers. Among the benefits generated by digital and online platforms, activists mentioned the creation of new opportunities, increased mobilization, recruitment and new forms of action. Of the technological tools, the most valuable and used, according

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to the findings of the authors of the chapter, is Facebook. Facebook was instrumental for the success of the largest protest actions since the postrevolutionary period in 1974–1975, namely the demonstration entitled “Desperate Generation” and the demonstrations organized by Screw the Troika. Unlike other global protests such as the Arab Spring, blogs and Twitter are neglected by Portuguese activists. Another important finding of the chapter is that, although activists are wary of the biases of more traditional media platforms such as television or newspapers, they are aware of their strategic importance in lending credibility and visibility to protest actions. Chapter 5 explores one of the forms of resistance to depoliticization and deprivation brought about by the adjustment program signed with the Troika—the emergence of people’s assemblies, focusing on the particular case of the people’s assembly of Algés. The authors of the chapter argue that the assembly constitutes itself as a radical program of community building and post-capitalist solidarity that aims at reclaiming the public space and democracy. The authors conducted field research between September 2013 and May 2014, taking part in the cultural and civic activities and weekly meetings promoted by the assembly. It is their contention that the assembly represents an example of radical politics where deliberation took place under the Habermasian ideal speech situation, where the better argument prevails, despite differing opinions. In this context, the authors see the people’s assembly of Algés as an interstitial process that takes individuals from the private sphere embodied in consumerism and transforms them into citizens engaged in the public sphere. In this sense, the assembly represents an emancipatory practice that can produce social change, solidarity and the sharing of resources. In this specific case, the assembly has created strategies of resistance against austerity and for the protection of the common good, including a time bank, communitarian dinners, an open-air library or artistic manifestations. Chapter 6 addresses political graffiti that have sprung up as a reaction to the crisis and austerity measures. The graffiti, which include words, slogans and spray-painted murals, express revolt, disgust with political power and economic agents and defy the status quo. Campos argues that graffiti constitute a new formula and grammar of political participation, where the city walls have become an arena of political struggle, particularly for the less powerful, given the closure of traditional politics. The anonymity of the works and the illegal nature of graffiti allow for a transgressive atmosphere whose visibility on the walls allows graffiti authors to overcome the restrictions on visuality that are imposed by dominant powers. The message they seek to convey thus becomes visible to everyone. The author of the chapter further establishes a connection to the highly politicized environment that followed the 1974 Carnation Revolution, arguing that the revival of political muralism in the wake of the

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current crisis draws much of its inspiration from the political muralism that sprung up 40 years ago. Chapter 7 focuses on the main macro change on the political level: the unexpected alliance of the Portuguese left that includes PS, PCP, BE and the Greens (PEV, Partido Ecologista Os Verdes). Ferreira and Fonseca argue that there are two main threats for the alliance—on the one hand, the several apparently irreconcilable divergences among the parties on specific issues. While BE and PCP favor the restructuring of the debt, PS dismisses it. PCP is against Portuguese membership of the Eurozone, while PS is in favor of it and of a deepening of the European integration process in both political and economic terms. BE advocates the termination of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, and the end of the Stability and Growth Pact. On the other hand, EU institutions continue to pressure the socialist government to maintain fiscal consolidation. Under this context, the authors further argue, what keeps the parties together is a loose “metaframe” aiming both at maintaining the center-right and the right parties at bay from power and the gradual elimination of austerity. This exercise of frame building is anchored on discursive practices that aim at reaching a balance between commitment to the alliance and the preservation of the specific identity of the parties. The significance of the alliance of the Portuguese left under such terms, according to the authors, lies in that the financial crisis has imperiled the legitimacy of the left. This, in turn, has a direct impact on how the Portuguese left perceives its role in the context of the crisis and how it can combat the hegemony of neoliberalism. Chapter 8 addresses one of the experiments which makes Portugal a laboratory for innovation: participatory budgeting. Allegretti analyzes the gradual development of participatory budgeting its initial failures and subsequent thriving, making Portugal the leading European country in this matter. The main contention is that participatory budgeting is contributing to changing the centralized nature of the state, and, in the process, the traditional understanding of its role. This change was brought about, the author contends, as an effect of austerity policies and their impact on political, economic and administrative systems, which include the loss of legitimacy of the main political actors. As a consequence, participatory budgeting represents a new pedagogy for understanding citizens’ roles in the construction of more inclusive and democratic polities. NOTES 1. For further information on the early years of Portuguese democracy, see Ramos 2010. 2. Constitutional changes need a two-thirds majority in parliament.

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3. Greece had to ask for a new bailout in the summer of 2015, as Syriza had tried to push back austerity measures, in the wake of its victory in the legislative elections early that year. 4. See http://www.osverdes.pt/media/Parlamento/PosicaoConjuntaPS_PEV.pdf.

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———. 2011b. “Passos Coelho: só vamos sair da crise empobrecendo (vídeo).” October 25. http://expresso.sapo.pt/dossies/dossiest_economia/OramentodoEstado2012/ passos-coelho-so-vamos-sair-da-crise-empobrecendo-video=f683176. ———. 2012. “Passos pede aos portugueses para serem ‘menos piegas.’” February 6. http://expresso.sapo.pt/actualidade/passos-pede-aos-portugueses-para-seremmenos-piegas=f703170. ———. 2015a. “PCP e Bloco reagem a acusações sobre ‘extremistas de esquerda’.” October 27. http://expresso.sapo.pt/politica/2015–10–27--PCP-e-Bloco-reagem-aacusacoes-sobre-extremistas-de-esquerda-. ———. 2015b. “Centro-direita europeu sai em defesa de Passos e aponta o dedo ao PCP.” October 21. http://expresso.sapo.pt/politica/2015–10–21-Centro-direitaeuropeu-sai-em-defesa-de-Passos-e-aponta-o-dedo-ao-PCP. ———. 2016a. “Troika teme regresso ao passado.” January 30. http://expresso.sapo.pt/ economia/2016–01–30-Troika-teme-regresso-ao-passado. ———. 2016b. “Fitch faz novos alertas a Portugal.” January 28. http://expresso.sapo. pt/dossies/diario/2016–01–28-Fitch-faz-novos-alertas-a-Portugal. ———. 2016c. “Bruxelas identifica riscos no orçamento, mas confia no governo para os controlar.” November 16. http://expresso.sapo.pt/politica/2016–11–16-Bruxelasidentifica-riscos-no-Orcamento-mas-confia-no-Governo-para-os-controlar. Finlayson, Alan. 2003. Making Sense of New Labour. London: Lawrence & Wishart, Project Muse. Flesher Fominaya, Cristina. 2014. Social Movements and Globalization. How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fonseca, Pedro and Maria João Ferreira. 2015. “Through ‘seas never before sailed’: Portuguese government discursive legitimation strategies in a context of financial crisis.” Discourse & Society 26 (6): 682–711. Freire, André, and Pedro Magalhães. 2002. “A abstenção portuguesa em perspectiva comparativa.” Eleições 7: 7–36. Freire, André, Marco Lisi, and José Manuel Leite Viegas (Eds.). 2015. Crise Económica, Políticas de Austeridade e Representação Política. Lisboa: Assembleia da República. ——— (Eds.). 2016. Representação e Participação Política na Europa em Crise. Lisboa: Assembleia da República. Freire, André, Marco Lisi, Ioannis Andreadis and José Manuel Leite Viegas. 2016. Political Representation in Times of Bailout. Evidence from Greece and Portugal. London: Routledge. Gill, Stephen. 1995a. “Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism.” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 24: 399–423. ———. 1995b. “The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance.” Alternatives 2: 1–49. ———. 1998. “European governance and new constitutionalism: Economic and Monetary Union and alternatives to Disciplinary neoliberalism in Europe.” New Political Economy 3 (1): 5–26. ———. 2012. “Introduction: global crises and the crisis of global leadership.” In Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership, edited by Stephen Gill, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Reimagining the Future: Some Critical Reflexions.” In Critical Perspectives on the Crisis of Global Governance. Reimagining the Future, edited by Stephen Gill, 1–23. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Governo de Portugal. 2013. “Um Estado melhor.” Accessed November 10, 2016. http:// www.portugal.gov.pt/media/1228115/20131030%20guiao%20reforma%20estado. pdf. Guardian. 2015. “Six ways your tech is spying on you—and how to turn it off.” February 10. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/six-ways-techspying-how-turn-off. Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. Après l’État-nation. Une nouvelle constellation politique. Paris: Fayard.

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Jornal de Negócios. 2011. “Passos Coelho quer alterar Constituição para impor limite ao défice.” December 9. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/detalhe/passos_ coelho_quer_alterar_constituiccedilatildeo_para_impor_limite_ao_deacutefice. html. ———. 2013. “Seguro responde a Portas e diz que PS não está disponível para alterar a Constituição.” October 31. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/financas_ publicas/funcoes_do_estado/detalhe/seguro_responde_a_portas_e_diz_que_ps_ nao_esta_disponivel_para_alterar_constituicao.html. ———. 2015. “Catarina Martins coloca a Costa condições para um diálogo de Governo PS/BE.” September 15. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/politica/eleicoes/ legislativas/detalhe/catarina_martins_coloca_a_costa_condicoes_para_um_ dialogo_de_governo_psbe.html. ———. 2016. “As principais medidas do Orçamento do Estado para 2016.” March 16. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/financas_publicas//detalhe/as_ principais_medidas_do_orcamento_do_estado_para_2016.html. ———. 2017. “Fitch sobe perspectiva de Portugal e em Dezembro pode tirar o país do lixo.” June 16. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/mercados/obrigacoes/detalhe/fitchsobe-perspectiva-de-portugal-e-em-dezembro-pode-tirar-o-pais-do-lixo. Jornal Económico. 2016. “Moody’s é a primeira agência a avaliar Portugal em 2017.” December 28. http://www.jornaleconomico.sapo.pt/noticias/moodys-primeiraagencia-pronunciar-portugal-2017–104741. Lisi, Marco. 2013. “Rediscovering Civil Society? Renewal and Continuity in the Portuguese Radical Left.” South European Society and Politics 18 (1): 21–39. ———. 2016. “U-Turn: The Portuguese Radical Left from Marginality to Government Support.” South European Society and Politics 21 (4): 541–560. March, Luke and Daniel Keith. 2016. Europe’s Radical Left: From Marginality to the Mainstream? London: Rowman & Littlefield. Marder, Michael. 2012. “Is Portugal hopeless?.” Al Jazeera, April 5. http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/20124311565448334.html. Marx, Paul and Gijs Schumacher. 2013. “Will to power? Intra-party conflict in social democratic parties and the choice for neoliberal policies in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain (1980–2010).” European Political Science Review 5 (1): 151–73. Matthijs, Matthias. 2014. “Mediterranean Blues: The Crisis in Southern Europe.” Journal of Democracy 25 (1): 101–15. Ministério da Administração Interna. 2015. “Eleições legislativas 4 outubro 2015.” http://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/legislativas2015/. Observatório da Emigração. 2015. “Estimativas globais.” Accessed November 27, 2016. http://observatorioemigracao.pt/np4/1315/. Observador. 2015a. “Fact Check. Quem trouxe a troika? Quem negociou com ela?” September 14. http://observador.pt/2015/09/14/fact-check-quem-trouxe-a-troikaquem-negociou-com-ela/. ———. 2015b. “Pedro e os mitos. O que Passos disse e não disse—em oito frases polémicas.” June 19. http://observador.pt/2015/06/19/7-frases-polemicas-passoscoelho-disse-mesmo-isto/. ———. 2016a. “Bruxelas pressiona. Pede ‘mais medidas’ e ‘bom senso’ a Portugal.” February 2. http://observador.pt/2016/02/02/bruxelas-pressiona-pede-medidasbom-senso-portugal/. Parker, Owen and Dimitris Tsarouhas (Eds.). 2017 (Forthcoming). Crisis in the Eurozone Periphery. The Political Economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. London: Palgrave McMillan. Petsemidou, Maria and Ana M. Guillén (Eds.). 2014. “Economic Crisis and Austerity in Southern Europe: Threat or Opportunity for a Sustainable Welfare State?” South European Society and Politics 19 (3): 295–412. Pinto, António Costa, Pedro Magalhães and Luís de Sousa (Eds.). 2013. A Qualidade Da Democracia Em Portugal. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

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Politico.eu. 2017. “European left wants piece of Portugal’s ‘contraption.’” February 24. http://www.politico.eu/article/antonio-costa-ps-socialists-european-left-wantspiece-of-portugal-contraption/. Público. 2015. “Ideias do Syriza são ‘conto de crianças,’ diz Passos Coelho.” January 26. https://www.publico.pt/politica/noticia/ideias-do-syriza-sao-conto-de-crianca-dizpassos-1683419. Rádio Renascença. 2014. “Um governo, um TC, oito chumbos.” August 14. http://rr. sapo.pt/bolabranca_detalhe.aspx?fid=27&did=158870. Ramos, Rui (Ed.). 2010. História de Portugal. Lisboa: A Esfera dos Livros. Rede Europeia Anti-Pobreza. 2015. “Indicadores sobre Pobreza: Dados Europeus e Nacionais.” October 29. http://www.eapn.pt/documento/468/indicadores-sobrepobreza-dados-europeus-e-nacionais. RTP. 2011. “Seguro não encontra motivos para mudar a Constituição.” December 11. http://www.rtp.pt/noticias/politica/seguro-nao-encontra-motivos-para-mudar-aconstituicao_n508355. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 2003. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London and New York: Routledge. SIC Notícias. 2013. “Taxa de desemprego em Portugal atingiu novo recorde de 17,8% em Abril.” May 31. http://sicnoticias.sapo.pt/economia/2013–05–31-taxa-dedesemprego-em-portugal-atingiu-novo-recorde-de-178-em-abril. Sol. 2014. “Maioria das medidas do PEC IV já foi adoptada.” April 27. http://sol.sapo. pt/artigo/104396/maioria-das-medidas-do-pec-iv-ja-foi-adoptada. ———. 2015. “As condições do PCP para apoiar um governo PS.” October 8. http:// www.sol.pt/noticia/415757/as-condi percentC3 percentA7 percentC3 percentB5esdo-pcp-para-apoiar-um-governo-ps. Traynor, Ian and Jon Henley. 2015. “Greece secures third bailout after Germany backs down on opposition.” Guardian, August 14. http://www.theguardian.com/business/ 2015/aug/14/greece-edges-third-bailout-positive-signals-germany. TSF. 2015. “Comunicação de Cavaco Silva na íntegra.” October 22. http://www.tvi24. iol.pt/politica/presidente-da-republica/comunicacao-de-cavaco-silva-na-integra. ———. 2016. “Dívida. DBRS admite cortar ranking. Financiamento do BCE em risco.” January 29. http://www.tsf.pt/economia/interior/divida-dbrs-admite-cortar-ratingfinanciamento-do-bce-em-risco-5005863.html.

I

The Impact of the Crisis

ONE Portuguese Economy How (Not) to Get Away with Financial Crisis and Economic Adjustment Programs Carla Guapo Costa

The global economic crisis, in 2008–2009, and the euro crisis, in 2010–2012, have uncovered the fragile foundations of Portuguese economic growth. After a satisfactory macroeconomic performance (Portugal was considered one of the most promising pupils, according to European Union criteria) that enabled the country to meet the convergence criteria for joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), Portugal benefited from an extremely favorable situation, with low interest rates, a strong currency and credibility in the international arena. As expected, these features induced substantial inflows of foreign capital into the Portuguese economy. Instead of enhancing structural reforms (fiscal, budgetary, labor market, innovation, education system and institutions), the country was caught in a spiral of (un)sustainable private, first, and public, afterwards, indebtedness, often for consumer goods or investment assets with no significant return. Along the years, Portugal has been plagued by unsustainable imbalances and permanent loss of competitiveness in most tradable, and nontradable, sectors, long before the crisis period. In fact, the Portuguese economy has been living a decade of stagnating economic growth practically since entering the Eurozone in the beginning of the new century. Portuguese Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has constantly been growing below the EU average, jeopardizing real convergence (Pordata 2017). Although improving, Portugal has been reg3

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istering a persistent current account deficit and serious imbalances in energy and agro-food sectors. There has also been a shortage of investment in other strategic areas of great potential. In what concerns human capital skills, a crucial factor for real convergence and socio-economic development, public policies reveal signs of permanent instability (according to OECD data, Portugal has had over twenty ministers of Education in thirty years, each with his own strategic vision of what the education system should be). With no medium/long-term education and training development programs, and the corresponding strategies for inclusion in the national labor market, labor productivity levels remain very low. Portugal has already been experiencing a severe brain drain, further weakening the economy’s competitive potential. In order to tackle all those issues, Portugal was forced to sign, in 2011, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with international institutions (the Troika), which, I believe, reflects a blind faith in “disciplinary neoliberalism,” noticeably the European Union policy guidelines and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) one size fits all policy. In this context, I try to disclose whether the adjustment program was fit to solve the imbalances of Portuguese economy, and what were the socioeconomic impacts. The main argument of this chapter is that the problems faced by the Portuguese economy and society are not only a consequence of the global crisis or domestic misbehavior but also, to a large extent, of competitiveness deficits that have plagued the country’s economic and institutional framework. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section addresses the shortcomings of the Portuguese economy in the wake of European integration and its impact. The second section provides a comparative analysis with other bailed out countries, and the third reviews the terms of the MoU. The fourth section addresses the consequences of the Memorandum for the Portuguese economy and society, and performs a global analysis of the crisis affecting Europe and Portugal. The chapter concludes with the main findings. THE GOLDEN AGES AND THE FIRST SIGNS OF ALARM Portugal joined the former EEC in 1986. Most analysts agree that this was a turning point in terms of financial and human capital endowments, since Portugal benefited from a massive inflow of structural and cohesion funds, which were vital to the financing of public services and training (Zartaludis 2014). At the same time, Portugal has always been committed to participating in all stages of European integration, such as the Internal Market and the EMU, by accepting the compromise of engaging in structural reforms and the maintenance of sound public finances, according to the Convergence Criteria of the Maastricht Treaty, in 1990. However,

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apart from misconceptions in defining and implementing internal policies, mostly for electoral reasons, Portugal has been trapped in the paradoxes of the integration process. In fact, the EU has been evolving into an alarmingly heterogeneous group of countries (due to successive enlargements) entangled with similar goals for economic policy (due to the implementation of the Internal Market and the EMU) (Costa 2011). As would be expected, these goals are consistent mainly with the interests of the most powerful countries. Yet, it all seemed quite easy at the beginning. In less than twenty years, Portugal went from being one of the least developed countries in Europe to a promising economy, joining the exclusive EMU club in 1999 (Costa 2011). Between 1995 and 2001, the “boom phase” (Blanchard and Portugal 2017), Portugal became one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, with a sharp specialization in the services sector, mainly tourism, transport, information and communication technology, financial services and real estate. Portugal’s entry into the EU and EMU induced, beyond trade expansion and capital inflows, exchange rate stability, and lower inflation and interest rates. These factors were central in tapering the cost of public debt, allowing the country to achieve fiscal targets. Until 2001, average annual growth rates consistently exceeded the EU average (Pordata 2017). However, a dramatic increase in private sector loans led to serious external imbalances, with the corresponding capital account imbalances, aggravated by persistent trade deficits and a significant shortage in lending (Mateus 2015). Up to the Eastern enlargement, Portugal was a net beneficiary of structural funds that were used to build up the country’s hard and soft infrastructures. In 1978 and 1983, the Portuguese had already suffered the impact of austerity programs of the IMF, with painful economic and social consequences. And, since 1986, to a certain extent, the inflow of structural funds was a replacement for the IMF’s conditional funding. These facts testify to Portugal’s high dependence on foreign capital. But the Portuguese economy is struck by other problems, such as the fragmentation of the industrial sector, where over 90 percent of companies are classified as micro enterprises (unable to profit from significant economies of scale). As a result of insufficient innovation, low levels of human capital in active population and scarce social skills, most of those companies are plagued by weaker productivity levels than their European counterparts ever since the mid-nineties (Magone 2014). Another factor of stressful importance is that Portugal has a dual labor market, which does not help social equality (Alves et al. 2010), since two types of labor contracts coexist: one is a stable labor relation, with no immediate risk of unemployment; the other relies on precarious contracts and instability. In Portugal, younger people are increasingly affected by the latter situation, whereas older workers, particularly civil servants, have greater stability.

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In the education sector, Portugal also has very serious problems. Despite some progress, Portugal has very low levels of social mobility, or high levels of intergenerational transmission, which do not allow for changes in the population qualification structure (Alves et al. 2010). Portugal remains in the bottom of EU countries in what concerns the qualification of active population, and displays one of the highest rates of early school leavers in secondary education. Accordingly, the Portuguese economy still displays a comparative advantage in low- and medium-level technology products, which can easily be produced and replicated by other countries at lower prices, a clear sign of an imperative need to diversify and upgrade industrial activity to more value-added products. The building up of those competitive advantages has been done in some of the so-called traditional sectors, such as textiles and footwear, where there has been an aggregation of added value related to the development of new technologically based products, such as intelligent textiles and design footwear (Mateus 2015). Despite the efforts, in 2015, almost 40 percent of Portuguese exports were considered high and medium high technology content, against 60 percent of low and medium low technology content, and imports were classified as high and medium high technology (Pordata 2017). The fact of being constrained by an overvalued currency over the last ten years should work as an additional incentive to realize that competition by price will always be unsustainable. It is a fact, though, that, in terms of value, Portuguese exports have increased significantly in the past five years, while imports have decreased, which helps to improve the trade balance, traditionally in deficit. However, to a certain extent, the reduction in imports is more directly related to the decline in consumption that followed the implementation of austerity measures in the MoU, than to an effective change in specialization profiles (Mateus 2015). In 2002, the Portuguese economy entered the slump phase (Blanchard and Portugal 2017), which would last until 2007, and was to be marked by a sharp decrease in internal demand and persistent low levels of productivity. In 2007, helped by a wider EU recovery, the Portuguese economy grew by 2.5 percent, up from 1.5 percent the previous year (Pordata 2017). However, in 2009, there was a negative growth of 3 percent. Although the GDP grew 1.9 percent in 2010, it contracted again by 1.8 percent in 2011 and, in 2012, by 4 percent. In 2013, the Portuguese GDP continued to decrease, by 1.1 percent, and started to recover in 2014, having grown by 1.5 percent in 2015, in a clear recovery trajectory (see table 1.1). At the same time, there seems to be a clear deterioration of the main macroeconomic indicators, namely the ones related to unemployment and public finances equilibrium, the main targets of the economic adjustment program. The unemployment levels have never been higher in the country’s modern history. Portugal has registered, in 2013, an unemploy-

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ment rate of 16.2 percent (nearly 700,000 people), after registering 3.8 percent (just reaching full employment) in 2000 (Eurostat 2017). Plus, the rate of unemployed people soared in what concerns the most problematic segments, such as youth unemployment (over 30 percent for people under the age of 25) and long-term unemployed (almost 60 percent are out of the labor market for over a year). This last segment is of very particular concern in Portuguese society, due to the poor qualification levels of the active population. And, the most remarkable (or not) result relates to the situation of public finances. The main goals of the adjustment program were to correct the severe imbalance of Portuguese public finance, namely the deficit and the government gross debt. The data show a very modest performance in those areas, up to recent years: after soaring in 2009 and 2010, the deficit and the gross debt have evidenced, against government perspectives and in spite of the magnitude of the adjustment program, a strong tendency of resilience and, in the case of debt, augmentation. The deficit reached 7.2 percent in 2014 and 4.4 percent in 2015 (that is, almost 8 billion euros), due to the need of recapitalizing “too big to fail” banks (Pordata 2017). In addition, the gross debt reached, in 2014, the highest level ever recorded since Portugal began its convergence path toward European monetary integration, 130 percent of GDP (circa 226 billion euros) (see table 1.1). These figures were, somehow, expected, given the restrictions of the adjustment program and the European depressive economic climate. Private consumption (66 percent of total GDP) and investment have registered a consistent decline since 2011. And the country cannot rely exclusively on exports to sustain growth, especially in a time when Portugal’s main trade partners, namely Spain (to which Portugal exports nearly 30 percent of its tradable goods), are going through the same ordeal. Due to weak economic growth, Portugal has lost ground in relation to the rest of the EU. The decade of 2000 has been quite an erratic one for Portuguese real convergence toward the European core: in 2015, the purchase power of Portuguese households was 20 percent lower than their EU counterparts, roughly the same difference that existed in 1990. Portugal’s 2000 per capita GDP stood at 79€ Purchasing Power Standards (PPS), compared to the EU28 average of 100€. After several ups and downs, it reached 81€ in 2010. From 2011 onward, there was a systematic fall, until it reached 77€ in 2015 (see table 1.1). According to the latest data, Portugal is the eleventh poorest economy (only ahead of Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia and Slovakia) of the EU28, having been surpassed by several Eastern European countries (Eurostat 2017).

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Table 1.1. Portugal, Economic Indicators 2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

178.872 175.448 179.300 176.166 168.398 170.769 173.079 179.504 185.035

GDPpc (UE28=100)

81

82

82

77

75

77

77

77

77

GDP growth (%)

0.2

-3.0

1.9

-1.8

-4.0

-1.1

0.9

1.6

1.4

Budget Deficit (%GDP)

-3.8

-9.8

-11.2

-7.4

-5.7

-4.8

-7.2

-4.4

-2.1

Budget Deficit (million €)

-6.766

-17.204 -20.100 -13.006 -9.529

-8.245

-12.402 -7.826

-3.807

Public Debt (%GDP)

71.7

83.6

129

130.6

130.4

Public Debt (million €)

128.191 146.691 173.062 196.231 212.556 219.715 226.031 231.540 241.061

Unemployment Rate (%)

7.6

9.4

Source: Pordata; INE; Eurostat.

96.2

10.8

111.4

12.7

126.2

15.5

16.2

13.9

129

12.4

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Carla Guapo Costa

GDP (million €)

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There are several other indicators that reveal structural differences (see table 1.2). One of the most striking is labor productivity. Considering, in 2015, the average of EU28 as 100, PIB per person employed is over 84 percent in Luxemburg (184), over 42 percent in Ireland (142,6), 27 percent in France and Germany, while Spain stays on average. On the opposite side, we have Portugal, with a labor productivity that is almost 30 percent lower than the EU average (68,2), which would mean, ceteris paribus, that the average Portuguese worker has a productivity level that is almost a 100 percent lower than his Luxembourger colleague. Estonia and Slovakia also present very modest performances, while Greece’s records are similar to Portugal’s (Eurostat 2017). The situation is identical in what concerns science and technology performance. In Finland, Sweden or Denmark the share of expenses in Research and Development is over 3 percent of GDP, the EU average is circa 2 percent and in Portugal less than 1.3 percent. Also, in those countries, the share of human resources in science and technology is over 50 percent of the work force; in Portugal, it is less than 25 percent. And the same goes regarding other indicators that represent important contributions to real convergence (or divergence) processes. These indicators reflect, in my perspective, huge differences in the qualification of human capital, perhaps the most important factor in determining real convergence (Eurostat 2017): in 2015, in the EU28, 20.8 percent of the population aged twenty-five to fifty-four had basic education, 46.5 percent completed secondary education and 32.6 percent tertiary education; in Portugal, those figures were, respectively, 48.4 percent, 25.6 percent and 26 percent. And if we consider the older population, aged fifty-five to seventy-four, the asymmetries are much wider: 80.7 percent of the Portuguese population has completed low levels of education (against 37.4 percent at EU level), 8.8 percent secondary education (42.6 percent for the EU) and 10.5 percent tertiary education (20 percent for the EU) (Eurostat 2017). Summing up all the previous issues, I argue that Portugal’s divergence process was not, exclusively, triggered by the financial or the sovereign debt crisis, but it began at the start of the new millennium, in the context of an incomplete economic and fiscal union, an overvalued cur-

Table 1.2. Labor productivity (output per hour), Portugal and EU 2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Portugal

68.8

69.7

69.7

67.7

67.9

69.8

68.9

68.2

EU 28

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Eurozone 19

112.3

112.9

111.8

111.9

111.5

112

112.2

111.8

Source: Eurostat.

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rency, an inadequate monetary policy, the unmerciful progress of globalization and the EU eastern enlargement. ON THE ROAD TO CRISIS: THE “SINS” OF THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERY At this point, and for the sake of my argument, I introduce a brief comparative approach with other European countries that were subject to financial rescue. I recall the acronym PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) or PIIGS (including Ireland), that was often used in a pejorative context for denominating EU countries (mostly in Southern Europe) hampered by deep instability in financial and monetary matters, and a permanent deficit in productivity. Those countries were under severe attack from financial speculators and international rating agencies, which have been taking systematic action to increase the risk premiums on their public debt securities, raising insolvency risks. I argue that, although there are similarities among those countries, it is fair to state that there are significant differences between them. According to Caldas (2013), there has not been a unified approach from the EU as a group all throughout the evolution of the financial and sovereign debt crisis. Moro (2014) argues that, since the start of the EMU, euro area countries have been experiencing diverse macroeconomic developments, ranging from significant competitiveness gains and a booming external demand (Germany being the most remarkable case) to mounting current account deficits, in southern European countries. In a comparative perspective, as Moro argues, the losses in competitiveness evidenced by those countries were linked to booms in domestic demand and credit easiness. All these led to the buildup of large domestic and external debt, inducing the correction of macroeconomic imbalances and structural vulnerabilities, especially after 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, Greece, Ireland and Portugal entered into financial assistance programs, with the EU and the IMF, involving policy adjustments and structural reforms. In a slightly different context, Spain joined a program for the recapitalization of its financial institutions and Italy was constrained to implement fiscal consolidation measures (Bordo and Harold 2014). The Greek situation was the most worrying of all, not only because it displayed the widest budgetary imbalances (deficit and debt-related issues), but also because the country has a historical tradition of lack of transparency in public accounts. When joining the euro, in 2001, Greece took advantage of low-interest loans to finance increased public spending. The country had a record of very high levels of public spending, due to military expenditures, high share of budgetary expenditure on salaries of public servants and on servicing public debt (7 percent of GDP in 2011)

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(Krajevska 2014). In the end of 2009, after the newly elected government revealed that its predecessor had fabricated public accounts, Fitch rating agency downgraded Greece’s credit rating. The country’s securities were downgraded to junk bond status, and the yields rose to unsustainable levels. In April 2010, Greece signed an agreement with the EU and the IMF, for a €45 billion bailout package, which would be transformed into a rescue package of €110 billion, over three years (Krajevska 2014), with the compromise of improving public finance imbalances. In July 2011 and March 2012, Greece received further assistance and a permit to debt restructuring. The bailout, however, both failed to restore market trust in the Greek economy, and also to halt contagion of the crisis to other countries of the euro area. As a consequence, the borrowing costs for the PIIGS countries increased significantly and the cost of insuring sovereign debt against default soared as well (Moro 2014). I stand with Blyth (2013), when he argues that, of all the PIIGS, only Greece was in any meaningful sense profligate. Ireland (the most successful case of economic convergence in the history of the EU) and Spain had a much more fiscally prudent policy, but were caught in a vicious circular trap of the private sector housing bubble and severe banking crisis. Portugal and Italy were united by a combination of low growth, demography constrains (Portugal has the second lowest fertility rate in the world), low productivity, and institutional bottlenecks, as well as wide regional asymmetries. With the exception of Greece, in all the other countries, private sector weaknesses ended up creating public-sector liabilities (Blyth 2013). Ireland was the poorest country of all when it joined the EEC in 1973. Irish GDP per capita was nearly half of the EEC’s GDP per capita then. Today, and despite having been one of the hardest hit countries by the financial turmoil, Ireland is the second richest country in the EU, with a GDP per capita that represents over 70 percent of the EU average. The convergence process of the Irish economy began in the early 1990s, and was particularly successful between 1996 and 2000. The “Irish Miracle” was due to several factors, namely, large inflows of foreign direct investment, mainly from the United States, skillful use of EU structural funds, with a special emphasis on human capital qualification and research expenditures, and a strong integration into the global and regional economy. However, and because Ireland was strongly linked with the US economy and finance, it was the first EU country affected by the financial crisis, and the first Eurozone economy to enter in recession. Another weakness of the Irish economy was its strong dependence on the construction sector, which during the investment boom provided an increase in GDP, employment, and tax revenues. However, the construction sector was very heavily dependent on the banking sector. When this sector collapsed, the economy began to plunge into crisis: GDP fell by 3 percent in

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2008 and 7 percent in 2009. Attempts by the government to rescue the economy, especially the banking system, led to a rapid increase in the budget deficit, that went from 7 percent in 2008 to 14 percent in 2009, and to 31.2 percent in 2010 (Krajesvka 2014). Spain is a different story. Having joined the EU in 1986 and the Eurozone in 1999, it is the fourth largest economy in the Eurozone, and, although with fewer budgetary imbalances and a higher savings index than Greece, has been anchoring its economic growth on a huge realestate bubble. The collapse of the construction sector (20 percent of GDP, in 2006) caused the bubble to implode and impacted the banking sector. The government was forced into a bailout, which caused an intense burden on public finances (the budget deficit was 11 percent of the GDP in 2009), at a time when decelerating growth made unemployment soar. As far as Italy (the third economy in the Eurozone) is concerned, it is generally acknowledged that it should be in better shape than the other PI(I)GS from a financial point of view, due to its progress in implementing structural reforms (fiscal and labor market). In addition, its banking supervisory mechanisms have been much more effective, protecting the financial sector from the debacle that occurred in other economies. However, like Portugal, although on a much wider scale, the Italian economy presents some serious competitiveness issues, related to the huge asymmetries between the northern regions (fully fledged industrial and technological hubs) and the depressed southern regions, net receivers of the national budgets’ funds. Italy also struggles with poor demographics, which undermine the sustainability of social security and economic growth itself. THE CASE OF PORTUGAL AND THE 2011 ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM: HOW (NOT) TO GET AWAY WITH DISCIPLINARY NEOLIBERALISM In the beginning of 2008, the worsening situation in international financial markets led Prime Minister José Sócrates to make radical changes in economic policy, like other European governments had done before. A strong credit squeeze was already being felt in the Portuguese financial market, following the collapse of two private banks, Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) and Banco Privado Português (BPP), which had been accumulating losses due to poor investment policies and accounting fraud. As such, in the end of 2008, the Portuguese government approved an Initiative of Reinforcement of Financial Stability (IREF), in order to stabilize and reinforce financial institutions. Measures included duties of information and transparency on the part of financial institutions and deposit guarantees and concession of personal guarantees from the state to the banks (the case of BPI, Banco Português de Investimento). Antici-

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pating a financial crisis, the government decided to bail out the banks, knowing that there would be consequences for taxpayers. In January 2009, aligning with the anti-cyclical European effort to prevent recession, the Portuguese government launched another program, the Initiative for Investment and Employment, that would induce a 0.8 percent increase in the GDP. The measures included support to property owners, by reducing the Tax on Property (IMI) and enlarging the exemption period; fight against poverty and extended social allowances (children and poor); support to corporate activity, by reducing corporate tax (IRC) and establishing credit lines to SMEs. In the year of 2008, there were also other measures to fight recession, such as building and modernization of school facilities; promoting renewable energies, energetic efficiency and networks; support to economic activity and internationalization of SMEs; financial and fiscal incentives to corporations; support to employment, for young people and long-term unemployed, and modernization of technological infrastructures. However, the international downturn had a powerful impact on the Portuguese economy: real GDP growth stalled, trade and current account deficits widened substantially, and there was an increase in net foreign liabilities. Also, the government deficit increased dramatically during this period, as the era of low interest rates on Portuguese debt was over. As a reaction to the financial crisis, spreads on sovereign debt of European periphery countries (the effects of the Greek crisis) and emerging markets rose, peaking in the first quarter of 2009. There was a new rise in Portugal’s interest rate spreads, inducing the main credit rating to downgrade Portugal’s sovereign rating. Subsequently, capital inflows fell sharply (IEO 2016). And, in spite of all the previous efforts, on 16 March 2010, the government was forced to implement the so-called Stability and Growth Program (SGP I), to be known as PEC I, as the inauguration of the budgetary stage of the European crisis in Portugal (Caldas 2013). SGP I was a threeyear plan (2010–2013) aimed at promoting economic growth and controlling public finances imbalances, namely deficit and debt aggregates. It had a primary goal of promoting structural reforms to enhance Portuguese economy competitiveness. It was focused on areas such as human capital qualification, investment in science and technology, simplification of administrative procedures, reduction of transaction costs for private companies and improvement of logistic and transport infrastructures. The main measures concerned tax hikes (VAT, IRS and IRC); extraordinary taxes on salaries (over minimum wage) and profits; reduction of public employees and social expenses, intermediary goods and capital expenses. However, the measures in SGP I soon proved to be insufficient. Therefore, in June 2010, the Parliament approved another program, SGP II, with supplementary measures aimed at reinforcing and accelerating the strategy of budgetary consolidation in SGP I. The measures kept the

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previous trajectory: to increase a percentual point in each of the VAT rates and IRS (personal income) rates, according to income levels; to increase IRC for companies with profits over 2 million euros; reduction of financial transfers to state-owned enterprises; cuts in politicians’ and state companies’ CEO’s salaries (5 percent), as well as stricter discipline in public servants’ recruitment. Again, in September 2010, the Prime Minister would announce a new austerity package, to be known as SGP III, to disclaim a set of measures that would be included in the 2011 budget, aiming at an additional budgetary consolidation. Those measures insisted on the reduction of public administration functioning costs, namely reduction on public servants’ salaries; freezing of promotions and admissions; reduction in overtime payments, social allowances and pensions; reduction of expenses in social functions, such as education and health services; cutting expenses in transfers to public administration subsectors and infrastructure projects; rationalization and restructuring of state-owned enterprises; fiscal measures, raising (again) VAT taxes and imposition of an additional tax to the financial sector, as well as measures to diminish tax fraud and evasion. However, Portugal’s current dismal situation was the legacy of a series of shocks in the international system and a rapidly changing global environment, as well as a path of economic and institutional weaknesses. According to the European Commission (EC), the vicious circle of low productivity and competitiveness, negative growth and growing imbalances of public finance, exacerbated by the onset of the Eurozone debt crisis, led to record high spreads on sovereign debt and downgrades in credit ratings. And, on 11 March 2011, yet another austerity package was announced, SGP IV. It would be rejected by Parliament, on 15 March, and Prime Minister Socrates resigned the same day. On 6 April, the Portuguese Council of Ministers requested help of the EC. With the consent of the opposition parties PSD and CDS, an agreement was reached with the Troika, and the MoU came to see the light of the day, on 3 May, when Portugal entered a three-year arrangement with the IMF, under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF). The EFF-supported adjustment program was designed, implemented, and funded by the IMF, in close cooperation with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the EC, with the European portion of the funding coming from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism (EFSM). The size of the program was 78 billion euros, which represented circa 46 percent of Portugal’s GDP, and each member of the Troika contributed with one third of the total amount (IMF 2011). The program aimed to strike “a balance between re-gaining credibility and debt stabilization, and limiting adverse impacts on growth” (IMF 2011). It is worth mentioning that the program was longer than usual (three years instead of two) because it was driven by the view that struc-

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tural reforms should form an important part of the program and they require time to implement (IEO 2016). Within the restrictions that have been previously identified, the Troika settled on a program that combined a large fiscal contraction (roughly one-third of the planned fiscal adjustment was to come from tax revenue increases and two-thirds from government spending cuts), with an ambitious agenda of structural reforms, in order to quickly restore credibility and allow Portugal to regain access to international capital markets. The Program recommended: • structural reforms to boost potential growth, create jobs, and improve competitiveness; • a fiscal consolidation strategy, supported by structural fiscal measures and better fiscal control over public-private partnerships and state-owned enterprises, aimed at putting the gross public debt-toGDP ratio on a firm downward path in the medium term and reducing the deficit below 3 percent of the GDP by 2014; • a financial sector strategy based on recapitalization and deleveraging, with efforts to safeguard the financial sector against disorderly deleveraging through market-based mechanisms supported by backstop facilities. The main goals were meant to tackle the most vicious handicaps of the Portuguese economy, namely the worrisome state of the banking system that had shut down access to affordable financing, affecting the capacity of local firms to obtain funding for their projects. The government planned to implement a wide number of reforms, namely the privatization of state-owned companies, market liberalization, competition (especially, reduction of rents in sectors shielded from foreign competition), labor market, energy, telecommunications and postal services, transports, housing market, public procurement and business environment, always bearing in mind the need to cut expenses and increase efficiency. Fundamentally, there was a firm intention of developing a pro-competitiveness context for national and foreign agents. The labor market deserved especial attention, since it was considered too rigid. As such, the main reforms aimed at reducing the level and duration of unemployment benefits for future recipients, and imposing a reduction in severance payments for new and existing contracts. There was also a plan to increase the flexibility of working time arrangements (reduce the pay and time off associated with overtime work and holidays) and to improve wage-setting mechanisms by limiting automatic extensions of collective agreements to firms that did not participate in the agreements. The only measure that was meant to reduce the impact on workers’ welfare was the reduction of the period necessary to be eligible for unemployment insurance. There was, clearly, a quite asymmetric distribution of the adjustment costs.

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The government also approved a series of institutional measures to improve the auditing of public finances, such as the creation of the Fiscal Council, the adoption of medium-term expenditure ceilings and instruments of evaluation and performance. In Portugal’s particular case, the government’s spending reduction target was supposed to be achieved by focusing on major budgetary items, namely the government wage bill and pension spending, since these two items account for 24 percent of the GDP and 58 percent of non-interest government spending (Schwartz et al. 2013). In what concerned the pension system reform, one of the main issues to be dealt with was the need to reestablish equity between public and private pension systems: the average pension in the civil service retirement system (CGA) is nearly three times higher than an average pension in the general contributory regime (GCR), and CGA retirees also worked fewer hours per week and fewer years before retiring. The current generation of workers is heavily burdened, as they have to pay for the higher pensions of their parents and grandparents while their own pensions will be much lower. All those factors provided the government with arguments for the merging of CGA and GCR administrations. They also applied a considerable number of changes in social spending programs, such as family benefits, unemployment insurance, or minimum income guarantee, in order to enhance efficiency and equity in the system. The education and health systems were also considered an important source of savings and rationalization, since the government planned to reduce the state’s role as a supplier of education (changing teacher contracts, and moving to a new student-based funding formula for public schools) and health services (integrating the health system of the civil service and the security forces into the National Healthcare Service), while strengthening its role as a regulator. One might discuss the adequacy of the program design, and its allegiance to the neoliberal mantra, but we should keep in mind that there were several restrictions that curtailed the range of economic policies: Portugal could not use the standard currency devaluation to achieve external equilibrium; as a member of the World Trade Organization, it was harder to use beggar thy neighbor policies, such as tax imports or export subsidization. Also, debt restructuring was not an option, since it could trigger moral hazard issues and fear of contagion. And, finally, the meaning of the Troika itself: being funded by three different entities, the program had to be agreed to by the EU and the ECB, and that was not a plain assumption (IEO 2016). Caldas (2013) argues that national policies were completely constrained by European guidelines, especially in the most fragile countries. Portugal was no exception. Although requiring a strong political leadership and maximum social consensus, the program was implemented under the new government (liberal biased) of Passos Coelho (supported

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by PSD and CDS), in a climate of organized protests and strikes promoted by trade unions. The program was subject to a strong opposition within Portuguese society and some intellectual and academic milieus, especially as its social and economic effects began to surge. The opposition parties, namely the Socialist Party, which nevertheless had been a traditional supporter of EU guidelines, joined several forces in the civil society that appealed to resistance against the neoliberal ideology of the government coalition parties, whom they accused of passively submitting to German orthodoxy (represented by the Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble) and globalized financial interests. The work of Fonseca and Ferreira (2015) gives us a clear image of Portuguese government discourse legitimation strategies on austerity and deregulating policies in order to get the Portuguese economy on the track of sustainable growth. The authors concluded that the Prime Minister used a mix of state of exception and blame strategy (of the former government) to justify the inexistence of alternative policies to austerity and neoliberal premises (primacy of market efficiency, redundancies in the public sector, privatization and deregulation). These orientations, that all European countries with financial bailouts from the EU and IMF were obliged to implement, constitute, from my point of view, a clear sign of the prevalence of freemarket ideologies, anchored on the principles of the neoliberalism mantra of the 1980s and, in what relates to the public sector, New Public Management practices. As Passos Coelho proudly stated, “we are going beyond the Troika’s demands” (Aguiar 2012). CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRISIS AND ITS AFTERMATH: DAYS OF THUNDER Inevitably, such an aggressive program was bound to be adjusted. It is safe to conclude that the Troika itself underestimated the severity of the European economic recession, which harshly affected Portugal’s largest trading partner, Spain, as well as other countries outside of Europe. On the other hand, it can also be assumed that some of the program’s initial targets suffered from overoptimistic assumptions, namely in what concerned public finances, since, among other issues, the initial design did not take into account the financing needs of the state-owned enterprises (SOE), public-private partnerships (PPP) or the dubious financing of the Madeira Autonomous Region’s government. The original targets were not achieved in any of the program years, and the focus of the program changed, by shifting the nature of the fiscal adjustment away from cuts in government spending and toward tax increases. In practice, roughly 60 percent of the fiscal adjustment occurred through tax increases and only 40 percent was implemented through cuts in government spending (IEO 2016).

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After years of distress and of painful austerity measures that led to the impoverishment of a significant part of the population, to a widening of social and economic disparities, to unsustainable levels of unemployment and to a sustained drain in human capital skills due to migration, it is not easy to provide for an accurate assessment of effects in Portuguese economy and society. In fact, according to Blanchard and Portugal (2017), in 2013 Portugal was, in many ways, in worse shape than in 2007, unemployment being higher and GDP growth negative. However, the main justification for turning to foreign help was that the Portuguese economy was no longer able to finance itself in international financial markets at affordable rates. And, from that perspective, the program was a success: Portugal did regain access to capital markets. Another criterion is to assess whether Portugal was on a sustainable path in terms of government debt and net foreign liabilities. Several analysts argue that the situation remains fragile. Portugal failed to meet its deficit targets in all the years of the program, but it is a fact that the country’s current account improved much more rapidly than envisaged in the original program: exports grew faster than expected and imports fell by more than expected. But it is widely discussed to what extent that evolution was a consequence of the recession and its immediate aftermath. In fact, exports were growing because of the sharp drop following the post-2008 crisis scenario. And the unexpected fall in imports might simply reflect the unexpected severity of the recession. In part, this fragility reflects the fact that structural reforms did not produce persistently higher growth rates of productivity or real GDP, so far. The IMF assessment illustrates what it considers to be the major achievements of the adjustment program: the increased flexibility of labor market dynamics, due to the reduced duration and level of unemployment benefits, while increasing eligibility for those benefits; reduced severance pay for regular employment contracts; and simplified individual and collective dismissal procedures. In what concerns public sector reforms, there is a well accomplished reorganization of local and central governments, improvement of the efficiency and governance of SOE, reform of procurement procedures, and efficiency measures in the health sector. In the field of product market reforms, the IMF underlines the process of privatization, the strengthening of the power of the competition authority, the simplifying licensing procedures or the phasing out of regulated tariffs on electricity and gas. The pension reform measures prescribed the increase of pension contributions of public sector workers and raised the retirement age, by indexing it to life expectancy. Also, financial reforms were able to apply measures to help deleverage the banking system, by progressively setting higher capital requirements, and tax reforms included broadening the base of the personal income tax and the VAT, as well as increasing property and car registration taxes.

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However, according to the IEO (2016), a true fiscal devaluation was not implemented, structural reforms were incomplete, and the original fiscal targets were not met. On the other hand, there is a general feeling that the broad scope of the program’s agenda and the scarcity of skilled personnel to implement reforms led, in many instances, to apparent rather than actual reforms (IEO 2016). This was worsened by the fact that the cuts in public sector wages made it difficult for the government to retain and attract highly skilled workers, which may have contributed to a reduction in the overall efficiency of the public sector. Another negative result was the emigration of thousands of highly qualified young professionals due to unemployment levels, affecting firms’ capacity to innovate, and preventing the country from changing its specialization into higher-value-added activities. According to the Portuguese Institute of Statistics (INE 2015), nearly 350,000 people left the country between 2011 and 2015, over 100,000 per year, especially younger people, with higher qualifications: in 2011, those people represented 47 percent of total migrants, and in 2014, over 60 percent of people leaving the country were aged between 20 and 39. Although it is possible to depict a slight deceleration in 2015, it still remains a relevant loss in human capital stock, in a growingly aging and low-skilled society. In the field of research and development expenses, the diagnostics are also bleak: in the same period, there was also a significant reduction in the number of scholarships for Masters and PhD students and grants to research centers from the main funding agency, Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) (Pordata 2017). In what concerns social issues, the consequences are, unfortunately, easier to assess. Portugal has traditionally been a country swept by significant inequalities and poverty, among large parts of its population. However, the country had managed to engage in a trajectory of sustainable reduction of those plagues. The onset of the financial and the sovereign debt crisis, as well as the austerity measures stemming from the adjustment program, marked a turning point. In spite of the progress registered in the first decade of the new century, there is an increase in the level of inequalities within Portuguese society. Family income has recorded a uturn between 2009 and 2014, as the austerity policies paved their way through Portuguese society. And the real income reduction did not affect all socioeconomic groups proportionally, since it had a major impact on the bottom tier, thus worsening the plague of inequality and inciting social unrest. According to recent data (Rodrigues 2016), almost 70 percent of individuals had their income cut back between 2009 and 2012, and circa 25 percent of the population had a real decrease in income over 30 percent. Incidentally, the Gini Index, the worldwide indicator of inequality evaluation, recorded a mild increase (from 33.7 percent to 34 percent), over roughly the same period, but the S90/S10 ratio, that measures the income of the top 10 percent richest to the 10 percent poorest, went from

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9.2 to 10.6, in spite of the measures that were implemented to improve the redistribution dimension of income taxes. In line with the structurally low levels of human capital qualification, Portugal has some of the lowest wages in the European context, and wide wage asymmetries induced by higher wages. In 2015, the average income of Portuguese workers (employed) was 25,887 euros in parity power purchase (PPP), against 35,741 euros PPC for the EU. And Portuguese minimum wage was 756 euros PPP, behind Greece, Poland or Malta, when the Luxembourger worker received 1,597 euros PPP, also in 2015. Additionally, the poverty rate rose between the years of 2009 and 2014, from 17.9 percent to 19.5 percent, well above the EU average, especially in younger parts of the population (children and under 25) (Eurostat 2017). The figures are similar to early century statistics, revealing a notorious deterioration of Portuguese families’ living conditions. Rodrigues (2016) also disentangles two famous and widespread myths: the austerity policies did not exempt from the ordeal poorer families; on the contrary. Despite being spared from wages and pensions cuts, the removal, the brutal reduction and elimination of social transfers (such as Social Income, Family Allowances or the Elderly Supplement) plunged thousands of families into acute poverty. The second misconception relates to those most affected by the crisis and the austerity measures that followed: although official statements and even some social media placed the burden of adjustment on the wealthier tier of the population and a part of the middle class, it is now clear that the income of the bottom 10 percent was slashed by 25 percent, the main reason being job loss, while top and intermediate tier incomes decreased 10 percent. According to Rodrigues (2016), the result of all these restrictive policies was the impoverishment of Portuguese society and a greater risk of disintegration and social cohesion. ARE HAPPY DAYS HERE TO STAY? At the time of this writing (mid 2017), the Portuguese outlook seems less grim and optimism starts to spread over the economic environment. After the 2015 general elections, the Socialist Party formed a government, supported in parliament by the Portuguese Communist Party and the radical left party, Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda), pledging to put an end to the austerity measures undertaken by the former center right government. After an initial period of distrust, from international organizations, rating agencies, and the European institutions, the situation seems to have reached a stable point of social appeasement and economic confidence. The new government tried to calm down international markets, combining the Eurozone flag of budgetary discipline and sustainable structural reforms, with measures aimed at increasing demand and con-

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sumption, and recovering part of the middle-class power purchase (reducing taxes and providing incentives to investment). The efforts seem to be working. In the end of June 2017, an IMF mission published a quite auspicious outlook for the Portuguese economy. It is acknowledged that Portugal has achieved commendable progress in taming near-term risks, since the 2016 fiscal outcome was significantly better than expected. Portugal is finally exiting the Excessive Deficit Procedure that had been in place since 2009, with continuing efforts to contain spending. In spite of the mind-blowing situation in the financial sector, the IMF depicts an increase in the stability and confidence in the banking system, with the implementation of successful plans to recover important banks, such as Caixa Geral de Depósitos (public recapitalization), Novo Banco and Banco Comercial Português. On the other hand, the economic activity is clearly gaining momentum, in spite of the GDP remaining below its potential level and high unemployment (circa 11 percent). The sustained growth in tourism and related activities (such as construction), and recovering exports are strengthening consumer and investor trust, in such a manner that the GDP is forecast to grow to an astonishing 2.5 percent in 2017, and 2 percent the following year (IMF 2017). International organizations and several authors (see Blanchard and Portugal 2017) recall, however, the need to complete structural reforms (labor market, product market, financial sector, justice, red tape bureaucracy, fiscal regulations) that, despite being envisioned in MoU, remain to be undertaken and hinder Portuguese economy competitiveness (WEF 2016). As Blanchard and Portugal (2017) claim, the Portuguese situation started improving in 2014, mildly, after a terrible ordeal between 2008 and 2013, but the risks of derailment are still present. CONCLUSION At the end of the day, it is clear that the global and European crisis effects exposed the underlying weaknesses of the Portuguese economy. However, beyond the effects of the crisis, it must be acknowledged that successive Portuguese governments were unable to take advantage of the growth opportunities opened up by European club membership. There is a general consensus that if rigorous and systemic structural reforms had been undertaken earlier, Portugal would have been able to exploit the growth opportunity offered by the availability of affordable funds for financing productive investments. It is now widely accepted in Portuguese society that there is an imperative to alter Portugal’s economic development model: from one based on public consumption and laborintensive investment to a model focused on exports, private investment, financial sector efficiency and a strong emphasis on innovation and en-

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hanced human skills. Naturally, this will not come easily or swiftly, although it has already been started. On the other hand, the distress that fell on Portugal and other fragile and peripheral countries of the Eurozone was also a clear sign of the short-sighted EMU’s design and means to correct asymmetries among member countries, and to the changing landscape in international economy and finance. Before the euro was created, most EU government debt was domestically held, but it gradually became internationalized. At the same time, in an attempt to enhance growth, governments implemented counter-cyclical policies, increasing deficits, and several countries were forced to bail out banks. As Moro (2014) puts it, private debt became public debt, leading to sovereign crisis. A fundamental lesson from the Portuguese crisis is that disruptive sudden stops can affect countries that are members of currency unions, even when those unions involve advanced economies. This oversight stemmed from a wider failure of the economists to understand the dangers of persistent current account deficits in monetary unions that are not fiscal unions (De Grauwe 2013). In the case of the EU, as Rodrigues and Reis (2012) argue, the Euro came to consolidate a division between the core “northern” countries, led by Germany and the Netherlands, which registered important surpluses in their current accounts and therefore capital outflows, and the peripheral “southern” countries, registering deficits in their current accounts and inflows of financial capital. It is also a division between growth and economic development models, the difficult coexistence of credit-led and export-led models of growth in Europe, which makes the financial surpluses of the European periphery responsible for its current account deficits. This led to the imposition of deflationary policies that increase unemployment, recession and the probability of defaults, in the absence of an alternative narrative to neoliberal orthodoxy (Costa 2011). Ever since the 1930s, it has been clearly acknowledged that markets cannot regulate themselves without serious economic and social costs. Markets are not totally efficient and they show a number of flaws. If there are no supervision mechanisms that prevent them from performing socially harmful actions, it is the whole system that should be blamed for failing in its mission. Finally, the EMU was built on the basis of an illusory preposition that assumed that a set of requirements, primarily financial and monetary policy targets, was enough to ensure that a group of countries, deeply heterogeneous in terms of socio-economic development, were in the position to bear the shock caused by the introduction of a common currency. The idea was that the fulfilment of those nominal convergence criteria would be sufficient to ensure real convergence and identical living standards. The global crisis has shown the structural difficulties in defining

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common economic policies for realities with different needs and objectives (Costa 2011). Also, in the following years, and especially from 2010 onward, it became clearer that the EU might lack some of the institutional structures, rules and instruments to face an ordeal such as the sovereign debt crisis. EU leaders were unable to address the market forces and stop the crisis from spreading. Clearly, there is an acute need to find alternative means of adjustment that are not yet available to a large extent: EMU does not represent a fiscal or effective economic union. In other words, it is not an Optimal Currency Area. As Moro (2014) argues, the apparent resilience of EMU makes it possible for strains to build up for much longer before the system cracks. And that might mean that foreign lenders thought that there is very little default risk because of implicit bailout guarantees, revealing a typical case of moral hazard (IEO 2016). As Honkapohja (2014) argues, being a member of a monetary union might increase, instead of reducing, weaker countries’ vulnerabilities. As Fitoussi (1994, 25) stated, “Solidarity is the difference between a Community and a Free Trade Area.” EU leaders and population must decide which one they want to be. The epilogue of this story is yet to be known: the brutal impact of the financial and the sovereign debt crisis, the (de)regulation of the world financial system, the short-sighted vision of the EU course itself, the growing divorce between EU citizens and national and European leaderships, all might risk the cohesion and the future of the European Project. Neoliberal orthodoxy has proved to be the incorrect answer to those problems. Let us hope a new economic and political mantra emerges. REFERENCES Aguiar, Nuno. 2012. “Nove dias após tomar posse, Passos já estava a ir além da Troika.” Dinheiro Vivo, May 8. https://www.dinheirovivo.pt/economia/nove-diasapos-tomar-posse-passos-ja-estava-a-ir-alem-da-troika/. Alves, Nuno, Mário Centeno and Álvaro Novo. 2010. “O investimento em educação em Portugal: retornos e heterogeneidade.” Boletim Económico Primavera 1 (16): 9–3. Blanchard, Oliver and Pedro Portugal. 2017. “Boom, Slump, Sudden stops, Recovery, and Policy Options. Portugal and the Euro.” GEE Papers 72 (June). Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity. The History of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Bordo, Michael and James Harold. 2014. “The European Crisis in the Context of the History of Previous Financial Crises.” Journal of Macroeconomics 39: 275–84. Caldas, José. 2013. O Impacto das Medidas anti-Crise e a Situação Social e de Emprego: Portugal. Comité Económico e Social Europeu. Bruxelas. Costa, Carla. 2011. “Impact of the Financial Crises and Global Macroeconomic Imbalances on a Fragmented European Union.” Global Business & Economics Anthology II (1): 27–34. De Grauwe, Paul. 2013. “The Political Economy of the Euro.” The Annual Review of Political Science 16: 153–70.

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Eurostat. 2017. “National accounts (including GDP).” Accessed October 4, 2016. http:// ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/national-accounts/statistics-illustrated. Fonseca, Pedro and Maria João Ferreira. 2015. “Through ‘seas never before sailed’: Portuguese government discursive legitimation strategies in a context of financial crisis.” Discourse & Society 26 (6): 682–711. Fitoussi, Jean-Paul (Ed.). 1994. Entre Convergences et Interêts Nationaux: L’Europe. Paris: Presses de la FNSP. Honkapohja, Seppo. 2014. “The Euro Area Crisis: A View from the North.” Journal of Macroeconomics 39: 260–71. IEO. 2016. The Portuguese Crisis and the IMF. Washington: Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF – Background Paper, BP16–02/05. http://www.imf.org/ieo/files/ completedevaluations/EAC__BP_16-02_05_The_Portuguese_Crisis_and_the_ IMF%20v2.PDF. IMF. 2011. Portugal: Memorandum of Understanding on Specific Economic Policy Conditionality. 3 May. Washington. https://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/2011/prt/051711.pdf. IMF. 2017. “IMF Datamapper—World Economic Outlook (Gross Domestic Product— Real GDP Growth).” http://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH @WEO/OEMDC?ADVEC?WEOWORLD. INE. 2015. “Provisional estimates of resident population – 2014.” Last modified June 16. https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_destaques&DESTAQ UESdest_boui=224677968&DESTAQUESmodo=2. Krajesvka, Anna. 2014. “Fiscal Policy in The EU Countries Most Affected by The Crisis: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, And Spain.” Comparative Economic Research 17 (3). Mateus, Augusto (Ed.). 2015. Três Décadas de Portugal Europeu. Lisboa: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. https://www.ffms.pt/FileDownload/ec3cb491-e053-47b990a3-7affd6c15ce7/tres-decadas-de-portugal-europeu. Magone, Jose. 2014. “Portugal Is Not Greece: Policy Responses to the Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Consequences for the Portuguese Political Economy.” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 15 (3): 346–60. Moro, Beniamino. 2014. “Lessons from the European Economic and Financial Great Crisis.” European Journal of Political Economy 34: 9–24. Pordata. 2017. “Economic and Social Indicators.” Accessed September 17, 2016. http:// www.pordata.pt/. Rodrigues, Carlos F. (Ed.). 2016. Desigualdade de Rendimento e Pobreza em Portugal – As consequências sociais do Programa de Ajustamento. Lisboa: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. Rodrigues, João and José Reis. 2012. “The Asymmetries of European Integration and the Crisis of Capitalism in Portugal.” Competition and Change 16 (3): 188–205. Schwartz, Gerd, Paul Lopes, Carlos Granados, Emily Sinnott, Mauricio Soto and Plato Tinios. 2013. Portugal – Rethinking the State – Selected Expenditure Reform Options. Washington: International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ scr/2013/cr1306.pdf. WEF. 2016. Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017. Accessed in 12 March 2017. https:/ /www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-competitiveness-report-2016–2017–1. Zartaloudis, Sotirios. 2014. “The Impact of the Fiscal Crisis on Greek and Portuguese Welfare States: Retrenchment before the Catch-up?” Social Policy & Administration 48 (4): 430–49.

TWO Tourism Gentrification in Lisbon The Panacea of Touristification as a Scenario of Post-Capitalist Crisis Luís Mendes

In Portugal, the first symptoms of the welfare state crisis were felt in the mid-1980s and 1990s. From then on, the progressive breakdown of the predominant model of public intervention has been simultaneous with the replacement of Fordism by post-Fordism, making it more difficult for the state to gather the necessary resources. The inevitable precariousness of labor conditions of unqualified workers and more disadvantaged social groups, together with the deregulation of the housing market and urban soil usage, tend to emphasize a more random pattern in time and spatial production of urban events and in the development of urban segregation at different scales. This pattern is the social product of an underregulated housing market and of speculative valuing processes. Strategic business-led management orients urban governance, with public resources drawn toward investment, a service supply oriented to the market and the private sector, and the reinforcement of public-private partnerships. These transformations in urban space intensified in Portugal with the economic, financial and budgetary realities resulting from the 2008–2010 crisis, which imposed the adoption of new models of management and development of the territory. The Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Portuguese government and the Troika in 2011 accelerated these trends. One of the reforms of the Memorandum was the new regime of urban rental, subjected to vigorous social protest, as it has 25

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created an update mechanism that has made rents unaffordable for many tenants, because values are established without adequate social support and affect families of lower socio-economic status. Displacement has been a hallmark of the new law on the urban rental, since it makes eviction easier if the landlord/owner claims to want the house for his own home or descendants, or if he wishes to make structural renovations. This new law, dated from 2012, is nothing more than the bastion of a major neoliberal turn in urban policy in Portugal, setting up the conditions for an austerity urbanism and legitimizing the ideology of the “natural” and “inevitable” need for touristification in the historical neighborhoods of Lisbon’s inner city. In the rhetoric of urban marketing and neoliberal rationality, this neoconservative turn in city government aims to make Lisbon a more competitive city, attracting foreign investment, visitors, and tourists, tying the flows of real estate capital to its built environment, in a frame of globalization of competition between cities and places. It is in light of this that I intend to identify important factors and impacts that are at the origin of the wave of touristification that occurred in Lisbon in the last decade. Lisbon receives every day more than 37,000 tourists. In 2015, the capital hosted 5.25 million guests, which makes a total of 3,500 million euros a year in tourism revenue. The year 2015 was the best ever for national tourism. In total, Portugal received 17.4 million tourists, 8.6 percent more than in 2014, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE). The tourist boom that gives new life and new businesses to Lisbon and Oporto is also enhancing latent tensions and generating new problems and urban and fiscal challenges. In the name of tourism, rehabilitation of vacant buildings is conducted, but the rents have skyrocketed, multiplying the evictions of vulnerable inhabitants and closures of historic shops—that is, residential and commercial displacement. On the other side, thanks to tourism, many Portuguese have ventured in the business of room rental. Many unemployed young people take the first steps in the labor market, but this does not always mean jobs with rights and income above average. In general, discussions around tourism give voice to opposing positions between those who profit from the boom in arrivals and welcome the modernization of avenues, the city and the economy (“tourism as panacea”), and those who are angry with the inability to utilize the now crowded public transportation in the historic center of Lisbon and with rising rents in the housing market or the destruction of tradition and authenticity in historical innercity neighborhoods (“tourism as disaster”). In fact, it is undeniable that Lisbon is experiencing a peak of international projection and that tourism revenue can contribute to the economic recovery of the country and the city, during and after the time of capitalist crisis. Urban tourism may also be an urban regeneration engine for the preservation of the architectural heritage, and the rehabilitation of buildings in an advanced state of degradation and may contribute to job crea-

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tion. But the apparent absence of either a planning strategy or the evaluation of its impact, together with the almost non-existent process of regulation, have overwhelming consequences. The most important one will be precisely the focus of this chapter: tourism gentrification. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section addresses the theoretical framework. The second section analyzes the processes of gentrification in Lisbon. The third analyzes the drivers behind Lisbon’s touristification. The chapter concludes with a summary of main findings. WELFARE STATE CRISIS, NEOLIBERALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF AUSTERITY URBANISM Under today’s neoliberal panorama, the state seeks to transfer many of its services to the private sphere (transports, housing, communication and electricity distribution networks). The idea behind such transfers is that economic activities are more efficiently regulated by the market. The state has also reinforced competitive rationales of a spatial nature and housing policies. The depression experienced by the large cities which characterized the end of the post-war economic cycle was followed by a new urban policy that was far more geared to the market and therefore affected by philosophies based on promoting consumption, inter-city competitiveness, and the protagonism of private stakeholders in the city’s planning process and production (Ley 1980; Hall and Hubbard 1996; Hackworth 2007; Peck 2010; Steger and Roy 2013; Rossi and Vanolo 2015). In a context of economic globalization and increased inter-urban competition worldwide, the framework for housing and urban renewal policies should be analyzed in the light of the neoliberal project, its recent developments within the economic and financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the effects that produced the socio-structure in the southern European cities (Mendes 2013 and 2014; Santos et al. 2014; Eckardt and Sánchez 2015; Tulumello 2015; Seixas et al. 2015; Zwiers et al. 2016). Urban governments have followed a managerial model (the strategic management imported from the business world) where public resources are provided so as to attract investment. The provision of services has now been taken over by market forces and the private sector, and publicprivate partnerships have been upgraded (Harvey 1989; Hall 1998). Urban entrepreneurialism, as Harvey (1989) puts it in his seminal paper, has, as its centerpiece, the notion of “public-private partnership” in which a traditional local boosterism is integrated with the use of local governmental powers to try and attract external sources of funding, new direct investments, or new employment sources. In many instances, this has meant that the public sector assumes the risk and the private sector takes the benefits. Some critical authors like David Harvey and Neil

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Smith call this “privatization of profits and socialization of costs.” Urban neoliberalism has spread across the globalizing world through an increasing emphasis being laid on the entrepreneurialization of local government, the privatization of public services, and the commodification of urban space. In this context, urban neoliberalism has taken the form of a highly mobile government technology, giving rise to a tremendous variety of politico-economic regimes across the globe through processes of hybridization (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010; Peck and Theodore 2015). Neoliberalism and related austerity policies are presented as the only solution, marking a new phase in what David Harvey (2010, 2012, 2014) described as “accumulation by dispossession.” Saskia Sassen (2014) has brilliantly applied this concept to the world economy: accumulation through direct extraction of profit out of public or common forms of collective wealth. In the “entrepreneurial city,” local governments act as cost reduction business actors who run their cities as businesses. Facing tax cuts and other cuts in their income, local governments have increasingly promoted austerity policies. This has resulted in fewer services for citizens and less investment in resources, equipment and most of the city’s infrastructure, especially in the affordable housing sector. Jamie Peck (2012, 2015; Peck and Whiteside 2016) outlines how neoliberalism strengthened its hold on the cities following the Great Recession of 2007–2008, coining the concept of “austerity urbanism.” Due to the spatial concentration of unionized workforces, ethnic minorities, vulnerable socio-economic groups and liberal groups, cities are particularly desirable targets for the implementation of austerity measures. Urban governments cut social services, public sector workers’ wages (increasingly as a way to deny these workers the right to collective bargaining) and school budgets, and eliminate housing units at affordable prices, while privatizing functions in the city center and subsidizing private investors, reproducing the logic of commodification, privatization and financialization of the housing sector in particular. Urban authorities in many cities have been forced to cut back on essential services, lay off public sector employees, control spending, and reduce debt in order to satisfy current and future fiscal obligations and meet restrictions imposed by higher levels of government. Austerity is, definitely, becoming a pervasive feature of neoliberal urbanism nowadays. Far from inciting institutional change oriented toward a progressive reform of the system, the outcome in terms of policy is a redoubled effort to extend the neoliberal agenda further. Economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it (Harvey 2014; Sevilla-Buitrago 2015; Jonas, McCann and Thomas 2015). As I have stated elsewhere (see Mendes and Carmo 2016), in Southern Europe, especially in Portugal, the effects of the urban crisis were felt

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more intensely because of the collapse of the already fragile housing market. This fragility is anchored on the encouragement, by governments, of the purchase of houses in recent decades, supported by easy access to cheap credit in parallel with the development of a model of urban expansion based on the mass production of new construction, especially in the outskirts of metropolitan areas. This has led to a gradual increase of indebted individuals who need credit for housing acquisition. These facts, in connection with the outbreak of a very strong economic downturn since 2008, accompanied by rising unemployment, taxes on the working class and cuts in social support to the most socially and economically vulnerable groups, resulted in a sharp increase in default of payment of mortgages to their creditor banks. In the case of public policies of urban renewal and housing policies, instead of the systematic destruction of public provision of goods and services, neoliberalism influences urban governance toward a sophisticated restoration of the state figure at the local level, transforming it into a commodification instrument of urban life. In the specific field of housing policies, there are trends that point to a reduction of the direct role of the state in social housing provision; while reinforcing the support to access to housing, there has been a change in the mechanisms by which the state intervenes, in particular through fiscal policy, public-private partnerships and financial incentives for different actors (Santos et al. 2014; Rodrigues et al. 2016). Although there have been substantial changes in the techniques of public management and the rhetoric of urban policy, there is little evidence of the massive withdrawal of the state. Therefore, and although the neoliberal ideology seeks to reduce the state to a kind of minimal state, we must not confuse neoliberalism with a return to pure laissez-faire and free markets that dispense and repudiate state intervention in the economy. The neoliberal project depends on the coercive, transforming and mediator capacity of the state to inject competition in the social and economic processes and, as such, restructure the spaces of the contemporary city around the market as a single principle organizer of the collective social and urban life. Therefore, neoliberalism is not necessarily concentrated on the amputation of the social functions of public institutions or on the destruction of the welfare state, but rather converts these functions into mechanisms that serve its interests through a strategic selectivity: “market intervention” (Dardot and Laval 2013; Brown 2015; Rodrigues and Teles 2015; Storper 2016). This is not so much to reduce the weight of public expenditure, as it is to promote private input in multiple areas of its traditional sphere—urban regeneration provides a paradigmatic example—and thus promote their commodification more or less gradually. In terms of regeneration and urban rehabilitation, this privatization involves complex commercial and financial engineering with the use of real estate investment funds and public-private partnerships that are not

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always transparent, complex subcontracts or costly subsidies and tax incentives, guaranteed by the public domain, involving a permanent and constant state activism. Building a national market for urban regeneration and rehabilitation and, above all, ensuring their progressive operation and expansion is very expensive and requires, given the nature of the sector, a powerful state machinery (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2013; Rossi and Vanolo 2015; Harvey 2010 and 2014). In this context, the role of the Neoliberal State is exactly to create, keep and maintain an appropriate institutional framework for market practices, although after the creation of these conditions the interventions do not go beyond those of a minimal state. In this system, the question as to how the production of space is performed increasingly as the general condition of (re)capitalist production becomes important, not only in the production of infrastructure, but also in forming the apparatus of the built environment that is necessary for the continuous reproduction of the system. The aim of the capitalist state is not to eliminate the contradictions of the system, but to mitigate them; the social fabric reproduces the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The state, inserted in the logic of the capitalist system, ensures the reproduction of capital, managing conflicts and contradictions produced by the system and can interfere with the completion of the capital cycle, either through production infrastructures, or by controlling the value of wages in order to keep them low, or even by stimulating the formulae of competition and regulatory policies (Lojkine 1997; Lefebvre 2000; Bourdieu 2014; Jessop 2016). The Portuguese framework of housing policies and urban regeneration that has emerged in the twenty-first century should be understood in this context of neoliberal urban governance, promoting stimulus to the market and private initiative. However, a retrospective of municipal urban renewal policies also becomes necessary, whose path in the case of Lisbon has been, like in Portugal, marked by an expensive and hard plan of liberalization and the unblocking of the Portuguese traditional housing market (Mendes 2013 and 2014). TOWARD A DEFINITION OF TOURISM GENTRIFICATION, LISBON STYLE Gentrification refers to the movement of affluent, usually young, middleclass residents into run-down inner-city areas. The effect is that these areas become socially, economically and environmentally upgraded. It is a process of socio-spatial change where the rehabilitation of residential property in working-class neighborhoods by relatively affluent incomers leads to the displacement of former residents unable to afford the increased costs of housing that accompany regeneration (Smith 1996; Slater 2013).

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Four processes must combine in order for gentrification to take place: 1) the reorganization of the social geography of the city, involving the displacement, in central areas, of one social group by another with a higher status; 2) a spatial regrouping of individuals with similar lifestyles and cultural characteristics; 3) a change in the built environment and the urban landscape, with the creation of new services and residential rehabilitation that involves important architectural improvements; 4) a change in the land system which, in most cases, leads to a rise in the price of real estate and an extension in the system of domestic property ownership (Savage and Warde 1993; Davidson and Lees 2005). The underlying processes of gentrification and the material changes they produce seem to have been stretched over time and space. Contemporary gentrification has become increasingly complex because different actors and locations are involved and the landscapes produced have changed. A series of transformations derived from a new political and economic context imposed by globalization generated a new form of gentrification significantly different from the one observed in prior decades, from the point of view of the protagonists and demands, and the modalities and supply structure. What was casual, marginal and local becomes systematic and is truly global to all regions of the planet, as a significant dimension of strategy in the scene of contemporary neoliberal urbanism. Gentrification, which was restricted to the issue of housing dynamics, is now expanding into tourism and commerce under urban regeneration processes, allowing us to speak of tourism gentrification and commercial gentrification (Lees et al. 2016). In Lisbon, the flows of capital in the real estate market, combined with the shift to tourism, explain gentrification more fully than do alternative accounts that focus on consumer demand or cultural preferences of a new middle class for upscale neighborhoods. Especially in the context of the post-financial crisis, the social and economic urban structure of Lisbon was profoundly transformed to embrace the growing demand of international tourism. Tourism in the inner city of Lisbon is perceived as a kind of “panacea” that can cure all of its diseases. There has been some discussion lately about whether touristification is a kind of gentrification, since both processes often share common traits (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1990; Law 2002; Gotham 2005; Ashworth and Page 2011; Hiernaux and González 2014; Cócola-Gant 2015; Delgadillo 2015; Lees et al. 2016). This tourism fever cannot be understood without looking at the increasing mesh of gentrification into global systems of real estate and banking finance, as well as the ideology of the free market, austerity urban regime, and financialization of society and economy, which curiously have been advanced as a cure for the problems created by the capitalist crisis of 2008–2010, when in fact they are the very cause of the whole problem of financial deregulation.

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One of the early seminal works on the subject is Gotham’s study (2005) of New Orleans’s Vieux Carré. In it, Gotham (Ibid., 1100) coins the concept of tourism gentrification “to highlight the role of state policy in encouraging both gentrification and tourism development, and the actions of large entertainment corporations.” This concept also helps to explain the “transformation of a middle-class neighborhood into a relatively affluent and exclusive enclave marked by a proliferation of corporate entertainment and tourism venues” (Ibid., 1102). Expanding the definition of Gotham and opening the doors of the conceptual framework for the empirical reality of Lisbon, in this essay I understand “tourism gentrification” as the transformation of popular and working-class neighborhoods of the inner city into consumption places and tourism sites, so that the recreation, leisure or lodging functions begin to gradually replace the residential and commercial traditional functions, emptying the neighborhoods of their original population. Historically, the historical center of Lisbon has been home to diverse groups of people. Over the past ten years especially, however, property prices have increased. This, coupled with the economic crisis, financial austerity and the new law on urban rental (bulwark of a neoliberal turn in legal and urban policy frame) legitimized the “tourism panacea” in the city center. Escalating rents have pushed out the poor people and immigrants, so that the tourist attractions, restaurants, entertainment bars and shops for visitors and tourists now dominate much of the central districts. I argue that this shift in capital flows to the real estate market of tourist accommodation, combined with the growth of tourism and, lately, with a neoliberal trend increasing in the urban regeneration policies, all together reinforce the importance of activities aimed for tourism consumption and encourage displacement and gentrification (Mendes 2016a and 2016b). In Portugal, since the 1970s, successive laws dealing with the rehabilitation of the housing stock acted as a brake on advancing gentrification, hindering the process of eviction of tenants from their homes (Mendes 2006, 2008 and 2014). Typically, Lisbon’s gentrification begins with some families seeking small spaces available in rundown neighborhoods that offer environments suitable for alternative lifestyles (for example, avantgarde artists or gay and lesbian communities). This first wave corresponds to an embryonic process of gentrification, according to Mendes (2006), which develops slowly and intermittently, manifesting itself in urban space in a random and fragmented manner, on a small scale circumscribed to a few homes or, at most, a few blocks in a neighborhood. This initial stage of gentrification, observable in areas in the center of Lisbon and other cities in Southern Europe, must be distinguished from the patterns of gentrification as a global urban strategy at the service of the revanchist city and the neoliberal offensive that underlies it, which is more widespread in cities in the Anglo-Saxon world.

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Lisbon’s gentrification, for decades, was characterized by stage one— “pioneering gentrification”—according to Clay’s model (1979). New residents of a neighborhood, often with more access to financial resources and cultural/social capital, move into traditionally working-class neighborhoods. They renovate property, usually using private capital because mortgages are unavailable due to the perceived risk of the area. Little or no displacement occurs at this stage, as existing properties are often vacant and new properties are built on unused land. However, this is changing. Gentrification in Lisbon is expanding very rapidly and aggressively, due to intense touristification and a neoliberal shift in urban policies, especially urban renewal and urban leases. Stage three of gentrification is in the making for the last ten years, after a quick stage two. Stage two—“Expanding gentrification”—is about spreading the word about the emerging “viability” of the neighborhood. Perceptive realtors begin offering property in and around the area. The associated financial risk implicit in stage one is minimized, but not eliminated: large-scale developers are still wary of injecting capital into the area, but small developers do. Displacement begins, as the stock of available housing falls and rents begin increasing. Small mortgages start becoming available and renovation may expand to adjacent blocks. Buildings may be held for purposes of real estate speculation, as landlords and property owners see emergent changes to the area. In stage three—“Adolescent gentrification”—more risk-averse people may start moving into the neighborhood, as there exists growing consensus that the area is a “safe investment.” Gentrifiers, old and new, may band together into associations to exert additional political and social pressure to further the gentrifying process (i.e., neighborhood associations, business improvement associations, historical preservation societies, etc.). Rents increase dramatically at this point and class struggle between gentrifiers/tourists and older residents becomes most pronounced. Media attention develops as physical changes to the area become more evident and external private capital (loans, mortgages, and the like) becomes more easily available. Tourist apartments, serviced apartments and local lodging (which are tourist lodging) are relatively recent products in the hospitality industry. However, these have gained popularity in recent years, representing a significant competitor for conventional hotels. Mainly for vacations and city-breaks, tourist lodgings often offer a more central location, a very “local,” “authentic” and informal stay, providing the possibility of accommodating a whole family or groups of friends, at affordable prices. Tourist lodging apartments can be individual or included in a fully dedicated building, and can be managed by an operator or by its owner. Renting whole homes through sites like Airbnb and Booking.com has become the central focus of the ongoing debate over short-term rentals in Lisbon in the last couple of years. Opponents—including some neighborhood groups and associations, the hotel industry and affordable housing

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advocates—have called on the city to keep rentals of entire homes illegal, arguing that they cut into the housing supply for residents and can disrupt neighborhoods by driving out stable, long-term homeowners or tenants. Proponents say being able to rent a house to tourists—often for more money and less problems than dealing with a long-term tenant— encourages the redevelopment of blighted properties and can provide needed income for owners, especially in a period of economic and financial crisis. For corporate tourism and relocated professionals, “serviced apartments,” which are typically subject to tourist apartment legislation (unlike Local Lodging), are also an increasingly popular alternative. This set of drivers has brought great momentum to the regeneration of Lisbon’s historical center, a market where national and international investors have identified good investment potential to purchase, regenerate and maximize their return in the future. All this has caused an increased refurbishment in the buildings of the historical center, contributing to a continuous growth of the supply of this type of accommodation (JLL 2015). Despite the high growth, this still is a “non-consolidated” market, with very recent legislation and with no statistical data, which makes its measurement difficult. Before the implementation of Tourist Lodging legislation, in 2014, some of these establishments were identified as residential units and not specifically for tourist use. In JLL (2015) research, it is estimated that this type of accommodation has around 3,500 to 4,000 apartments in the Lisbon market, a large part operated by individual/ informal operators. The numbers may be underestimated, especially if we include the informal non-registered apartments and the massive supply on Airbnb that are not regulated. According to some sources, these can amount to more than 13,000 apartments. On the website Airdna, which allows for the counting of the number of rooms or houses registered in Airbnb, there were 12,576 ads available in Lisbon in early July 2017 (74.6 percent corresponding to the apartment as a whole, 23.7 percent to private rooms, and a residual number of 1.7 percent for shared rooms) (see Figure 2.1). In Oporto, there were 5,436 ads (75.4 percent of which apartments and 23.6 percent private rooms). All this led to rising prices of rents and property speculation. Shortterm rental for tourist accommodation fundamentally upset residential values by introducing unsustainable commercial appreciation into residential neighborhoods. Home prices in historically significant neighborhoods have increased at excessive rates (20 percent or even 30 percent), far higher than the local incomes needed to support those prices. A significant portion of those home price increases is due to the fact that some of the properties get up to from 20 percent to 25 percent return on investment through illegal renting. It is terrible news if you are a long-term resident with no intention of moving, but are now faced with an annual property bill driven up by the appreciation effects of illegal renting.

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Regarding location, it is estimated that 85 percent of the tourist apartment supply is located in the main historical zones of Lisbon, like Castelo/Alfama, Baixa, Chiado/Bairro Alto and Príncipe Real (see Figure 2.2). However, due to its informal characterization there is no reliable information about it. Compared to a review made last year, the prices have slightly dropped, due to the pressure of increasing supply, mainly of apartments of individual operators, by the platform Airbnb or Booking.com. The continuous growth of this market is expected and many refurbishment projects are appearing. Tourist excesses are similar to other cities like San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam or Venice. Urban tourism in its various forms has experienced great expansion in the early twenty-first century. In addition to luxury hotels, rehabilitated buildings in the inner city of Lisbon have been used for the increasingly high supply of accommodation for young and modest tourists, through “hostels,” the private offering on Airbnb or other online platforms, or short rental apartments. This mass demand for Lisbon as a tourist destination is accelerating gentrification, among other social and economic impacts in the urban fabric. Not respected (because not known), the tourism carrying capacity of the various neighborhoods of the old district is leading to overcrowding equipment, infrastructure and transportation. Traditional retail (e.g., grocery stores, bakeries, and butchers) is disappearing to give room to gourmet shops, souvenir shops, serving only tourism supply and demand. There

Figure 2.1. Airbnb Lisbon property information. Source: airdna.co.

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Figure 2.2. Active Airbnb rentals in Lisbon. Source: airdna.co.

is a macrocephalous development of the local economy based on tourism, a risky trend of monofunctionality and hypertrophy of economic diversity present in other sectors, which undermines the resilience of the community (Mendes 2016a). There is also the mischaracterization of the old district, increasingly intense, with Disneyfication of historical neighborhoods and the destruction and dismemberment of social relations between old residents of the community. In most of Lisbon’s historical neighborhoods, entertainment and tourism have priced out workingclass residents and have eroded the unique and local character of the neighborhood and its identity. This destroys the authenticity, memory and identity of communities, which constitute the tourist attractions for visitors and tourists in the first place (Mendes 2016b). The destruction of the rental market and the displacement and eviction of former residents are being used in order to create various forms of tourist accommodation, often luxury apartments. Property owners are betting on tourist lodging (also known as local lodging), because they

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consider it to be a more profitable and safe investment due to the general instability of the classical lease arrangements/long-term housing. Many owners find that investing in tourist accommodation is safer and allows for more efficient and rapid reproduction of real estate capital. From the perspective of tenants, the commitment of the owners to short rental accommodation affects the supply of homes for leasing and increases the price of rent to unaffordable values for the majority of the families already living in the neighborhood. The investment is also more profitable under the existing tax regime. The tax regime discriminates between classic leasing and renting to tourists. The normal/classic lease has a tax rate on income of 28 percent, while the lease to tourists only has a tax rate of 15 percent. Tourist lodging can have positive effects on the regeneration of urban centers in heritage rehabilitation, and social diversification, in addition to the income of residents in job creation and economic recovery, but its oversupply reduces the supply of rentals to anyone living (or trying to live) in the city. Today, many investors buy entire buildings (mainly to rehabilitate) with the goal of renting them to tourists, especially in centers of Lisbon and Oporto. In the districts of Santa Maria Maior and Mercês alone, in the center of Lisbon, there are about 2,700 units of local tourist accommodation, about 8.8 percent of the national supply. Renting a house in the cities of Lisbon and Oporto has become almost impossible. The problem is not only the increasingly high value of the lease, but above all the lack of homes available for renting. According to data collected by the newspaper Jornal de Negócios (2016), the number of houses for renting has decreased 75 percent in Lisbon and 85 percent in Oporto. Some authors have noted that direct displacement no longer seems to have as much meaning in the context of new forms of state action, corporate-led gentrification and larger political economic shifts. Marcuse (1986) has proposed the concept of exclusionary displacement when the costly prices of rehabilitated real estate prevent families or businesses from moving into a place. Later on, this process became known as indirect displacement. No eviction as such has been put into action but denying the access of the least privileged groups to rehabilitated real estate paves the way for allowing the wealthier groups in. In other cases, the displacement may be indirect because regeneration has not led to eviction, owing to the fact that the area was an industrial zone, or the housing was falling down and empty, which often happens in Lisbon’s inner-city neighborhoods, and therefore no longer offers any living conditions. The issue of indirect displacement is particularly important to my argument in order to understand the effects of excessive touristification in the eventual production of gentrification.

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MAIN DRIVERS BEHIND TOURISTIFICATION: THE NEOLIBERAL TURN ON URBAN POLICY Some of the causes behind gentrification are: the emergence of the Internet platforms that allow clients to book directly their accommodation, such as Booking.com, Airbnb, Windu, Homeaway, and more; the lack of hotels in the historical center, where at the same time, there was a huge amount of vacant properties; the attractiveness of the “authenticity” of the historical city center to a more critical and emancipated tourist demand that prefers heritage and monuments, instead of other forms of modern and massive urban tourism; the perception that the profit is higher in tourism lodging than traditional residential long-term leasing; the lack of legislation that allowed an easy entry for everyone interested in touristic lodging; the continued cheapening of international mobility, including through low-cost airlines. These factors triggered the entrance of new operators, many of them individual and informal players, creating a deregulated market with little margins of profit. Also, the unexpected increase of tourism in Portugal derives largely from the decline in tourism in several Arab countries—Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco. Lisbon has a rising fame worldwide—it is an International Brand recognized as a result of massive marketing and promotion in recent years. However, these causes are just the tip of the iceberg and the adoption of a more structural view of the process is needed, in order to discover the forces behind it. A combination of factors has led to enormous new pressures on the housing market, leveraged by the combination of liberalization of the urban lease law, the gains in tourist accommodation short rental, and broad benefits of the international real estate investment. In 2015 alone, housing prices in central Lisbon increased 23 percent, and throughout the city about 12 percent (Confidencial Imobiliário 2016), a trend that seems to last for 2016. The problems of access to housing in the historic areas of Lisbon and Oporto and other problems related with the tourist boom have to be understood in the context of a neoliberal turn registered in Portugal at the level of urban and fiscal policies since the beginning of the twenty-first century, promoting stimulus to the market and private initiative. Urban rehabilitation has been one of local government’s priority lines of action over the last decades. By attracting new residents and encouraging the population to settle in the historical quarters of the city, specific new social and economic dynamics have been set in motion that have generated development in the oldest areas of downtown Lisbon. Coming under the various measures to be taken for the city and falling within the framework of the Lisbon Strategic Plan (2002), it is a foregone conclusion that the city will never be an attractive place to live and work in if it is unable to solve its serious housing problem. Therefore, during the 1990s, the

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local government’s commitment to upgrading housing in the city as a whole, particularly in downtown neighborhoods, has been decisive for redressing the socio-urban balance. All urban rehabilitation programs launched by the government since the mid-1970s have led to rehabilitating and upgrading existing buildings in the historical city center of Lisbon by respecting collective public interests (Mendes 2008, 2013 and 2014). While in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the government showed social concerns in urban regeneration policy, since the beginning of the 2000s, a neoliberal frame of reference has set in. The new urban policy of rehabilitation is much more market-oriented and therefore marked by the logic of promoting consumption and competitiveness among cities and the role of private actors in the planning process and city production. Most urban neoliberal governments believe that private investment, when encouraged by the market, creates jobs and wealth and directly produces social welfare in the city. It is recognized that the abandoned urban areas or the ones in the process of decline can be truly an opportunity to attract private investment and ensure the reproduction of real estate capital. One of the important reforms proposed by the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika was the new regime of urban rental, also known as the New Urban Rental Scheme (NRAU—Novo Regime de Arrendamento Urbano), promulgated in November 2012. Displacement has been a hallmark of the new law of urban rental, since it facilitates the eviction if the landlord/owner claims to want the house for his own home or descendants, or if he wishes to make structural renovations. NRAU aims at terminating lease agreements concluded before the 1990s, without guaranteeing the rights of tenants. The growing demand for rentals as a result of the market crisis in construction and real estate and the lack of affordable rental supply determined that the reform of urban rental was assumed as a priority in housing. The reform of urban rental in 2006 failed to give a sufficient answer to the main problems faced by the urban leases, especially those related to contracts made prior to 1990, with the difficulty of carrying out rehabilitation works in rental real estate and with a complex and lengthy eviction procedure (Mendes 2014 and 2016a; Alves, Pereira and Rafeiro 2015; Mendes and Carmo 2016). The residential market experienced major difficulties during the crisis, causing severe consequences due to the lack of bank financing and the huge cuts in Portuguese incomes. In an attempt to overcome such difficult times, the government launched two programs to attract foreign investment: Golden Visas and the Non-Habitual Resident Tax Regime. The Golden Visa Program, launched in 2012, is a fast track for foreign investors from non-EU countries to obtain a fully valid residency permit in Portugal and to travel freely within the vast majority of European countries (Schengen space) in exchange for a real estate investment in the minimum amount of 500,000 euros. With extremely reduced minimum

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stay requirements, the Golden Visa has been considered one of the most attractive residency programs for investors in the world. 1 This fiscal program boosted the development of several guest houses, hostels and tourist apartments, usually located in the historical center, where there was a lack of supply. Investors looking for Golden Visas saw in the tourist lodging market an opportunity to obtain profits from their assets. The orientation of the real estate capital, under the Golden Visa program for the production of housing products or luxury accommodation, clearly demonstrates that this is a case of super-gentrification, as coined by Lees (2003), when specifically inner-city areas become the focus of intense investment and conspicuous consumption by a new generation of super-rich “financifiers,” a true transnational capitalist class, fed by fortunes from the global finance and corporate service industries. The non-habitual resident tax regime (NHR) was introduced in 2009, providing very favorable conditions for citizens (foreign or national) who decide to establish their tax residence in Portugal and who have not received any income in the country for the last five years at least. The Portuguese Non-Habitual Residency status enables those who become tax residents in Portugal, and are accepted as NHR, the opportunity to receive qualifying income tax-free both in Portugal and in the country of the source of the income. The NHR regime represents a major step forward in making Portugal a tax-free jurisdiction for individuals in receipt of qualifying non-resident income. Qualifying income includes pensions, dividends, royalties and interest income. This status is granted for ten years and does not incur any costs. Portugal has been regaining the confidence of international and national investors in the past three years, while tourism has been growing and Lisbon has become one of the leading European capitals in this respect. The combination of these factors, driven by further incentive to foreign investment programs and the growing importance of this segment in urban regeneration revitalized the residential market metrics. Concerning tax issues, special importance is given to the new regime applied to taxes levied on property investment funds that are created and operate under the terms stipulated in the national legislation (“FII—Fundos de Investimento Imobiliário,” Property Investment Funds), both in contractual and societal terms. The new regime was approved by Decree Law 7/2015, of 13 January (DL 7/2015) and means that the FIIs will no longer be taxed on most of the income earned. The FIIs’ typical income, especially real estate income and capital gains (that were until the passing of the law subject to the rates of 25 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively), shall no longer be subject to taxation. All these fiscal programs allowed Portugal to create an “offshore haven” that offers unique conditions of return on real estate investments, devoid of any obligations toward paying taxes to the state (JLL 2015).

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Recent changes in the fiscal system and new regulations for Local Lodging Establishments (tourist lodging), have also driven apartment purchases, with the intention of placing them on the rental market for short-term stays. The understanding abroad is that this is a golden opportunity to acquire real estate in Portugal for tourist lodging. In November 2014, the government created a law to regulate the Local Lodging market. According to it, Local Lodging is any residential unit with authorization for a temporary accommodation in return for remuneration, but lacking conditions for being considered a touristic development. Villas, apartments or lodging establishments composed of bedrooms, like hostels, are included in this regime. This registration in the city council by the operators is free and a mandatory condition to operate. After the registration, the establishment will be subjected to an inspection, in order to avoid any misinterpretation of the law. The intention initially was that this procedure would enable the control of this market and also to follow the trends of this new and increasingly demanding market. However, after two years of implementation, the operators clearly realize that this law does not regulate the market, because it is too liberal, due to the reduced monitoring capacity on the part of the competent authorities, allowing illegal competition from unlicensed establishments. Many others came out in support of the law, arguing it would make it easier for authorities to clamp down on illegal holiday rentals and unfair competition, while also making this type of accommodation safer for tourists. Another important cause for the increase of tourism gentrification is the huge amount of vacant properties in advanced degradation and abandonment. There has been an increase of rent gap in Lisbon’s inner city: real estate devaluation produced by degradation and poor maintenance of buildings serves as a real estate investment opportunity. The dynamics of capitalist investment and disinvestment cycles explains how the stages of constructing the built environment and spatial form work, as well as urban regeneration. The value of land in the suburbs has increased significantly with the growth of new buildings and infrastructures, as well as with the resulting introduction of a multiplicity of activities in these spaces during the formation of the metropolitan area of Lisbon (since 1950). The original value of the central quarters, by contrast, has seen an opposite trend and has suffered a gradual decline owing to the fact that increasingly less capital has been channeled to and invested in the upkeep, repair and recovery of the housing located in these innercity areas. This phenomenon caused what Neil Smith (1979 and 1987) called the emergence of the rent gap in the city-center’s quarters—accentuating the difference between the actual ground rent capitalized from the present (depressed) land use and the potential rent that may be capitalized from the highest and best use given the central location. It is this transfer of capital to the suburbs and the subsequent appearance of the rent gap in the central urban space that, according to the author, affords

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more economic opportunities to rebuild the central quarters and make more public and private investments to rehabilitate and recover their housing park. Lisbon has almost 5,000 vacant buildings in poor condition or crumbling, 2,812 buildings are included in the category of “partially vacant” (degraded and uninhabited fractions) and 1,877 in the “completely vacant” category (abandoned and without recovery license), according to a survey of the Lisbon city council (Roseta 2009). These 4,689 decaying buildings are equivalent to 8 percent of the total of 60,000 existing buildings in the capital. In other words, almost one in ten properties is considered vacant. This is an extremely favorable condition for the development of the rent gap, also associated to the highly attractive tax policy for foreign investment in vacant real estate available in the city center. CONCLUSION The Golden Visa and the NHR programs, the new urban lease law, the new tax regime for Property Investment Funds, the new law on tourist lodging, along with an intense rent gap in the inner city, as well as a strong growth in tourism in the city of Lisbon, introduced significant changes in the residential market, which went from an abrupt pause to a high level of demand, with supply now beginning to fall short. This led to a very quick take-up of the new and good quality residential stock that was available, located mostly in the city’s historical center. The rapid take-up of apartments, the new tourism drivers—with an “alternative” demand for stays in apartments—and tax incentives to boost urban regeneration have created renewed interest among many national and international developers, leading to a great rise in the refurbishment of buildings in Lisbon’s historical district. Through a neoliberal turn on fiscal and urban policies—driven by the capitalist international austerity intervention since 2008–2009—both national and urban governments have discovered the potential in regenerating inner city traditional housing areas, in order to increase the competitiveness of the city and certain neighborhoods in the global context of urban competition. Today, the city of Lisbon is undeniably the focus of great international interest. That effect was visible at first in the tourism market, but lately the city has also been attracting significant foreign investment into the residential sector. Urban regeneration is a spatial strategy in which prestigious urban uses have been increasing through private sector investments in public areas. Recent urban regeneration is a primary tool in the restructuring of Portuguese cities and is devised as a government-assisted urban spatial strategy to achieve gentrification indirectly (state-led gentrification).

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These developments have opened new discussions on the displacement of lower-income groups and gentrification of inner cities in the country. New trends in urban policies, from the beginning of the twenty-first century, mainly oriented to a hegemonic touristification in the historical districts of Lisbon, have fostered the emergence of more aggressive forms of tourist and commercial gentrification, which seem to lead to displacement (even indirect displacement), worsening of residential segregation and socio-spatial fragmentation. Physical structure and environmental conditions have changed. The poor, immigrant and aged population have been displaced from the inner city area, and the higher income groups have taken over the area. With this transformation, the area has been restructured according to the expectations of the local and national authorities and increased rent has been facilitated. These conclusions strengthen the idea that gentrification is effective in the tourism-led regeneration process and this is evolving in Lisbon’s inner city to another level of neoliberal urbanism. NOTES 1. http://goldenvisa-portugal.com/FAQ.html.

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Confidencial Imobiliário. 2016. “Preço das casas em Lisboa recupera 22% nos últimos 3 anos.” May 23. http://www.confidencialimobiliario.com/?q=content/press-releasepreco-das-casas-em-lisboa-recupera-22-nos-ultimos-3-anos. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2013. The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society . London: Verso. Davidson, Mark and Loretta Lees. 2005. “New-build gentrification and London's riverside renaissance.” Environment and Planning A 37: 1165–90. Delgadillo, Victor. 2015. “Patrimonio urbano, turismo y gentrificación.” In Perspectivas del Estudio de la Gentrificacíon en México y América Latina, edited by Víctor Delgadillo, Ibán Díaz and Luis Salinas, 113–32. Coyoacán: Instituto de Geografía, UNAM. Eckardt, Frank and Javier Sánchez. 2015. City of Crisis. The Multiple Contestation of Southern European Cities. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Gotham, Kevin. 2005. “Tourism Gentrification: The Case of New Orleans’ Vieux Carre (French Quarter).” Urban Studies 42 (7): 1099–121. Hackworth, Jason. 2007. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism. New York: Cornell University Press. Hall, Tim. 1998. Urban Geography. London: Routledge. Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard. 1996. “The entrepreneurial city: new urban politics, new urban geographies?” Progress in Human Geography 20 (2): 153–74. Harvey, David. 1989. “From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler 71B (1): 3–17. ———. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. ———. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiernaux, Daniel and Carmen González. 2014. “Turismo y gentrificación: pistas teóricas sobre una articulación.” Revista de Geografía Norte Grande 58: 55–70. Jessop, Bob. 2016. The State: Past, Present, Future. Cambridge: Polity Press. JLL. 2015. “Apartamentos Turísticos em Lisboa. Um Mercado em Crescimento.” May. http://www.jll.pt/portugal/pt-pt/Research/JLL_Research%20Report_ Tourist%20Apartments_PT.pdf?747075763–55f-45e1-ac0c-7c502d986736. Jonas, Andre, Eugene McCann and Mary Thomas. 2015. Urban Geography. A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Jornal de Negócios. 2016. “Casas para arrendar desaparecem do mercado.” August 8. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/rendas/detalhe/casas_para_arrendar_ desaparecem_do_mercado.html. Law, Christopher. 2002. Urban Tourism. The Visitor Economy And The Growth Of Large Cities. London and New York: Continuum. Lees, Loretta. 2003. “Super-gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City.” Urban Studies 40 (12): 2487–509. Lees, Loretta, Hyon Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales (Eds.). 2016. Planetary Gentrification. Bristol: Policy Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 2000. La Production de l’Espace. Paris: Anthropos. Ley, David. 1980. “Liberal ideology and the postindustrial city.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 (2): 238–58. Lisbon Municipal Council. 2002. Plano Estratégico de Lisboa. Lisboa: Directorate of the Lisbon Municipal Council Strategic Plan. Lojkine, Jean. 1997. O Estado Capitalista e a Questão Urbana. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Marcuse, Peter. 1986. “Abandonment, gentrification and displacement: the linkages in New York City.” In Gentrification of the City, edited by Neil Smith and Peter Williams, 153–77. London: Allen & Unwin. Mendes, Luís. 2006. “A nobilitação urbana no Bairro Alto: análise de um processo de recomposição socio-espacial.” Finisterra 46 (81): 57–82.

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———. 2008. “A Nobilitação Urbana no Bairro Alto: Análise de um Processo de Recomposição Sócio-espacial.” Master’s diss., Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon. ———. 2013. “Public policies on urban rehabilitation and their effects on gentrification in Lisbon.” AGIR, Revista Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais e Humanas 1 (5): 200–18. ———. 2014. “Gentrificação e políticas de reabilitação urbana em Portugal: uma análise crítica à luz da tese rent gap de Neil Smith.” Cadernos Metrópole 16 (32): 487–511. ———. 2016a. “Tourism gentrification: touristification as Lisbon’s new urban frontier of gentrification.” Master Class Tourism Gentrification and City Making, Stadslab and Academia Cidadã, Lisbon, 16 April. [mimeo] ———. 2016b. “What can be done to resist or mitigate tourism gentrification in Lisbon? Some Policy Findings & Recommendations.” In City Making & Tourism Gentrification, edited by Marc Glaudemans and Igor Marko, 34–41. Tilburg: Stadslab. Mendes, Luís and André Carmo. 2016. “State-led gentrification in an era of neoliberal urbanism: examining the new urban lease regime in Portugal.” Paper presented at the International Conference Contested Cities, From contested cities to global urban justice—critical dialogues, Madrid, Spain, July 4–7. Peck, Jamie. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. “Austerity urbanism.” City 16 (6): 626–55. ———. 2015. Austerity Urbanism. The Neoliberal Crisis of American Cities. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Peck, Jamie and Nik Theodore. 2015. Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peck, Jamie and Heather Whiteside. 2016. “Financializing the entrepreneurial city.” In Urban Austerity: Impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on Cities in Europe, edited by Barbara Schöning and Sebastian Schipper, 21–39. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Rodrigues, João and Nuno Teles. 2015. “O neoliberalismo como intervencionismo de mercado.” In Correntes Invisíveis: Neoliberalismo no Século XXI, edited by Luís Bernardo, 71–82. Lisboa: Deriva. Rodrigues, João, Ana Santos and Nuno Teles. 2016. A Financeirização do Capitalismo em Portugal. Lisboa: Actual. Roseta, Helena (Ed.). 2009. Programa Local de Habitação de Lisboa. Relatório da 1ª Fase. Vol.1. Lisboa: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Rossi, Ugo and Alberto Vanolo. 2015. “Urban Neoliberalism.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 846–53. Volume 24. London: Elsevier. Santos, Ana, Nuno Teles and Nuno Serra. 2014. Finança e Habitação em Portugal. Coimbra: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra, Observatório sobre Crises e Alternativas. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. New York: Harvard University Press. Savage, Mike and Alan Warde. 1993. Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Macmillan. Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro. 2015. “Crisis and the city: neoliberalism, austerity planning and the production of space.” In City of Crisis. The Multiple Contestation of Southern European Cities, edited by Frank Eckardt and Javier Sánchez, 32–49. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Seixas, João, Simone Tulumello, Susana Corvelo and Ana Drago. 2015. “Dinâmicas sociogeográficas e políticas na Área Metropolitana de Lisboa em tempos de crise e de austeridade.” Cadernos Metrópole 17 (34): 371–99. Slater, Tom. 2013. “Gentrification of the City.” In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 571–85. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Smith, Neil. 1979. “Toward a theory of gentrification: a back to the city movement by capital not people.” Journal of the American Planning Association 45: 538–48. ———. 1987. “Gentrification and the rent gap.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (3): 462–65.

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———. 1996. The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Steger, Manfred and Ravik Roy. 2013. Introdução ao Neoliberalismo. Lisboa: Actual. Storper, Michael. 2016. “The Neo-Liberal City as Idea and Reality.” Territory, Politics, Governance 4 (2): 241–63. Tulumello, Simone. 2015. “Reconsidering neoliberal urban planning in times of crisis: urban regeneration policy in a ‘dense’ space in Lisbon.” Urban Geography 37 (1): 117–40. Zwiers, Merle, Bolt Gideon, Maarten Van Ham and Ronald Van Kempen. 2016. “The global financial crisis and neighborhood decline.” Urban Geography 37 (5): 664–84.

II

Resisting the Crisis

THREE The Anti-Austerity Protest Cycle in Portugal The Ambiguous Relations Between Social Movements and Left-Wing Political Parties Dora Fonseca

Worldwide protests from 2011 to 2013 took place in a context of acute crisis. Directed at governments and austerity supporters, they also fostered an increasing division between political elites in terms of solutions to the crisis. On the other hand, taking after Dagnino (1998), collective actors at stake in this chapter fought for the right to participate in the definition of the very system they act upon. In Portugal, the anti-austerity protest cycle was launched by a protest announced as “nonpartisan, secular and pacific.” From 2011 to 2013, social movement protests tried to keep their distance from partisan logics in order to maintain a neutrality that would grant them a broader character. However, have they succeeded in keeping their distance from political parties, particularly those on the Left? How did the anti-austerity movement and its social movement organizations (SMOs) interact with those traditional political actors? Were they immune to any influence whatsoever? Were they safe from co-optation and instrumentalization? These are the research questions underlying this chapter. The cycle of antiausterity contention between 2010 and 2013 in Portugal reveals a complex picture, where traditional actors, including trade unions and leftwing political parties, emerge as key actors.

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Among southern European countries, in the period of recession, Portugal emerged as an interesting case given the high volume of protests and the fact that those tended to evolve into cohesive organizations of a national scope that, in turn, created wide coalitions and established alliances with unions and left-wing political parties (Fernandes 2017). Such singularity has been attributed to the interplay of two features: on the one hand, in comparison with other countries, a less severe impact of austerity measures; and, on the other, the political and institutional context facilitated the availability of allies, voice and resources for social movements (Ibid). Taking after a set of authors anchored on the political process theory, who have developed the political opportunity structure model (POS), my goal in this chapter is to elaborate on this contentious matter. The empirical background is the 2011–2013 protest cycle in Portugal. The findings of this chapter are based on ethnographic and participant observation that I conducted during those years, including a number of interviews with SMO members—Precários Inflexíveis (Inflexible Precarious), 15-O, Que se Lixe a Troika (Screw the Troika), Geração à Rasca (Desperate Generation), Ferve (Tired of These Green Receipts) and Plataforma dos Intermitentes do Espectáculo e do Audiovisual (Platform of the Intermittent of Show and Audio-visual)—and members of left-wing political parties represented in parliament—Socialist Party (PS), Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and Left Bloc (BE). The Socialist Party is a center-left party, with a social democratic platform (although the party has tilted to the center since the mid-1990s, following the more general trend in European social democratic parties). The Portuguese Communist Party is an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party, with a democratic centralist organization and with an umbilical connection to the main trade union confederation—the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP). The Left Bloc is a far-left party that considers itself a “movement party” (BE 2016), with strong links with social movements, and akin to Greece’s Syriza. The chapter starts by discussing the theoretical framework: Political Opportunity Structure. The second section addresses the relation between austerity and participation, while the third section introduces the role of social movements under austerity. The subsequent section discusses the main empirical findings from my fieldwork. The chapter closes with a summary of the findings. POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE: A FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS The life cycle, strategies and organizational forms of SMOs are influenced by internal and external contexts (Zald and Ash 1966). The consolidation of a precarious society and the austerity regime (Soeiro 2015) made up

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the external context in which SMOs and movement platforms addressed in this chapter were shaped and influenced the option for certain strategies. Those options were also influenced by institutional attitudes toward the new collective actors. The reactions of formal political actors to the claims of social movements were a key factor. As highlighted by Fernandes (2017), the political and institutional context was favorable to protest, providing recognition, allies and support. Social movement success is thought to go hand in hand with a decrease in autonomy (Zald and Ash 1966), which, alongside the incorporation of some of their claims by political parties, can mean a greater interest for more conventional forms of doing politics. In parallel, more traditional means of protest like political strikes have regained relevance (Campos Lima and Martin Artiles 2011 and 2014; Costa, Dias and Soeiro 2014). The political context is of considerable importance for the mobilization and impact of new social movements (NSMs). Such impact varies according to specific characteristics. Kriesi and associates (1995) propose a political opportunity structure (POS) model composed by four components: national cleavage structures; institutional structures; informal procedures and prevailing strategies; and alliance structures. These components maintain a more or less systematic relation amongst themselves. The first three correspond to stable elements of the POS, while the fourth is an unstable element. This model presents the advantage of emphasizing the distinction between formal institutional contexts of social movement mobilization and prevalent (informal) strategies used by political authorities to deal with collective actors. The combined effects of the four components vary according to the type of social movement. Differently from identity-oriented movements, in the case of instrumental social movements, all four are relevant. Political opportunities also vary according to political domains. For my purposes, alliance structure is the most relevant component. It is the most unstable of the four and is in part determined by the other three (more stable) components. 1 The concerns of the Left and those of new social movements are thought to be closely related. In particular, new Left political parties appeal to the same constituency as new social movements, pursue the same goals as these movements to a large extent, and resort to forms of political action close to those of new social movements. One consequence is that both the mobilization capacity of new social movements and their political success are, according to Kriesi and associates (1995), expected to depend closely on the support they receive from the organizations of the Left. It is important to clarify that the framework of analysis proposed by the aforementioned authors relies on the distinction between the old and the new Left, one here considered acceptable though not without some criticism as such a distinction may be somewhat blurred nowadays. The authors develop two aspects in particular: the configuration of power on the Left and the presence or absence of the Left in government.

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Kriesi and associates (1995) distinguish between strong and weak states. Strong states are at the same time autonomous with respect to their environment and capable of getting things done, whereas weak states not only lack autonomy but also the capacity to act. The authors recognize this distinction to be a very crude and systematic one. The truth is that the strength of any given state varies from one policy domain or one period to another. Nevertheless, such distinction is believed to be useful for conceptualizing the general outlines of the national political context in which social movements operate. The strength of the state is a function of two general structural parameters: the degree of (territorial) centralization of the state and the degree of its (functional) separation of power. Another useful distinction is between exclusive (repressive, confrontational, polarizing) and integrative (facilitative, cooperative, assimilative) informal procedures and prevailing strategies of the state with respect to challengers. In the case of exclusive states, more than in inclusive ones, the parties of the old Left and trade unions are more willing to support social movement action, given that they are similarly confined to extra-parliamentary action. Such tendency is stronger when strong states are combined with exclusive strategies. In the case of inclusive regimes, characterized by the presence of negotiation strategies and commitment, extra-parliamentary action weakens the position of social actors because it violates the rules of the game. For the purposes of this chapter, Portugal is considered a strong state relying on exclusive strategies. The support of the old Left to NSMs can happen in situations where the latter bring forth issues that also mobilize the old Left’s traditional social bases. When a militant old Left in an exclusive regime is willing to support social movements that appeal to the concerns of a constituency closely related to its own, one should bear in mind that a) the presence of a non-pacified old Left limits the space of action of new social movements, and b) a militant old Left will only be ready to support new social movements on its own terms. When non-pacified, divisions are usually between social democrats and communists. The importance of the organizational and ideological makeup, as well as the strategies of the “two parts” of the Left depend to a large extent on the institutional structures and prevailing strategies of a given country (Kriesi et al., 1995). The heritage of the prevailing strategies to deal with the challengers has a lasting impact on the strategies and the structure of the old Left. The heritage of exclusive strategies contributes to the radicalization and split between Left currents. The split between Left currents may foster the further radicalization of the labor movement. Such a tradition of extra-parliamentary action is likely to continue to affect the labor movement’s strategies with regard to new social movements. Given that, parties of the old Left and the labor movement are seen as more likely to support the actions of new social movements in

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exclusive regimes. This tendency will be reinforced by the fact that exclusive strategies affect not only the relations between new social movements and polity members but also those among polity members themselves (which are more polarized in exclusive regimes, and, therefore, more likely to confront each other by way of extra-parliamentary mobilization). In the context of a split Left, the trade union context is also split along party lines (with the communists typically taking the dominant position). An alliance with NSMs can be quite promising for electoral purposes, as long as the concerns of those movements can be reformulated in terms of the classic struggle of the labor movement, and as long as the Left remains in the opposition. A pacified old Left may become an ally of new social movements if it comes under competition of a new Left or if it is captured by the new Left. If challenged by a new Left competitor, the party from the old Left will be likely to take some facilitative steps in the direction of NSMs. The facilitation of the mobilization of NSMs by a pacified old Left depends on the degree of competition the latter has to face from the new Left, and on the extent to which the new Left succeeds in gaining influence over the organizations of the old Left. In opposition to a militant, split old Left, a pacified old Left is more likely to be transformed under the impact of the mobilization of the new Left. Political parties’ openness is also a relevant factor, depending on the electoral system, prevailing strategies concerning challengers, and the extent to which the new forces themselves have chosen to work through the old parties. New Left parties have generally remained rather small in electoral terms and have rarely participated in governments. Their presence is thought to play an important facilitating role concerning the campaigns of NSMs. The chances of alliances between political parties and NSMs increase when the Left is in the opposition because it will benefit from the challenges posed by NSMs to the government, especially when those challenges are moderate and considered legitimate by a large part of the electorate. As a part of the government, the Left is limited by institutional politics and pressures from dominant social forces, and will make compromises with regard to their electoral promises. Moreover, its reelection depends on whether it is able to be responsive to working-class concerns as well as capable of making concessions to groups that support NSMs (usually, the middle classes) (Kriesi et al. 1995). Although possible, cooperation between a Left government and NSMs is a remote possibility because there is always the risk that the actions of NSMs will get out of control. In general, when the Left is in government a decrease of mobilization levels is expected for two reasons: reforms that can benefit social movements are more likely and social movements lose their most powerful ally. It is worth mentioning that the relationship between the Left and NSMs can vary according to the type of social movement. Also, the de-

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gree to which changes in the composition of government will affect the opportunities of NSMs will vary according to the strength of the state apparatus, the exclusiveness of elite strategies, and the details of the composition of the government. According to Kriesi and associates (1995), the demobilizing impact of Social Democrats in power may be expected to be most pronounced in strong, exclusive states, especially when the Social Democrats govern alone. By contrast, in weak, inclusive states, where the Socialists participate in centrist, multiparty coalitions, the demobilizing effect may be very limited or may not exist at all. If the Social Democrats govern alone, they will be more able to make concessions than if they depend on a coalition partner. If they are only a minority partner in a coalition government, they may not be able to make any concessions at all. AUSTERITY AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION In Southern Europe, the driving factor for participation in demonstrations was dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (Campos Lima and Martín Artiles 2013). This dissatisfaction was associated with changes observed in Portugal after 2011 brought about by the Memorandum of Understanding, namely rising unemployment, which amplified the probability of protests. The significance of austerity is not only economic, but it is also intricately connected with democracy and its erosion. Portuguese anti-austerity collective actors were part of a transnational protest cycle in which democracy was a contentious issue in the sense that efforts were made to re-signify the notions of citizenship, political representation and participation, and to counteract the substitution of economic democracy by impositions of financial markets under the form of technocratic governance (which caused general indignation) brought about by disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill 1995). Austerity and the idea of its inevitability were fostered not only by national political actors but also, and with great intensity, as Gill’s (1998) conceptualization of “new constitutionalism” associated with disciplinary neoliberalism demonstrates, by international institutions, making space for a strong debate about the (non)democratic nature of the Portuguese bailout process. Constraints imposed by the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Portuguese government, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB) and European Commission (EC)—the so-called Troika—were regarded as non-democratic. In that context, the hegemony of representative parliamentary democracy was widely questioned. Claims focused on the opening of the political decision-making processes but also on the “rehabilitation” of the political class.

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A context like the one mentioned above is not the most favorable for political parties in terms of public opinion. In fact, the public image of political parties was damaged as there was the perception that they were either powerless or compliant regarding the imposition of austerity. In that sense, reasons to protest sprung from dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (in connection to wealth, welfare and unemployment) associated with disaffection toward political parties in a general sense (Campos Lima and Martín Artiles 2013). Even though economic and social grievances played an important part, mobilization and social protest were also (or primarily) an expression of meta-political motivations (Ibid.). According to the European Social Survey’s (ESS) data for 2012, 2 the percentage of people who reported participation in at least one demonstration grew significantly between 2008 and 2012. Portugal registered one of the largest increases. Regarding electoral participation, Portugal can be considered a below-average country. It is also one where confidence in the party and parliamentary system and in democracy in general tends to be lower. Campos Lima and Martín Artiles (2013) have highlighted that findings point to discontent with the performance of the economy and the working of democracy as a contributory factor accounting for mobilization in Europe, discontent being greater among young people and those with a university education. Also, there seems to exist a correlation between people’s position on the Right/Left political spectrum and their participation in mobilizations, with people on the Left being more likely to take part in mobilizations than those on the Right. In such a context, youth’s claims tend to be channeled through social movements instead of political parties or trade unions. The Portuguese political system has been more open to mobilization and non-conventional forms of claim-making than other southern European countries (Fishman 2011). Decreasing levels of engagement with politics and of trust in political institutions are reported. Despite a solid support for democracy, there seems to exist a strong sense of “democratic disaffection,” representative of the distance of Portuguese citizens from political institutions. This has been translated into low levels of political participation and engagement, conventional (as participation in elections) and otherwise, like alternative forms of civic activism (Magalhães 2005). The gradual erosion of the weight and role of traditional forms of politics has nevertheless been punctuated by periods of intense mobilization (Accornero and Ramos Pinto 2015). Democratic disaffection also played a role in how the protest cycle unfolded. There is evidence of a decline of satisfaction with regime performance. Referring to a blend between high levels of support for democracy and citizens’ discontent with democratic performance, Magalhães (2005) stresses that growing dissatisfaction with regime performance did not foster increasing political activism or engagement among the Portu-

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guese citizenry. That has changed in 2011. Especially between March 2011 and March 2013, there was a phase of heightened conflict and contention across the social system, marked by a rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors. Those characteristics are used by Tarrow (1998) to define a protest cycle. Other characteristics, also present in the Portuguese case, are the emergence of new groups, mobilization of new actors, innovation in the repertoires of action, and the elaboration of new cognitive, cultural and ideological frames. It is worth saying that despite the levels of participation attained throughout the protest cycle, in the second half of 2013 and after, there has been a cooling down of the frequency and intensity of protests. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AUSTERITY AND DEMOCRACY Portuguese citizens tend to exhibit a frail political culture and a weak predisposition to be actively involved in public sphere matters. Consequently, collective action and social movements are “weak” (Nunes 2011). Social movements congregate “new” and “old” logics of action and are characterised by a community dimension (Estanque 2008). In Portugal, as stated by Santos (2002), the “old” social movements are “new” and NSMs are weak or non-existent, remitting to the acknowledgement of a social movement deficit. This deficit can be attributed to a number of factors: a long dictatorship that severely constrained civil and political liberties, the conservation of the Catholic Church (opposing any kind of progressive civil society), and a certain “distance from power” that precluded the emergence of contestation and opposition, among others (Hofstede 1984; Mendes and Seixas 2005; Fonseca 2016). The Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 brought an opening that made possible that the old-new social movements of the representative democracy (political parties and trade unions) assumed an enlarged presence in Portuguese society but also the emergence of NSMs (Santos 2002). These NSMs were based on the principles of participatory democracy and brought forward post-materialistic and cultural values, as well as objectives related to the satisfaction of basic needs. Atomized far-left movements and organizations also proliferated 3 (Mateus and Ramalho 2013). In that sense, the events of April facilitated the simultaneous emergence and coexistence, for a short period of time and in a very tense way, of old and new social movements in dispute over conflicting conceptions of participatory and representative democracy (Estanque 2008; Nunes and Serra 2003; Santos 2002). Afterward, the “old-new” social movements became gradually hegemonic and NSMs practically vanished, and the absence of a strong class action allowed a hyper-politicized action in periods of democratic stability and enabled the transformation of NSMs embryos into political organizations/parties (Santos 2002).

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From the 1980s onward, collective action became more local, with media expression and less ideological, and protests focused on social rights, leaving aside post-materialistic issues (Estanque 1999; Mendes and Seixas 2005). In the dawn of the 2000s, more precisely in 2003, the emergence of the Portuguese Social Forum (FSP) represented an engagement of Portuguese social movements with alter-globalization transnational action dynamics (Nunes 2011). In 2011, in a scenery of widespread contention that encompassed a number of countries, including Greece, Spain, Tunisia and Egypt, Portugal experienced a wave of protests against austerity. A number of elements that point to similarities and continuities among protests in different countries are identifiable, especially regarding forms of action and framing. Also, protest agendas and modes of organization and action stood out for being quite divorced from traditional political participation in most of the cases. In fact, protests between 2011 and 2013 entailed a political critique of the social and political order, challenging it, and calling for new and radical forms of democracy. Social movement organizations and movement platforms expressed an acute discontent focused in part on the perception that political participation and organizations like political parties and trade unions were excessively bureaucratized, which, in association with other factors, precluded a true expression of citizens’ claims and will. That being so, and as pointed out by Campos Lima and Martím Artiles (2013), most of the recent social movements operate very much in the periphery of political and trade union organizations. Social movements and SMOs here at stake are considered to be network social movements that express, as proposed by Manuel Castells (2013), revolts and personal projects anchored in multi-dimensional experiences. They are spontaneous and respond to an emotional mobilization unchained by indignation before injustice, evidencing a common pattern. Connected in multiple ways in a horizontal network pattern, mainly supported by the Internet, those social movements can avoid identifiable centers, formal leaderships and a vertical structure without jeopardizing coordination and deliberative functions. Such decentralization increases participation and reduces vulnerability to repression. Castells (Ibid.) highlights network social movements’ capacity to generate spaces of autonomy through their action. They are also viral, reflexive in nature, non-violent by principle, embrace many different claims, and seek value change. Other features worth emphasizing are the transnational nature of many of the networks that were established, a significant participation from younger cohorts, the usage of new communication technologies as mobilization tools, and the combination of material, political and identity-based demands, and particularly the establishment of new forms of organization (horizontal, direct or diffuse modes of decision-making and

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representation). It is possible to acknowledge the autonomous organization strategies of civil society—that is, detached from the state—a sign of civil society reemergence (Cohen and Arato 2000). Network social movements are less exposed to cooptation by political parties, even though the latter can capitalize on public opinion changes produced by the former (Castells 2013). Despite their engagement in political debate, social movements neither create new political parties nor support governments, albeit, as it will be discussed below, in the light of the Portuguese context, such reasoning does not hold. Even if the issue of autonomy is a central one, social movement strategy and politics are always constrained by their internal dynamics and interaction with formal politics (Kriesi et al. 1995). In spite of the fact that contemporary social movements act on and compose new organizational contexts, SMOs are by no means insulated from the outside world. They exist within political, economic and social contexts, and deal with a dynamic internal context. Changes in both produce impacts of several types (see Zald and Ash 1966). FROM NONPARTISAN TO “LEFTISH”: THE PORTUGUESE ANTI-AUSTERITY PROTEST CYCLE According to the findings of my fieldwork, autonomy was the mantra of the anti-austerity movement. Autonomy from ruling powers, political parties, vested interests, trade unionism, and so forth. Autonomy was a step in the uncertain path to an alternative project. Citizens were to take the stage that time; they would be active subjects with an active voice in political decisions. In this context, how odd was it to exclude political parties from the political game that was to take place? Adopting a partisan stance was a contentious issue inside social movement organizations throughout the entire protest cycle. It was contentious in a number of ways and constrained further developments up to a certain point. The issue of autonomy is not exactly new in the Portuguese context. In the dawn of the 2000s it was posed by the Portuguese Social Forum (PSF), which intended to be part of the alter-globalization action that asserted autonomy vis-a-vis political parties, adhering to the World Social Forum’s Chart of Principles (Nunes 2011). However, the Portuguese counterparts eliminated the prohibition of political parties’ participation. In spite of that, the presence and active involvement of political parties was a contentious issue among participants. As highlighted by Nunes (2011), political parties’ involvement influenced the possibilities of success of the forum given the cooptation of alter-globalization action by political parties and institutional politics. In reality, despite the drive for autonomy that has been mentioned, trade unions and left-wing political parties became key actors in that

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context, facilitating and sustaining the discontinuous mobilization of new forms of activism, while seeking to gain access to new constituencies through them. That acknowledgement is in line with Lisi’s (2013) findings about the linkage between radical Left parties and civil society: the first tend to represent the demands of specific social groups and mobilize new sectors. In a certain way, those findings are not surprising since, as Lisi stated, the two left-wing parties here considered—the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Left Bloc (BE)—exhibit an “anti-system” nature that has excluded them from government until the 2015 elections. Moreover, as Lisi mentions, radical Left parties characterized by masstype organizations are more likely to “encapsulate” their members and to establish close and formal links with actors from civil society sharing the same ideological profile (that would be the case of PCP), while radical Left parties with a more open organizational structure (BE) will be more prone to foster internal participation and create more distant and broader relations with civil society. 4 On the other hand, it can be argued that a nonpartisan stance was a sort of asset that allowed bringing new supporters to the “anti-austerity cause.” Before analyzing the connections between the anti-austerity movement and political parties, it is important to mention developments prior to the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika. The case of the Inflexible Precarious (PI), 5 one of the SMOs on which I conducted my fieldwork, can be considered paradigmatic regarding those relationships. The PI was created in 2007, in Lisbon (Portugal’s capital), with the goal of giving continuity to the mobilization accomplished with May Day. 6 The main goal of the PI was to act against labor precariousness, a field in which there were no active groups until then, thus filling a void. As May Day was a process that was limited in time, the constitution of an autonomous group (or social movement organization) aimed at ensuring the maintenance of social action targeting that problem seemed a logical step for those who had been involved. They were inspired by Ferve, a group from Oporto, adopting, however, a more comprehensive focus that included all forms of labor precariousness. Those disappointed with institutional dynamics and with the way political parties and trade unions operated felt attracted to the new collective actor. As an SMO, PI is informal, horizontal, with no hierarchies or formal leadership, and resistant to whatever form of bureaucracy. These characteristics were adopted in order to prevent oligarchization and its negative effects. PI is an inclusive SMO in terms of membership requirements and participation and is not concerned about ideological purity. Its inclusive “ideological matrix” was however unable to avoid a straightforward identification with the political Left, which was the predominant political spectrum among its activists/members. There is an overrepresentation of a specific party affiliation among activists, as a substantial part of them

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were Left Bloc (BE) members or supporters. The prevalence of the spectrum of the Left may be envisaged as a natural consequence of the objectives defined by the SMO. Asserting such overrepresentation also means that it was possible to acknowledge the presence of other party affiliations, or even no affiliation at all. Such “coexistence” reinforced PI’s inclusive character. Multiple affiliations represented an advantage because they facilitated interaction, circulation of information and of resources, and, hence, the coordination of actions. When I asked about the existence of a connection of any kind with the BE, PI’s activists and members rapidly dismissed it. Such straightforward identification was envisaged as something that would compromise the broad character pursued by the SMO. Personal links to the political party in question were not denied; they were dismissed as irrelevant factors instead. Nevertheless, as a consequence of that identification, supporters and members of other left-wing political parties were less prone to join the SMO given that, as one of them mentioned in my interviews, they “[were] not willing to be instrumentalized by it [the BE].” Even though the PI brought forward issues that also mobilized the traditional social bases of the old Left, old Left political party members were not very enthusiastic about supporting the new SMO. According to my interviews, they regarded it as a trade union competitor (especially the members of the Portuguese Communist Party). It should be mentioned here that the communists dominate the largest Portuguese trade union, the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP). Also according to my interviewees, the PI was criticized on the grounds that it pretended to be influence free, while BE advanced its political orientations from behind the scenes. Despite criticism, I observed that the PI managed to improve significantly its neutral aura in the long run. Another revealing example of intertwined connections between social movements and political parties before the anti-austerity cycle was the submission and discussion in parliament of the petition “Before the Debt, We Have Rights!” (see Precários Inflexíveis 2009). The petition emerged from a coalition between four SMOs focusing on the struggle against labor precariousness: Ferve, Inflexible Precarious, Platform of the Intermittent of Show and Audio-visual and Precarious Activists. Launched in November 2009, the petition demanded measures to combat the injustices verified in the contributions of false autonomous workers (the socalled false green receipts) 7 to Social Security. They requested parliament to legislate for the creation of assessment mechanisms for conditions of contraction of debts to Social Security and that, in the case of detection of false autonomous work, the employer would have to be punished and forced to regularize the situation. The petition was submitted in February 2010. At the time, the Socialist Party (PS) was the party in government. When the Left is in government, levels of mobilization are expected to

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decrease because reforms are expected and social movements can benefit from them. On the other hand, as previously mentioned, social movements lose their natural ally. In the case of the aforementioned petition, none of these conditions were in place. In fact, it was the very government of the Socialist Party that was to blame for new disadvantageous provisions for workers. The PS government passed laws that actively promoted increased precariousness and thus reforms beneficial for social movements were not expected. In that sense, it is possible to speak of a certain PS drift toward the center and neoliberal policies. This is related to the fact that the socialists are one of the two traditional government parties, together with the center-right Social Democrat Party. This neoliberal turn influenced PS’s relations with social movements, which therefore did not look at the socialists as an ally. In the eyes of social movements, their main allies were the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Left Bloc. Both parties were committed to finding a solution for the problem of the debts to the social security system. Moreover, both parties were in the opposition (according to the theoretical framework advanced in the first section, when in opposition, left-wing political parties tend to support the demands of social movements). Support from the Left Bloc would be, in theory, more probable than that from the PCP, given that the latter is identified with the old Left. As for the Socialist Party, not responding to meeting solicitations to discuss the petition can be interpreted as a fragile alignment with social movements’ action in the institutional field. Social movements were actively defying the government, while PS, as the ruling party, was confronted with the limitations imposed by established policies and pressures exerted by dominant social forces, as well as with electoral constraints (presented by more conservative constituencies, for instance). In this specific case, it is possible to conclude that social movements did not benefit from the presence of the Left in the government, contrary to what is suggested by theory. In the context of austerity, however, connections between social movements and political parties became altogether clearer and even unfolded. This may seem contradictory as the first protest, staged by a social movement organization named Desperate Generation (Geração à Rasca), was presented as ostensibly non-partisan, and even anti-political in the sense that it rejected established political parties. 8 The protest was launched via Facebook by four young people from Lisbon and announced as nonpartisan, secular and peaceful. The adjectives used to define the protest had two effects. On the one hand, the definition was a source of attractiveness that allowed the expression of uneven interests— for instance, the nonpartisan epithet allowed far-right participation, displeasing many people. On the other, it gave the protest a broader sense with the negative effect of making it more difficult to define a concrete direction as well as objectives. The protest consisted in a demonstration

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that took place on 12 March 2011, shortly after the presentation of the Stability and Growth Program IV (PEC IV) by the Socialist government, igniting the emergence of the anti-austerity movement in Portugal. PEC IV envisioned harsh austerity measures, namely in the field of labor, such as a revision of the labor law in order to increase precariousness and introduce new taxes. According to my fieldwork, discontent displayed in the demonstration was based on concrete deprivation experiences and degradation of life conditions and expectations. The conflicting relation between capital and labor was central to the protest, which aimed at being “a protest of a generation against the imposition of labor precariousness.” There is evidence of prevalence of “carrousel trajectories” (Diogo 2012), characterized by a “disqualifying integration” (Paugam 2000) and permeated by risk and insecurity among activists and supporters of the protest. Demands were articulated with issues pertaining to representative democracy, its quality and the quality of the political class all together. The call for the protest expressed dissatisfaction with three specific domains: political class, government politics and absence of future prospects for young Portuguese. In spite of the large mobilization produced by the protest—over 280,000 people in eleven cities (Jornal de Notícias 2011)—both the call and the organization of the protest were not mediated by any organization except for the four precarious young people. In that sense, the protest was seen as spontaneous and raised particular reactions from political actors, according to research conducted during my fieldwork. The protest was seen by most as “a healthy demonstration from civil society,” in the sense that democracy allows expressions of discontent, being those expressions are valuable elements in terms of political agenda configuration. Nevertheless, those “healthy expressions” were framed in two distinct ways. The coalition in government (PSD-CDS) at the time stuck to the “healthy” character while devaluating those same expressions. Leftwing parties’ reactions were far more interesting. As mentioned, chances of alliances between political parties and social movements increase when the Left is in the opposition because it will benefit from the challenges posed by social movements to the government, especially when those challenges are moderate and considered legitimate by a large part of the electorate. Both the members of the Socialist Party (PS) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) that I interviewed kept their distance from the new collective actor. They praised collective action, acknowledged their claims and were sympathetic, particularly PCP, as it served well its opposition to the socialist government, but they also displayed some distrust. For those parties, discontent has to be channeled through institutions in order to produce effects. That was something the “Desperate Generation” refused. Also, those parties, which can be taken as representatives of the old Left, were utterly puz-

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zled by the enormous mobilization produced without political party or trade union support, according to my interviews. Differently, the Left Bloc, here identified with the new Left, was more than simply sympathetic. According to the responses of my interviewees, the party actually supported the protest in what could be called a “moral” sense. As previously mentioned, new Left political parties appeal to the same constituency as social movements, pursue the same goals to a large extent, and resort to forms of political action close to those of social movements (Kriesi et al., 1995). In that sense, the support that was granted was not at all surprising. Moreover, the BE strongly opposed the cuts introduced by the socialist government in office and embraced the struggle against labor precariousness. Besides that, as mentioned above, the BE had a history of unofficial involvement with the PI. The 15-O was the second protest of the anti-austerity cycle and the first after the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding by the Portuguese government and the Troika, on 17 May 2011, and after the appointment of a center-right coalition government composed by the Social Democrat Party (PSD) and the Democratic Social Center-People’s Party (CDS-PP), following the June legislative elections. The 15-O protest was a global protest that took place on 15 October 2011 under the motto “United for Global Change.” The call for the global protest was made by the Spanish Indignados. It was launched resorting to cyberactivism tools such as Facebook and subscribed to by a network of activists. In Europe, the largest demonstrations took place in Spain, Portugal and Italy. The 15-O reproduced the viral character attributed to network social movements and underlined the importance of images circulating throughout the world. The examples of prior mobilizations, which were disseminated by media, alternative information platforms and social networks, unleashed a sense of hope in the power of mobilization and in global change. In several cities around the world (951 cities in 82 countries), people rose up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy, in order to promote a global change. The international context of mobilization was one of generalized indignation. Thus, mobilization in Portugal benefitted from the “favorable interest” from society. Following Piven and Cloward (1977), one could say that both the Desperate Generation and the international protests produced transformations of behavior and conscience that had a positive effect on subsequent protests. On the other hand, the protests reinforced two central ideas: low intensity representative democracy is not the only possible model of democracy and the crisis is an outcome of conscious choices of a restricted handful of people. The main purpose was to send a message to the whole world: “we do not conform, we want to change the system.” The slogan “Direct Democracy, Now!” was the most emblematic but others can be mentioned: “They don’t represent us” or “We are the 99 percent.” Those slogans expressed indignation against political lead-

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ers, denounced the shortcomings of democracy and demanded active citizenship. The goal of the protest staged by the 15-O in Portugal, according to my interviewees, was to condemn a political, economic and social model that “does not serve us, that oppresses us and does not represent us,” especially since the Troika arrived in Portugal. An important aspect of the 15-O is the differentiation us/them addressed in the slogan “we are the 99 percent.” Drawing on Laclau (2010 and 2011) and Laclau and Mouffe (2010), it is possible to identify a barrier between the 99 percent of the population and the remaining 1 percent. That frontier emerges from the tensions between two different sets of logics: logics of equivalence and logics of difference. The “99 percent” have in common the fact that their demands are not absorbed by institutional channels. They differentiate themselves from and oppose the 1 percent identified with power. Those mobilized wanted to reinvent politics, society and economy by breaking up the system. And that meant breaking up political parties too. Nevertheless, there was a strong leftist stance in the 15-O protest. The 15-O protest gave voice to more radical perspectives, in the sense advanced by Scott (1990), that advocated a total rupture with the status quo, in line with the criticism of representative democracy and political actors previously conveyed by the “Desperate Generation.” However, differently from it, the 15-O was summoned by organizations linked to the extra-parliamentary radical left, like ATTAC. 9 The radical nature of the claims created suspicion among the Socialist Party and the Portuguese Communist Party, according to my fieldwork. For these political parties, especially the communists, the very conception of political action, organized and driven by political parties, was at stake. As a member from the PCP told me, “I agree with the claims but they have to be articulated through political parties.” The protests organized by the social movement organization named Que se Lixe a Troika, “Screw the Troika!” (QSLT) were the height of the protest cycle. The expression “Screw the Troika” condensed a set of meanings related to the imposition of societies of austerity (Ferreira 2012) and incorporated several struggles aimed at counteracting that imposition. The first QSLT protest and demonstration, under the heading “Screw the Troika, we want our lives back!,” was summoned via Facebook by a group of citizens, the majority of whom linked to activism and previous mobilizations. 10 The demonstration took place on 15 September 2012, in a context of economic and political crisis and social unrest and gathered over one million people, capitalizing on harsh discontent generated by the announcement of the entry into force of the Single Social Tax (TSU) for workers and its reduction for employers (Correio da Manhã 2012). Demystifying the idea that there was an absolute need for austerity measures allowed for the rejection of the intervention and demands of the Troika and for a proactive and combative posture against austerity.

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Austerity policies were after all political and ideological options. Therefore, the appeal to participation was broader and more inclusive than in previous protests. The second QSLT protest took place on 2 March 2013, after the approval of the budget for 2013, which introduced salary cuts and a drastic reduction of public expenditure. The motto of the protest was “Screw the Troika, The People are the ones who rule!.” The context was one of austerity reinforcement. The call for protest was broad and inclusive and conveyed a harsh criticism. The indignation tone, the demands for government resignation and the rejection of the Troika rose in intensity and were more clearly formulated in comparison with previous protests. The mobilization was considered a success by its organizers, according to my fieldwork, because it brought to the streets hundreds of thousands of people that demanded a left-wing government. The idea of unity among all sectors of the population, organized and non-organized, and of different struggles, was present in both QSLT protests. The nonpartisan character was not evoked as a guiding principle. Critical speech toward political parties and unions was softened, allowing the QSLT to attract other social sectors that had remained aside until that moment. Differently from the previous protests, the second QSLT protest had quite concrete claims: resignation of the center-right government, expulsion of the Troika and early elections. The largest Portuguese trade union, CGTP (General Confederation of Portuguese Workers), dominated by the Portuguese Communist Party, lent its support to the demonstration, while members of PCP, PS and BE also attended the demonstration. In the case of BE, there was complete support, including from its leadership—Catarina Martins and João Semedo—and members of parliament, all of whom were present. Participation levels and the enlargement of the social base confirmed the disintegration of the consensus around inevitability of austerity measures. However, the government downplayed the dissatisfaction expressed in the streets (TVI24 2013). The QSLT brought new traits to the protest cycle. On one hand, it reversed the fall into despondency after the first round of protests (the last one had taken place almost a year before); on the other, the claims acquired not only a more specific but also a “more political” nature in conventional terms because they relied clearly on the distinction between political Left and Right. Another new element was related with the amplification and diversification of the support. In the case of the second QSLT protest, CGTP, and some left-wing parties openly supported the protest. The magnitude reached by the second QSLT protest can in part be explained by the fact that it was an issue-centered mobilization. In this case, collective actors benefit from the support provided by institutional actors (Melucci 1996) and from the presence of influential allies (Tarrow 1998). Political parties were one of those influential allies (especially the Left Bloc).

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CONCLUSION Assessing the relationship between social movement organizations and political parties is not an easy task. Social movements and their organizations are not insulated islands. In particular, the social movements addressed in this chapter emerged from and acted within a complex political landscape, nationally and internationally. Political parties were for sure part and parcel of it and played an important role throughout the protest cycle, even if unintendedly sometimes. The anti-austerity protest cycle was a paradigmatic milieu for relations between political parties and network social movements. According to the findings of my fieldwork, throughout the protest cycle, attitudes of social movements regarding political parties and vice versa have evolved. The unfolding of those attitudes responded to changes both in the external and internal contexts. In the latter case, those were connected with changes in the internal environment of SMOs. Contrasting with what happened in countries like Spain, the Portuguese anti-austerity movement and its SMOs have evolved from a straightforward rejection of political parties—the anti-political stance, clearly related to radical perspectives of total rupture with the system—to an acceptance of political parties, or, more precisely left-wing political parties, as inescapable political actors that could become important allies. The other way around was also true. As soon as the anti-austerity movement and its SMOs formulated clearer and more realistic claims and abandoned the harsh criticism of political parties, some of the latter saw them as important allies that could help bring the center-right coalition government (PSD-CDS) down. Those changes in attitudes accompanied the worsening political, social and economic conditions, as well as the display of increasing mobilization capacity from the social movement sector. Left-wing political parties were the natural ally of the anti-austerity movement. While in opposition, those parties supported social movements, especially the anti-austerity social movements. Nevertheless, support from left-wing parties varied according to their aspirations to power. As a traditional government party, the Socialist Party was not as supportive as the Left Bloc. Actually, the attitude of the socialists toward the anti-austerity movement was always a very careful one. As for the Portuguese Communist Party, they also tried to keep a relative distance from social movements, at least for a while. As an old Left representative, communists compete with the new Left (the Left Bloc) for support and votes. After a two-year period of intense mobilization and contention, the Portuguese anti-austerity movement came to a halt by mid-2013. Though this falls outside the scope of this article, a comparison with the unfolding of the Spanish anti-austerity protests can shed some light on this point. Differently from the Spanish case, the Portuguese anti-austerity plat-

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forms and SMOs lacked grassroots embeddedness and a strong implantation of dynamics of collective action like the ones developed by Spanish activists: acampadas, regular popular assemblies, among others. Those dynamics imprinted additional strength to the Spanish anti-austerity movement. On the other hand, the demobilization of the Portuguese anti-austerity movement from mid-2013 onward is also linked to the government’s absence of responsiveness to protests: despite the rolling back in what concerns specific austerity measures, the austerity path kept on track, demoralizing anti-austerity constituencies. In spite of these differences, in the cases of both Portugal and Spain, the political opportunity structure constrained further developments as austerity-driven policies were imposed in spite of protests and accepted by larger sectors of society. Political parties were important allies of social movements on a number of occasions. By embracing the claims of social movements, particularly those concerning labor relations and the defense of workers’ basic rights, political parties rehabilitated their public image, one very damaged in the last couple of years, especially in the context of austerity. NOTES 1. There are other elements susceptible to change in the short run as the opening of access to participation, power realignment, available influential allies and cleavages inside and among elites (Tarrow 1998), but they do not integrate the present POS model. Unstable alignments (alterations of the alignments in power) are identified with electoral instability, generate uncertainty, stimulate expressions of dissatisfaction and can induce elites to seek support outside the political circuit. Electoral realignments are important in what concerns the opening and creation of political opportunities. Divisions among elites motivate more vulnerable groups as well as other segments of the elites to choose strategies of collective action, while the presence or absence of influential allies is particularly relevant for actors with few resources. 2. http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/download.html?r=6. 3. This atomization was a consequence of radicalization and of the small dimension of those movements and organizations. 4. As advised by Lisi (2013), one should bear in mind that the party organizational model is not the only factor influencing party-civil society relations; the electoral environment is also relevant. 5. http://www.precarios.net/. 6. May Day is an action day against labor precariousness. The first May Day parade took place in Milan, 2001. In Portugal, its first edition was in 2007. 7. The false green receipts are a form of independent contract used illegally by many employers and by the state to avoid labor contracts, permanent employment and paying for social security, illness, holidays and unemployment benefits. 8. Manifest available from https://geracaoenrascada.wordpress.com/manifesto/. 9. http://attacportugal.webnode.com/. 10. http://queselixeatroika15setembro.blogspot.pt/.

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FOUR Digital Activism, Political Participation and Social Movements in Times of Crisis José Alberto Simões, Ricardo Campos, Inês Pereira, Mafalda Esteves, and Jordi Nofre

From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, from Movimiento 15M in Spain to the recent uprisings in Turkey and Brazil, in various parts of the globe, the last few years have been defined by multiple forms of public dissent that, although having emerged in the streets, also use the Internet, especially social networks, and other digital technologies, as vital resources. In southern European countries, and in particular in Portugal and Greece, these protests have been a result not only of the escalation of the financial and economic crisis, but also of its broader social and political consequences. In this context, the Internet and digital devices have come to play key roles, not only by facilitating the union of disperse sets of individuals under common goals, but also by creating specific politically driven events (like street demonstrations). In times of crisis and social turbulence, these seem to be very relevant tools for informal political action at the margins of more conventional ways of expressing protest related to particular claims. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the role played by digital devices and online platforms in the way activism is currently being represented and performed, particularly in the context of the Portuguese crisis and the Troika bailout. Our analysis is grounded on a research project on networked youth activism in Portugal carried out between 2014 and 71

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2015. 1 Using a qualitative set of methods (ethnographic observation, indepth interviews and the gathering of documents of various types), the goal of the project was to explore young people’s digital activism, bearing in mind the emergence of new social platforms for political action fostered by the social and economic crisis in Portugal. In view of the increasingly important role of digital media in the international political context, particularly in those countries of southern Europe that have been more affected by the crisis, we would like to consider the hypothesis that the same situation might occur in Portugal. At the heart of the enquiry are the following research questions: 1) Are digital devices changing traditional forms of political activism? 2) If so, what are the characteristics of this digital activism—what particular configurations does it assume? 3) How do “traditional” forms of expressing dissent coexist with “innovative” ones (considering that they might range from protest marches and occupation of public places to the use of multiple digital apparatuses)? Despite the fact that such questions are comprehensive and address various topics, they have been placed in a period of political turmoil and intense civic intervention, for which reason they portray this historical moment. The connection between the online and offline domains of action has allowed us to explore several spheres of participation that cross the micro, meso and macro dimensions, which became very clear in the results of our research as we shall see throughout this chapter. This chapter consists of three sections carefully laid out to scrutinize the aforementioned questions. In the first section, we intend to address issues dealing with the articulation between digital media and the Internet with political and civic participation. This will be done through a brief review of the literature on the subject. The second section seeks to make a brief contextualization of political and activist dynamics during the recent period of austerity in Portugal, linking these dynamics to global protest movements during this period. The third and longest section will center on our findings, setting out to assess the roles that social media/networks play in contemporary activism, taking into account their uses and representations. ACTIVISM, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND ICTS There are numerous examples of the connection between contemporary social movements, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) that clearly show that, in today’s day and age, political activism tends to be digital activism as well (Dahlgren 2013; Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). This is evident in the globalization of various social movements (as is the case with the so-called alter-globalization movement, the diverse mobilization sequences known as the “Arab Spring” or the recent anti-austerity movements), as well as in debates regarding freedom of

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speech and content sharing arising from the Wikileaks case or the emergence of Pirate parties (Atton 2004; Castells 2012; Hill 2013; Postill 2012 and 2014). This connection between social movements and ICTs is not a recent trend, given that the use of the Internet on the part of activists and social movements already possesses a long history, as exemplified by the Zapatista movement of the 1990s (Castells 1998; Rovira 2009). The articulation between the Internet and social movements takes on different forms. We here highlight three areas that, to some extent, tend to overlap. Firstly, the usages relate to dissemination and spreading of information related to social movements, something that is aimed, not only at activists, but at the public in general, setting out to broaden the social space for recruiting new activists and sympathizers. Secondly, and directly related with the first, the usages aim at social movements themselves. Here there is a whole set of practices that enhance the building of networks and collective organization. Thirdly, the protest practices and social conflict occur in cyberspace, which has become a privileged stage for social struggle. 2 Particularly worth drawing attention to are the first two points, often highlighted in the literature as bringing greater focus to recent political dynamics. Both reveal the central power of the Internet as a communication resource. Primarily, the more general use of the Internet allows for the dissemination of content and the flow of information regarding actions and causes of the social movements. Virtual space acts in these cases as a showcase, which allows for the extension of speeches, projects and causes, and the transfer of information and knowledge. The presence of the Internet frequently results in an effective dissemination of these movements and in the recruitment of allies in different parts of the globe. Contemporary movements are often substantiated in ephemeral organizations, platforms and networks with no solid juridical existence or in names and registrations in cyberspace. Frequently, these constitute a privileged way to formalize and institutionalize a certain project. The fast flow of information in a synchronized way through ICTs allows not only for an ample circulation of information, but also an increasing coordination of collective action. On the other hand, on several websites, there are not only information or ideological debates, but also directories of action and modus operandi for the accomplishment of different actions that can be modularly transposed and reconverted in a way that can be reused in other parts of the world. This technological infrastructure, however, also allows for the development of coordinated actions through the various means of communication available (email, forums, social networks, mailing lists, etc.), not only at a local scale—allowing for an electronic calling for demonstrations and other events—but also at a global scale through the coordinated organization of simultaneous events or reproductions spread out in time. It should be noted that all the actions that have been mentioned, associated to social movements, may occur in an organizational sphere (led

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by structured movements, NGOs, associations and informal groups) just as ICTs also enable participation in a more individualized way. In fact, an individual alone can defend the causes he wants on the Internet, suggest initiatives and organize technological attacks or selectively join certain campaigns that are underway without necessarily registering in any type of organization. On the other hand, the cycle of protests and contemporary mobilization tend to include hybrid formats of movements, organizations and institutions, as is the case of ephemeral platforms built around certain events and which tend to either reconstruct themselves or vanish. We can also add here identity concepts, such as Anonymous, who assume themselves not as an organization one can belong to, but as a concept one can join and where certain operations can take place. The fact of the matter is that the existence of these instruments appears to have modified the structure of political participation and the street protest format, announcing increasingly hybrid forms of participation involving both online and offline worlds, as well as combining collective interests with individual interests (Bennett and Segerberg 2011). These traits render the context of contemporary protest more complex. The heterogeneity of digital media use by activists in a context of increasing complexity can be illustrated by the global waves of protest and political mobilization that took place mainly from 2011 onward (Dahlgren 2013; Postill and Pink 2012). The use of these tools can best be described as diversified, serving varying functions. Several studies point to the ability demonstrated by numerous digital platforms in relation to the fast and widespread circulation of the information. This is the case of Twitter, a crucial instrument in the way that numerous demonstrations and acts of insurgency occurred in Spain, for example, in the case of 15M (Fernandez-Planels et al. 2014; Micó and Casero-Ripollés 2014). Prior to that, in the many events related to the Arab Spring, digital media also assumed a prominent role. Such events have multiplied, with more or less direct impact in other contexts. Such is the case with the Occupy movement in 2011 (Dhalgren 2013; Penney and Dadas 2014; Tremayne 2014), the protests that erupted in Brazil between 2012–14—the Passe Livre (free public transportation) and the Anti-Copa (Anti-World Cup) movements (Recuero et al. 2015)—or even the contestation against the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey in 2013 (Vatikiotis and Yörük 2016). POLITICAL AND CIVIC PARTICIPATION IN TIMES OF CRISIS: A BRIEF PORTRAYAL OF THE PORTUGUESE CONTEXT Recent protests should be understood against a broader socio-historical context of political and civic participation. Portuguese society is characterized by low levels of civic and political engagement owing to an over-

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all disbelief in the country’s political system, its values and institutions (Mendes and Seixas 2005; Cabral 2014). This scenario may be explained by many factors, namely a non-existent tradition of political and civic participation which is historically connected with Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime that lasted almost fifty years (from 1926 to 1974). As a consequence, political activities that stood outside the system were usually repressed and a general disinvestment in political participation was promoted. The regime was overthrown in 1974 in a non-violent coup d’état known as the “Carnation Revolution” led by joint military forces (known as the Armed Forces Movement, MFA) and backed by popular support. Although intense participation would continue in the year that followed, this was, in fact, an exceptional period of profound political participation (Santos and Nunes 2004) 3 which, still today, is regarded as a symbolic milestone for political activities and discourses concerning democracy and civic engagement in the country. Contentious actions, however, have not been entirely absent from Portuguese society since the revolutionary period. Protest against the bailout by the International Monetary Fund in 1982, for example, was quite significant, as was the discontentment with Portugal joining the European Economic Community in 1986 (Accornero and Pinto 2015). Apart from student-led protests in the mid-1990s against reforms introduced in the education system, political parties and trade unions remain the chief protagonists of collective action. In the late 1990s, internationally driven mobilizations on the part of Social Forums connected with the Global Justice Movement and, more recently, May Day 4 demonstrations emulating Euro May Day demonstrations (occurring since 2001), represent important moments of mobilization outside the direct influence of trade unions and political parties. Given the weak tradition of political engagement and activism on the part of the Portuguese population, protests that occurred between 2011 and 2013 were particularly meaningful in an otherwise relatively empty landscape of public participation, bringing about a new cycle of contention (Accornero and Pinto 20154; Baumgarten 2013) characterized by new political opportunity structures (Tarrow 2011). This, in fact, was a period marked by the intensification of the financial and economic crisis that brought with it several social and political consequences. First, the adoption of austerity measures by the Portuguese government, instigated by the country’s financial bailout by the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the Troika—caused broad social impacts across the country. The intervention of the Troika and subsequent austerity measures triggered a wave of anti-austerity protests, leading to unprecedented public demonstrations. This was a new period of activism, characterized by the emergence of new collective actors acting outside the institutional political system—working through informal groups, platforms and activist net-

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works—as well as the mobilization of individuals who would not be involved in public protests otherwise. Among the fundamental resources used in the new forms of mobilization and public participation were technology and digital media, particularly the Internet, which helped create events in an informal and decentralized fashion, relying on social networks functioning under the coordination of emerging collectives, as well as personal networks that, at the same time, give these protests an individualized character. These protests were also marked by the significant presence of young people, owing to the fact that they, more than any other group, suffered the economic and social consequences of the crisis. These consequences were largely rising unemployment and job insecurity, not to mention the reduction of social support from the state (Carmo, Cantante and Alves 2014). Although young people had a prominent role in some of the demonstrations, to a large extent these were intergenerational. Nevertheless, youth prominence in distinct protests, not only in Europe but around the world, seems to point out the importance of younger generations as drivers of social change (Feixa and Nofre 2013). This new cycle of political mobilization and greater civic participation, taking place in the streets as well as on the Internet, did not distance itself from more globalized dynamics of social and political turbulence. There was a global framework of protest, which was noticeable in demonstrations that occurred throughout 2011 in many European countries and across the world (Baumgarten 2013; Feixa and Nofre 2013). It was during this period that several protest events and political insurgency erupted, with a clear network effect that inspired many local political movements. The most obvious was the so-called “Arab Spring,” a transnational phenomenon that was not only well disseminated, but also served as an inspiration for other movements that were distant from its original geographical and cultural reality. Another set of political events that can, in this case, be seen as a response to the global financial crisis, had more immediate repercussions in Europe and the United States: the 15M and Occupy movements. The economic and financial crisis somehow brought social inequalities and “material issues” to the center of social movements (Tejerina et al. 2013). Nevertheless, this “material turn” of protest is not identical in all countries in which recent uprisings occurred: “What is at stake in current mobilizations in Southern Europe (in opposition to democratic reforms demanded by protesters in Arab countries) is the political mismanagement of the socioeconomic crisis and the erosion of the welfare state” (Tejerina et al. 2013, 380). Although we cannot truly speak of global movements (Baumgarten 2013), what took place in Portugal cannot be disconnected from these global processes, which had obvious repercussions in the protests and collective actors that emerged in 2011 and continued in a protest cycle

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that lasted until mid-2013. Although we do not set out to provide a detailed inventory of the different episodes of “alternative” political action that occurred in Portugal during this period, some deserve to be highlighted. There is such an episode, which deserves to be highlighted for two reasons. Firstly, from a symbolic point of view it has become a reference in the fight against precariousness and the crisis. Secondly, due to the fact that the digital circuit had a crucial role in the creation and the success of this initiative. We are referring to the “Geração à Rasca” (“Desperate Generation”) demonstration which occurred on 12 March 2011 in several major cities across Portugal. This demonstration was called for by four young people 5 who created a Facebook event as a protest against labor precariousness and the loss of social rights. The 12 March demonstration was somewhat a turning point in activist practices, which are usually led by institutional actors (Baumgarten 2013; Accornero and Pinto 2015). This situation was new in the Portuguese context because, for the first time, a large-scale initiative had been organized using digital social networks; and it has demonstrated the extent to which these new tools would come to play a relevant role in the context of turmoil that was to ensue. Several people that were engaged in this huge demonstration were later connected to emergent movements and had a trajectory of involvement with other collective actors. The Movement 12 of March (M12M) 6 emerged from the “Geração à Rasca” protest and was linked to other subsequent protests and initiatives with a general claim of strengthening democracy in different arenas (from politics to culture and work conditions). The launch of M12M occurred under a general slogan of the need for deeper citizenship and politicization of all citizens. On 20 May 2011, directly inspired by the Spanish 15M and its call for Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!), a public square was occupied by protesters in the heart of Lisbon (Rossio Square). This was an occupation carried out by distinct activist groups and non-aligned individuals from which distinct actions emerged: assemblies, meetings. The year 2012 also witnessed several major public protests. After attempting to re-enact the 15 October 2011 global protest on 12 May 2012 with the Global Spring 7 protest—which did not generate quite the same interest—the next big public event was the “Que se Lixe a Troika” (“Screw the Troika”) protest, on 15 September. This protest was promoted by a newly created platform of citizens who mobilized around the fight against austerity measures, and, above all, the institutions behind the measures: the IMF, ECB and EC. “Que se Lixe a Troika” (QSLT) was also responsible for the organization of the 31 October protest in front of the Portuguese parliament while the state budget was being discussed. This demonstration was marked by incidents with the police, owing to the escalation of protest actions. Less than a month later, on 14 November, a new general strike occurred, coor-

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dinated at the European level by numerous national unions. QSLT activities continued throughout 2012, culminating in 2013 with a new public demonstration on 2 March, under the motto “The People are the ones who Rule the Most” (“O Povo é Quem Mais Ordena”). This was an explicit reference to the claims made in the agitated days following the 1974 revolution. This demonstration was considered one of the largest since the beginning of the new cycle of protest (Accornero and Pinto 2015). After the 2 March demonstration, mass protest declined. This was evident in the 1 June “Povo Unido Contra a Troika” (“People United Against Troika”) demonstration organized by QSLT, which gathered much less participants. This was also the case with the general strike that followed on the 27th of the same month. After these two events, two other noteworthy protest events took place in 2013. The first was the “Obrigado Troika!” (“Thanks Troika!”) protest (on 21 October), an ironic reference to the institutions deemed responsible for the austerity measures implemented by the government. The second was the “Não há becos sem saída” (“There are no dead ends!”) protest (on 26 October), an evocation of the possibility of escaping austerity policies. Again, these events came far from having the same mass participation of the 2011 and 2012 protests. Since 2014, a phase of decreasing participation has been witnessed, especially in terms of visible events, owing to an apparent disillusionment with the political effectiveness of protest. The year 2014 can best be characterized by micro-activism or targeted actions by existing groups of activists that survived the initial wave of enthusiasm, organizations that have been developing activities for quite some time (e.g., Precários Inflexíveis [Inflexible Precarious]), as well as LGBTI and environmentalist associations, traditionally tied to target-specific and theme-specific activism. The year 2015 was marked by significant political change brought about by the new government, led by the Socialist Party (PS) with the parliamentary support of other two left-wing parties (Left Bloc and Unitary Democratic Coalition 8). The new government has generated new hope, since it has adopted measures aimed at reducing austerity, promoting growth and overcoming the economic crisis. This new political climate partly explains the reduced nature of public protest, equally leading to a significant disinvestment in acts of civic participation as had been experienced since mid-2013. Nevertheless, we can argue here that the level of civic participation has increased in the last few years, bringing with it the birth of new activist groups, platforms and networks of cooperation connected to a series of politically charged events (Baumgarten 2013).

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THE DIGITAL AS A RESOURCE AND TOOL FOR ACTIVISM: THE RELEVANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA/NETWORKS We shall begin this section by rehashing a previously discussed episode, which deserves to be highlighted, the “Geração à Rasca” protest. This was a protest that, as we have mentioned, apart from being the first great moment of collective mobilization, heralding times of greater political participation, was the first large-scale event to be organized using social networks, in particular, Facebook. The initiative was mainly created and promoted through this social medium. The mobilization was an unexpected success, one of the largest since the revolutionary period following the 1974 military coup, with around half-a-million people marching on the streets in Lisbon: ranging from precarious young people, to older generations, to existing social movement organizations and associations, to public figures in solidarity with the claims of the movement. In this sense, it deserves a more detailed analysis. The first point that should be stressed is that, for the first time in Portugal, it was proven that a reasonably small group of people, without the support of institutional machinery (political parties, trade unions, NGOs), can use social media 9 to organize a large-scale initiative that left an impression on the Portuguese society. The second point refers to the symbolic aspect of this event, which, in terms of public representation, led the way to a wave of new forms of protest and mobilization with an informal and non-institutional nature, deeply rooted in the use of the digital (online-offline intersection), inspiring other initiatives. This initiative, due to the impact that it achieved, has left us wondering about the changes that the digital had been making in citizens’ forms of civic intervention and political participation, assuming that there is a before and an after “Geração à Rasca.” We believe that, in fact, the period of political turmoil that occurred during the intervention of the Troika represented a moment previously unseen in Portuguese society, in what concerns the existing technological capabilities and, therefore, the articulation between digital technologies and political protest. This means that, if before the intervention of the Troika there was already a regular use of digital media in activism, the period of collective agitation that followed has shown that digital media can take on a whole new set of functions, becoming crucial for the success of certain collective actions. The project that we have developed intended, precisely, to explore these changes, particularly in what concerns how digital media can amplify the citizens’ field of political and civic participation. That said, an analysis of the interviews conducted within the project reveals that the use of the Internet and its different digital tools in activist work is something that happens naturally, even though some activists reveal a certain resistance and skepticism regarding the virtues of these resources (Campos, Pereira and Simões 2016). What seems more evident

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is that it is difficult to escape the use of the Internet and digital technology, as these are dimensions particularly rooted in everyday life, incorporated in activism as well as in other spheres (work, leisure, and the like). This does not mean that these tools do not alter some practices—as there is evidence that the use of these resources not only creates new opportunities, but also brings about different forms of action in the activism field. Between the adaptation to old practices and the creation of new ones, we can find a large array of attitudes that vary as a result of a series of variables which occur, not only due to the trajectory and skills of the individuals, but also due to the characteristics of activist groups or the type of resources and digital platforms used. According to our interviewees, although the variety of platforms/tools used is vast, some stand out due to the function they assume. Social media, namely blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, assume an important role when it comes to activism, a fact that corroborates with other studies (Penney and Dadas 2014). These are platforms that are not only openly disseminated, but also easy to use and allow for personalized management. It can therefore be argued that they facilitate individual political participation, mixing public and private, politics, entertainment and popular culture (Dahlgren 2013; Bennett and Segerberg 2011). The particular usefulness of these tools is their enormous power of communication, a key factor in the functionality of activism and political participation (mobilization, recruitment, propaganda, and the like) (Campos, Pereira and Simões 2016). In our study, the enquiry was geared toward understanding the “uses” and “representations” of different digital media. We underline here that there are a variety of forms of digital media use that correspond to different representations built around the potential opportunities and fragilities each media form presents. It is on this very point where this analysis lies, relying on interview excerpts to exemplify our arguments. Facebook is one of the most cited platforms, not because it is especially suited for activist purposes, but rather because it is the most used in the everyday lives of activists carrying out their duties. The most paradigmatic case of the power of Facebook in the Portuguese context continues to be the 12 March 2011 demonstration known as “Geração à Rasca.” From the interviews carried out, we can identify the role assigned to Facebook and how this medium interacted with other communication platforms. One needs to take into account that Facebook can be used individually or collectively in activist practices. The individual use of Facebook implies that it is from each person’s personal profile that certain practices are developed. The activist dimension is submerged in a group of other social or leisure activities taking place on this platform. This is related to the importance assumed by personalized and expressive practices using distinct digital platforms, particularly social media, pointing to the relevance of personal networks in protest (Bennett and Seger-

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berg 2011 and 2012). The following excerpt is telling of the individual and collective usages of Facebook for activist actions: I use Facebook daily, all day, for almost everything. From personal life to activism and a great part of the activism I do is related to Facebook. I get all my news about activism, about other groups and people related to activism and social issues relevant to activism through Facebook. Maybe, without Facebook, I would be more disconnected from all that happens and it is my first contact with reality, it is my first contact with any news. Then, there are certain groups, on Facebook . . . Well, one thing that is relevant is that my feed, my newsfeed on Facebook is nearly all from activists. (Activist, PolyPortugal) People create Facebook accounts for everything and whenever something happens, it is on Facebook. I know I will be notified on my computer about everything that will happen. [. . .] Even in collectives we always have a group for communication. A communication group is always formed and decides, for example, the frequency of publications on Facebook, that is: at noon a text about something will be published; at night, when there is more traffic, the video we made with JP Simões’s statements will be released, then, the next day in the morning something else someone signed will be published. [. . .] For me, Facebook is a kind of permanent rally. Opinion texts, sharing music. (Activist, Inflexible Precarious)

The use of Facebook as a communication platform for collectives seems to result from the relevance of this social network—adapted to new communication realities—that is taken into account, not only by activist movements, but also by more traditional political actors. Thus, this media platform can be used exclusively or simultaneously with a blog or website. Facebook is very useful for me; everyone says it is a kind of magazine made right there on the spot. It depends on the people who you are friends with, but if you have more than a thousand, of which half are activists, left wing militants, your feed ends up being very busy with things from the daily press and big issues, the Gaza issue, before that Russia and the Ukraine, demonstrations, movements, and so on. Through Facebook, a first selection is made right away, checked daily. Then, there are websites. In the past I used to read more blogs, I do not think they are so popular anymore, and Facebook took up part of the space blogs had. Some bloggers also started writing for the daily press. I write [. . .] for a blog, I check it once in a while. But the truth is that I almost always know about things through Facebook or by email. Someone sends something or forwards it, etc. (Activist, Platform 15 October)

Facebook, therefore, seems to be especially suitable for five areas of activity or functions, all of which are interwoven. First, communication, is either with activist colleagues or with friends. This is a platform that allows reaching out to a wider public in a relatively easy and fast way.

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Second, many things can be defined as forms of interaction with friends and activists. Facebook allows for the creation of discussion forums, debating issues, and organizing events. Third, mobilization, allows creating events and inviting large numbers of people. Fourth, access to information, is either for consultation or for dissemination. Many see Facebook as an important means of receiving information when it is “filtered” by their (activist) friends. On the other hand, posting information on Facebook also guarantees that it reaches a large number of people. The fifth and final area, one that very much emerges from the other functions, is that of the creation or strengthening of networks, local or translocal. Another tool mentioned regularly were blogs. Interestingly, this reference to blogs was not made because they are a widely used tool, but because they marked a specific moment in the history of modern-day civic movements and activism, even though currently they are perceived as somewhat outdated tools. Blogs did have a pre-Facebook golden era, at a time when a series of political/activist blogs were very dynamic. Having lost their importance to Facebook, this change was not necessarily seen as positive, but, instead, as an imposition or a result of a series of technological and social changes that resulted in Facebook becoming the dominant tool. The idea that prevails from the interviewees’ discourses is that this dichotomy, Facebook/blog, corresponds to two distinct paradigms of conceiving the political/civic/activist activity. On the one hand, blogs are seen as time consuming, that is, as a concept of civic and political activity that requires a deeper and longer-lasting period of reflection. Blogs are more “elitist” as they promote a literate culture; they require reading time and encourage debate and an informed and sustained reflection. On the contrary, Facebook, besides being a massified tool, is more associated with a paradigm of “short/fast time,” to rapid reading, to the audio-visual culture, to the instantaneous and the ephemeral. Facebook does not encourage a sustained debate, but rather works through very simplified and speedy forms of communication. It favors therefore the development of “viral” episodes, fast mobilization and “instantaneous outrage.” This is the reason why images work very well in this context. I cannot write an analysis of an OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] report on Facebook. No one will read it. Facebook is very instantaneous, of very quick answers, divulging the lyrics of a song, releasing a video; a blog has a function that is not possible on Facebook, such as a more structured, longer text and it creates archives, which is something that Facebook does not do. On a blog, you click on my name and you can see all the texts I wrote, or you can click on the education area and you can see everything that was written about it, or you can click on health or macroeconomics or whatever. On Facebook, I post some things and then they vanish, I cannot read what I wrote about the transportation strike because I was writing

Digital Activism, Political Participation and Social Movements in Times of Crisis 83 about it in 2010, unless I go back and see, but the publications are so many that it is lost. It (Facebook) is better for agitation and propaganda, but blogs and sites are better for reflection, for deeper politics I guess. (Activist, Inflexible Precarious) I have written for many blogs. Blogs are something that has become different. The initial blog community, and I participated in the first, the so-called political blogosphere, was very diversified in the beginning. In the beginning people read each other, it was an interaction thing, and I would read a right-wing blog, respond to it, and I even knew a lot of people, and I had a lot of friends that read right-wing blogs. I would not agree at all (with what was written), but I would agree with debating and they would read what I wrote, they would respond and I would too. We would post things, play and create a kind of virtual discussion community among people who had diverse and different opinions, contrary and opposing opinions. Nowadays they (blogs) are like parallel circuits, no blogger reads another blog, it seems we are preaching. . . . The discussion usually is done within the blog, among people from the blog and its readers, although they are rare. When there are discussions, they are held in much smaller sectors (of society). [. . .] The arrival of Facebook emptied most blogs. (Activist, ATTAC and Screw the Troika)

According to most interviewees’ responses, and running parallel with the idea of a world today defined by a “culture of instantaneousness,” platforms such as Facebook or Twitter 10 are, ultimately, the preferred source of communication. Also, pragmatically speaking, if activists want to reach certain people they must be on the same communication wavelength, using the same communicational platforms/circuits as the people they wish to reach. Table 4.1. aims at synthesizing the findings of the interviews and reveals the tensions and proximities between the different social media forms. Digital platforms are not used only with the intent of communicating, even though it is one of its main functions. Nevertheless, for most activists, the digital is represented as one more element of a wider group of communication platforms that include traditional media (newspapers, magazines, television, and the like). Thus, its interconnection with other media is thought of as taking into account the advantages and disadvantages it may bring according to different contexts being analyzed. The mainstream media, because of the relevance they have in building a highprofile agenda, cannot be ignored. The interviewees usually represent mainstream media as partial, ideologically motivated or limited, and often controlled by corporations. This can, therefore, explain the specific relevance digital media tools can have when in the service of activists’ causes, allowing for the creation of parallel circuits of information and, in certain cases, “empowering” those who do not have great visibility or

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Table 4.1. Main Digital Tools Compared: Attributes, Uses and Representations

Attributes and uses

Facebook

Blogs

Twitter

•

Highly disseminated and used Facilitated form of disclosure/ access to information Creation/ strengthening of networks Mobilization and creation of events Individual and collective use; “blurring” between public and private

• •

Less used Lost relevance to other tools Good source of information Individual and collective use; public nature

•

“Short/fast-time” paradigm Fragmented/ superficial information Emotional responses Associated with “viral” episodes of “instant outrage”

•

“Long/slow-time” paradigm Reflection and debate Rational/ weighed responses Less immediate

•

•

•

•

•

Representations

• •

• •

• •

• •

•

•

•

• • •

Less used or mentioned Fast and immediate way of disseminating information Individual and collective use; predominantly public

“Short/fast-time” paradigm Emotional responses “Viral” episodes; Instant mobilization

access to communication platforms in the public sphere. This is especially relevant for small groups who defend minority causes (for example polyamorous or queer). Digital media can therefore be vehicles of counterpower that question “hegemonic thinking” or “dominant narratives.” The internet has disrupted hegemonic discourses. Before (the internet), (political) parties needed a well-oiled machine or a newspaper to disseminate information to a lot of people, and today you do not need this. It is impressive if someone writes in “5 Days” he may get 15 or eventually 5,000 shares on Facebook. It is strange for me to think that thousands of people read this, or that 5,000 people shared this on Facebook; it is frightening. [. . .] On Facebook, you can see that many people were politicized in these last three years, and widely through the internet (Activist, RDA69).

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Besides the skepticism that emerges from the discourse of the majority of interviewees about mainstream media, especially television, there is some ambivalence regarding the functions and uses such mainstream media can have. For the ends activists want to achieve, these devices are considered strategic, mainly due to the ability they have to disseminate information beyond restricted networks and social contexts of activists. Thus, as the following excerpts reveal, it does not suffice to use social networks (namely Facebook); it is also crucial to be on television in order to reach the “general public” and to create an impact beyond the restricted network of the community of activists and of those who are close to them: There is a fundamental issue, which has to do with entering the mainstream. So, there is this entire game that goes on between alternative media and the mainstream, right? We have to get on the news, we have to reach the newspapers and especially television [. . .] we must always create this balance among alternatives, which are read by few people, but there are ways of disseminating, creating discussions and debate, flow of information, generating networks with several groups, right? It is not just for 300,000 or 100,000 people. (Activist, Screw the Troika) The 15 October 2011 demonstration, which was a global demonstration at the time, I even put up some posters for that, but when I started to see people I did not know . . . it was announced on Facebook, and then when I was confronted with the thousands of people at the demonstration . . . I was not expecting that. But it seems to me that, in Portugal, television is a decisive element of success or failure of a mobilization. At the time of the biggest demonstrations that took place, on 12 March and 15 September, television basically told people that it was cool and acceptable and understandable that they go to the demonstrations. Every time television ignores them you can see the difference. (Activist, Platform 15 October)

All interviewees point out the relevance of digital media for contemporary activism. This does not imply that there is a completely positive representation of these devices, as there are several criticisms and dangers that emerge from the general use of these tools. The main risks mentioned by interviewees relate mainly to three categories. Firstly, there is a danger of warping the original meaning of activism with the development of individual practices that may be ephemeral, superficial and uncommitted, practices that can be defined as “click activism” or “couch activism.” Linked with this issue is the risk of overvaluing online action at the expense of street action. Secondly, there are problems associated with monitoring, guarding and controlling political action and activism as it happens on digital circuits. Lastly, there is an excess, fragmentation and transitory nature of information, other than the lack of credibility of many of the contents circulated on these media (Campos, Pereira and Simões 2016).

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CONCLUSION Between 2011 and 2014, Portugal, on par with other countries, went through a period of increased public participation, triggered, in large part, by the financial and economic crisis. Examples of this are most evident in the (street) protests of 2011, 2012 and 2013, as well as in the more limited micro-democratic activities that revealed increased civic and political dynamics. Along with street dynamics, the key was the strong mobilization garnered through the Internet, particularly through social networks. Indeed, there is a specific online dynamic that interrelates and interacts with what happens offline, not only because the Internet presents itself as a complementary platform of information exchange, communication and network creation, but also because it can be a specific space of public intervention, creating a territory for activist struggles and the dissemination of causes, for which other individuals and groups might fight as well. These new forms of activism and protest cross the traditional borders of space and time, entailing a constant overlapping of the micro and macro spheres of social action. On the one hand, the micro dimension refers to the dynamics of the street, the protest and to the mobilization around specific episodes. Furthermore, the media and digital technologies operate in this context, allowing a clear intersection of the street and the digital circuit, in a process with a hybrid nature. The intersection of the street and the online domain means that movements are either started from the “top” (online platforms), or they come from the “bottom,” from the street. On the other hand, digital activism also works in a meso and macro context, when it is used to build and consolidate communication circuits between activists and militants or, broadening the scope, when it crosses borders, allowing certain movements to acquire a transnational character, gathered around shared or similar causes. How can the Internet and digital technologies be used in activist practices? Are digital media changing traditional formats of protest, mobilization and activism? These were questions that guided our exploratory research project. The answer to these questions has two different interpretations. On the one hand, there have been obvious transformations, which, even if they have not altered activism in itself, they have modified its impact (e.g., a poster placed on the street calling for a demonstration may be identical to one placed online in a digital format, though not having exactly the same reach due to the simple fact that we are talking about a mediated communication process). This is the case with certain online practices, the specificity of which is clear (from online discussion groups to cyber-attacks). On the other hand, we can see obvious continuities and links between the online and the offline, with the former being seen as an extension of the latter. From another perspective, the reply to the overarching questions may be given as a function of each person’s

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dedicated practices of an activist nature and the way in which they use and evaluate the digital within their practices. Despite the generalized use of digital technology by the activists who were interviewed, the critical sense of its use is visible. There seems to be a clear idea of what the different uses are, in different circumstances, filling distinct functions, which go from the simple sharing of information to the creation of networks, online mobilization and event creation, among many other uses. In this way, different tools seem to not only present different functions, but are also objects of distinct representations through which we can perceive the way they are critically appropriated. One area particularly in evidence, given the role it takes on, relates to social media. With this chapter, we have tried to address this issue by giving emphasis to the “uses” and “representations” of such tools as Facebook, online blogs and Twitter. The integration of these instruments appears to have been carried out in a natural manner, without any major friction, despite the reservations shown by many activists concerning the potential of digital activism. These reservations, however, are, to a large extent, related to the changes that have occurred in the way political action and activism have been understood and implemented in more recent times. Given the failure of traditional models of political action, along with the disillusionment with government institutions and the political class, there are now new ways of penetrating the political field, which are no longer reduced to formal election periods. These new ways are a part of our everyday lives, reaching such diverse spheres as our intimate spaces, ecology, lifestyles, sexuality. In this context, politics also assumes an individual outlook, not only in relation to concerns and causes, but also in forms of action. Digital media allow this fragmentation and individualization of political action to take place through different networks and platforms also implying that a protest, mobilization and contestation can be carried on in real time, without leaving home. From this perspective, individual and collective action tends to overlap just as public and private spheres tend to become borderless when it comes to the use of digital media tools. Another issue, certainly critical to the success of these tools when it comes to activism, has to do with familiarity and ubiquity. The fact of the matter is that these are easy to use and widely disseminated platforms with enormous potential. In other words, any resistance and skepticism (which also exist), in relation to these tools, succumbs to the pragmatism of evidence. The fact is that it is easier, cheaper and more effective to use such platforms for mobilizing, disseminating, advertising, or recruiting. These characteristics turn the digital media into extremely useful tools for moments of political turmoil when citizens require greater civic intervention, which was clearly proven in various countries and also in Portugal. The period of the crisis and the intervention of the Troika has represented, for this reason, a turning point, since there had never

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existed such technological capabilities as there were then. The democratization of digital technologies in Portugal has allowed, for the first time in our history, a cycle of strong civic and political intervention by the citizens to coincide with a networked society. This fact clearly has consequences of a broad social and political reach. In this sense, this period has distinctly represented something new in terms of political participation by the citizens. In summary, we conclude that the use of digital media in activism in Portugal is something that has been trivialized, with different digital tools taking on different roles for different purposes. There is a clear strategic assessment of the constraints and opportunities offered by each instrument in order to get the most out of each, keeping in mind the multiple demands of what composes the role of activism. That said, it is, therefore, common that different activist groups simultaneously use blogs, websites, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, in accordance with the communicational specificity each possesses. NOTES 1. The project was entitled “Networked Youth Activism: Digital Media, Social Movements and Participatory Culture among Young Activists” (EXPL/IVC-COM/ 2191/2013) and was financially supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia). Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences/Centro Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais—CICS.NOVA—NOVA FCSH (UID/SOC/04647/2013) is also supported by national funds through FCT/MEC. 2. Among the most common directories of action, the following can be mentioned: online petitions, virtual demonstrations, mail bombing (the consecutive sending of emails that can lead to the blockage of email accounts), Web Sit-ins and DDOS or the denial of service attacks (invading certain websites with so many requests that they literally stop working or at least become much slower due to excessive traffic), or still defacing (changing the homepage of a certain website or replacing the original content with a provoking message). Groups and decentralized initiatives such as Anonymous have been prodigal in this type of action, which, however, is not yet generalized. 3. The legacy of this period of agitation is noticeable in the creation of numerous associations. In comparison with Spain, for example—a country that experienced an authoritarian regime and subsequent transition to democracy during the same period—the associational landscape in Portugal is slightly larger in the case of cultural and sports associations, but lower in regard to new social movements. Cf. Fernandes 2014. 4. These demonstrations have been organized continuously since 2007 by an activist platform called Precários inflexíveis (Inflexible Precarious). 5. Although some publicly known political figures were present, political parties and unions were not directly involved in the organization of this demonstration. The manifest created for the event made no reference to political parties or any other organization, stating only the aim of the protest. 6. http://www.movimento12m.org/. 7. See https://occupysavvy.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/global-spring-2012-the-callto-worldwide-action-is-out/. 8. A coalition that brings together the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Greens (Partido Ecologista Os Verdes, PEV). 9. However, we should stress that this initiative has also had some impact on traditional media, particularly on TV, which has contributed to disseminate the event.

Digital Activism, Political Participation and Social Movements in Times of Crisis 89 10. Quite surprisingly, although massively used in the organization of recent demonstrations in Spain, having had a relevant impact in the successful mobilization of protesters (Fernandez-Planells et al. 2014), Twitter has been a tool scarcely used by Portuguese activists. This might be explained by the significant lack of expression that this social network has in Portugal in comparison with Facebook, for example.

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Penney, Joel and Caroline Dadas. 2014. “(Re)Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement.” New Media & Society 16: 74–90. Postigo, Hector. 2012. The digital Rights Movement. Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press. Postill, John. 2014. “Freedom technologists and the new protest movements: a theory of protest formulas.” Convergence 20 (3): 402–18. ———. 2012. “Digital politics and political engagement.” In Digital Anthropology, edited by Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller, 3–35. Oxford: Berg. Postill, John and Sarah Pink. 2012. “Social media ethnography: the digital researcher in a messy web.” Media International Australia 145: 123–34. Recuero, Raquel, Gabriela Zago, Marco T. Bastos and Ricardo Araújo. 2015. “Hashtags Functions in the Protests Across Brazil.” Sage Open April-June: 1–14. http://sgo. sagepub.com/content/5/2/2158244015586000. Rovira, Guiomar. 2009. Zapatistas sin fronteras. Mexico: Ediciones Era. Santos, Boaventura Sousa and João Arriscado Nunes. 2004. “Introduction: Democracy, Participation and Grassroots Movements in Contemporary Portugal.” South European Society & Politics 9 (2): 1–15. Tarrow, Sidney G. 2011. Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tejerina, Benjamín, Ignacia Perugorría, Tova Benski and Lauren Langman. 2013. “From indignation to occupation: A new wave of global mobilization.” Current Sociology 61 (4): 377–92. Tremayne, Mark. 2014.”Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street.” Social Movement Studies 13 (1): 110–26. Van Laer, Jeroen and Peter Van Aelst. 2010. “Internet and social movement action repertoires.” Information, Communication & Society 13(8): 1146–71. Vatikiotis, Pantelis and Zafer F. Yörü k. 2016. “Gezi Movement and the Networked Public Sphere: A Comparative Analysis in Global Context.” Social Media + Society July–September: 1–12.

FIVE The People’s Assembly of Algés Heterotopia and Radical Democracy in Crisis-Stricken Portugal Marcos Farias Ferreira and João Terrenas

In his Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek engages with Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and draws attention to what he calls an “all too sentimentalhumanist dialogue” between Spartacus and a pirate who offers to organize transport for the slaves across the Adriatic. In this dialogue, the pirate asks Spartacus whether he would continue to fight to the end, even in the face of an inevitable defeat. Žižek is interested in Spartacus’s affirmative answer, no matter how doomed the struggle had seemed to be at that juncture: “the slaves’ struggle is not merely a pragmatic attempt to ameliorate their position, it is a principled rebellion on behalf of freedom.” (Žižek 2010, xiv). But in his Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek is not only interested in freedom; he is also interested in the end of capitalism. He then turns to the five stages of grief advanced by the Swiss-born psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in search of a guide for how our contemporary social consciousness might deal with what he calls the forthcoming apocalypse. Žižek’s book sets off a productive conversation for the sake of debating and understanding both the circumstances and meaning of countless social movements that have flourished in the context of the current “European crises” and developed in different ways— that is, from mere civic associations (in Portugal) to new system-challenging political parties (in Spain). What we term here as “European crises” might be seen as part of Žižek’s end times and the concomitant apocalyptic zero-point of capitalism comprised by environmental crisis, the conse91

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quences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the capitalist system and the deepening of social divisions and exclusions (Žižek 2010, x). As the financial crisis hit Europe more decisively in the first semester of 2010, after a series of rebounds from one side of the Atlantic to the other, the economic consequences proved unstoppable and were addressed by policy remedies that exacerbated most social divisions and exclusions of neoliberal design underway for some time throughout the continent. Afflicted by mounting fiscal imbalances that were the product both of expansive policies of past decades and European-backed policies for the immediate crisis years, the Portuguese government was forced to ask for a bailout from the European institutions and the IMF—the socalled Troika—which ushered in a series of austerity measures, including harsh fiscal cuts in all sectors of an already fragile welfare state. In this chapter, we set out to explore the process through which the People’s Assembly of Algés (PAA) was set up in May 2013 in the Oeiras district, at the gates of Lisbon, working at a grassroots level with a radical program of community rebuilding and post-capitalist solidarity. After a couple of years of austerity, society had mobilized at different junctures in order to counter what was perceived as the most destructive Troika policies embraced by the Portuguese center-right government (a coalition between PSD and CDS-PP). The Spanish movement 15-M (Los Indignados), emerging from the acampada at Puerta del Sol in Madrid (May 2011), inspired similar movements in Lisbon with different groups of people assuming henceforth the need to act locally on the basis of a true deliberative and agonistic democracy and other ideals proclaimed at that critical point. PAA emerged in the aftermath of that mobilization—probably at the height of it—trying to embody contestation and deliberation at a grassroots, local level of politics. As soon as we started attending and parttaking in PAA weekly assemblies and connected activities, it became possible to witness a series of processes and tools of grassroots mobilization intended to reclaim the public urban space and work up public awareness based on a broad range of local and global issues. The underlying premise of our inquiry is that the setting up of PAA does not illustrate merely a collective answer to economic difficulties affecting large sectors of Portuguese society. Rather, we uphold that it must be approached as a deeper movement in search of radical urban and community rebuilding and the concomitant redressing of that which within the movement was perceived to be the dissolution of the “social” at an extremely dangerous time for Portuguese democracy. Following the PAA experiment, this chapter is above all one about how citizens foster new spaces of hope and solidarity in collaborative ways and cope with the crisis of the “political” in the end times, or how they restore hope in the public space at a time when the “public” and the urban space are perceived to be under assault and therefore the crux of a much larger crisis than is assumed by the citizenry at large.

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Our research was conducted between September 2013 and May 2014 and assumed the form of a collaborative ethnography that involved taking part 1) at the weekly open gatherings of the People’s Assembly (PAA) at a public garden in downtown Algés; and 2) at the connected activities at the Factory of Alternatives (the factory), a semi-private space organized by the same people as a common-interest civic association under the Portuguese law and functioning at an old, dismantled textile factory in uptown Algés. Our involvement started with an invitation to document through film the PAA process and its expanding activities at the factory. As the documentary project developed, it created its own space within PAA and ended up working as a trigger for discussing the assumptions, achievements and drawbacks of both the People’s Assembly and the factory as they unfolded. Therefore, this chapter draws both on the visual data collected from September 2013 to May 2014 (verité scenes in which we—and the camera more critically—interact in the PAA context) and on the very film edit—still to be completed—which we take as a reflexive tool in order to question the meaning of PAA as social ontology and process. By underlining reflexivity, we want to stress the turn to thinking human practices as social ontologies, in the sense of historically constituted interactions and transactions, therefore contingent and embodied in specific language games, power plays and discourses. Accordingly, the chapter sets out to address a set of relevant notions and debates around the meaning of living through crisis in the end times, radical politics, deliberative and agonistic democracy, grassroots mobilization and solidarity in the public space, in terms of their constitutive power over the phenomenon of people’s or citizens’ assemblies. In between the more theoretical debates, we shall focus on PAA as story, experiment and case study unveiling a situated, contingent and local answer to a set of crises perceived as arising both from the menacing expansion of global dynamics and processes (neoliberalism and transnational capitalism) and the dwindling of national democratic processes (the betrayal of the 1974 Carnation Revolution). Arguably, PAA is depicted as a heterotopia located at the radical political juncture between the domain of agonistikós—that is, the unremitting struggle, or contestation, over the production and distribution of public values and goods (Connolly 1995), and the domain of deliberative democracy: political decisions as the product of open discussion and debate among citizens affected by them. The bottom line here, in methodological terms, is the possibility of building up a visual-cum-reflexive paradigm in order to stress a discursive practices approach to the political and the broad spectrum of social ontologies. A discursive practices approach can help uncover the ways in which cultural meanings are produced through contestation but also assist in pointing at immanent resources, from within the current political order, for human resilience and progressive change. The underlying epis-

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temological assumption upheld here is that, as researchers, we set out to produce knowledge with people, not on people, and reflect in a collaborative way on the multiple social processes and ontologies embodying meaningful action in times of crises. Eventually, the very process of social research is conceived as permanent self-awareness, whereby our understandings about the “political” and the “social” are challenged, refined and transformed along the way. PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLIES AS INTERSTITIAL PROCESSES This chapter builds up on the claim that peoples’ assemblies (in the context of the current European crises) represent the emergence of radical forms of politics (grassroots, bottom-up and direct action) in the interstices—the spaces and cracks—of dominant social structures, along with the concomitant search for ways of mobilizing and organizing, in politically active ways, the discontent of hegemonic liberalisms (both in their local and global forms). As in the case of PAA, interstitial processes embody the desire to take people out of their private spaces of blind consumption and engage instead in public processes of social change, solidarity and sharing of resources and skills, recycled and put together for collective benefit. Taken together, interstitial processes such as people’s assemblies can be approached as pragmatic strategies against global structures of violence and resource depletion, and “often play a central role in large-scale patterns of social change” (Wright 2009, 229). Against radical individualism of neoliberalism, popular assemblies constitute themselves as collective forms of intervention in the affairs of the city. As interstitial processes, they assume themselves as social mechanisms for fighting against the disciplinary effects of neoliberalism and its austerity measures that weaken public services, the social fabric and the state’s capacity to fulfill its functions. João had been my student and found out about PAA by the time a group of people decided to start meeting on Sunday mornings at Parque Anjos, in downtown Algés, where he was living by then. He knew I was after a new story to document and invited me to attend, on the last Sunday of September. In the following weeks, we had the opportunity to ask people all about the origins and motivations of PAA. Following the acampada at Puerta del Sol, Madrid (May 2011), Portuguese people who had been there, or were just inspired by the 15-M movement, decided to replicate in Lisbon the forms of grassroots organization that sprang from it. That was the case of RDA—69 (Regueirão dos Anjos 69), a radical left association established in an historic quarter of Lisbon as a community center by a group of ideologically conscious people with 15-M background. Among the founders of PAA we discovered a variety of people with friendship and family links developed in Algés. They were both

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ideologically conscious people with a 15-M mindset (and a background of participation in radical left political parties in the 1970s and 1980s), interested in political and ideological discussion, but also less politicized people interested in grassroots organization and some form of involvement in local affairs independent of political parties. The coming together of these two strands was critical to give a form to PAA but, as we could witness during the nine months taking part in it, it was never easy to strike a balance between them. Eventually, the more openly politicized activities (and even the open-air discussions on Sunday mornings) were given less attention in favor of the communitarian activities organized at the Fábrica das Alternativas. Henceforth, PAA would refer to the public law association and guiding idea of Fábrica das Alternativas. Uniting the two strands, though, there was a fierce perception about neoliberalism and its disciplinary capacity in times of crisis. People getting involved in PAA activities shared the conviction that answers being given to the crisis would somehow exacerbate problems and the Troika policies would make democracy and people’s agency captive of big corporations favoring the concentration of capital and the unsustainable use of space and resources. As a group of citizens engaged in local politics— but not functioning as a political party—PAA started taking part in debates open to citizens at the Municipal Assembly in Algés, therefore contributing to opening the debate on local problems and solutions. Devising a series of shared and communitarian activities, PAA members shared the conviction that they were resisting, if not the Troika policies per se, at least the neoliberal drift in society and economy and the increasingly formal and empty democracy made captive by too disciplined political parties obeying big corporations and financial institutions. Different people, with different backgrounds from different generations, mobilized to set up a communitarian space based on social activities working as an alternative to the monetized economy. The practice of reciprocal exchange service was meant to constitute the crux of PAA and the core of a solidarity-based strategy meant to regain the fading communitarian links among Algés dwellers. A schedule of activities in the form of a time bank was set up in November 2013 as the mode of functioning of the Fábrica das Alternativas but the very fluid nature of the group—new people joining beyond the original core of founders—quickly confronted the group with the difficulties of abandoning monetized relations altogether. Monetized contributions were introduced for people wanting to take part in activities but not offering their contribution to the time bank nor having any activity to offer to the group. On the other hand, a bar was set up inside Fábrica das Alternativas to help pay for current expenses like electricity and running water. Setting up an interstitial group capable of organizing socially meaningful activities in direct confrontation with the neoliberal logic of making a profit was seen as a powerful tool for social change badly needed in Algés.

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Activities were set up on the basis of the members’ skills (workshops on chess, theatre, reiki, European dances, artisanal soap, hand sewing) or having in mind the needs of the local population (assistance to elderly people and school boys and girls), and were meant to fortify transgenerational solidarity. The sense of community was further amplified by organizing weekly music jams, poetry readings, lectures on current affairs (connected to grassroots movements) and communitarian dinners. These dinners were prepared after gleaning at the Lisbon Supply Market (MARL), and gleaning itself became a guiding idea for functioning as a group on the basis of sustainability and against the rapacious practices of the neoliberal economy. Drawing on Freud’s Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), Žižek (2010, ix) notes that twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it has become increasingly relevant to ask who will articulate “a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism,” the unease or discontent with the apocalyptic promise of the existing neoliberal order. Against the backdrop of a new bipolarity opposing technocratic and post-political administration to passionate and populist political struggle, the alternative articulations of contemporary Unbehagen embodied in grassroots movements seem to emerge from the acceptance of a certain emancipatory subjectivity-taking crisis as the chance for new beginnings. Actually, acceptance coincides with the fifth stage of grief advanced by KüblerRoss and used by Žižek as the end point in his dialectical pattern of how social consciousness tries to deal with crisis. The particular framework used by Žižek (2010, xi–xii) starts from ideological denial (there is no crisis in the contemporary global world order) and proceeds through consecutive phases of anger (against the injustices of such order), bargaining (the attempt at accommodating minor changes within the prevailing order), depression (the pathological disengagement from the need to question order) and finally acceptance as the emancipatory re-engagement with order and the need to critique and overcome it. According to Žižek (Ibid., xii), “The turn towards an emancipatory enthusiasm takes place only when the traumatic truth is not only accepted in a disengaged way, but is fully lived: Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!” By resorting to classic references such as Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Karl Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Žižek underlines the stakes in the process of consciousness concerning the crisis of global order and its local manifestations: citizens must be made to understand the real depths of crisis and its implications for the social fabric—must be put in terror of themselves— before any emancipatory enthusiasm—courage—can emerge. And yet, the “traumatic truth” must be lived and not just accepted; it must be addressed in an engaged way in order to restore political possibilities that had seemed beyond reach or sidestepped eventually by hegemonic social forces and their interests in the ordering of society. The idea of

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citizens’ assemblies with their radical and grassroots politics can be connected to utopianism as spatial play and the principle according to which “[t]he infinite array of possible spatial orderings holds out the prospect of an infinite array of possible social worlds” (Harvey 2002, 161). As David Harvey has noted in this context, utopianism has either worked as a constructive or destructive force for change and he warns all those intent on revitalizing utopian ideas today to consider how and with what consequences utopianism has worked in the past. Utopianism is at the core of Žižek’s pragmatic strategy for emancipation when he underlines that global orders must not be simply accepted, they must be lived. What kind of truth is this, then, that makes the citizen a subject engaged in deep social critique and the concomitant opening up of spaces of hope and solidarity? What kind of truth embodies that kind of performativity inherent in utopianism as spatial play, according to Harvey’s terms? Going back to Living in the End Times, we learn that this is “an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation” (Žižek 2010, xiii). Resorting to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Karl Marx’s Thesis XI, Žižek clarifies this idea by remarking that the “test” of acceptance and emancipatory enthusiasm, as well as their truth—and, we would say, the test and the truth of those spaces forged to recover the “social” and the “public”—lies in the truth-effect it unleashes among engaged individuals and go through the five stages of grief, as it were. As Žižek concedes, it is a kind of truth close to the Badiouian Event in the sense of something that only an engaged gaze—someone willing to believe in it—is able to see. Not unlike the case of the Badiouian Event, the non-engaged objective observer (but also the citizen and the researcher) is unable to recognize the Event: “[l]acking this engaged position, mere descriptions of the state of things, no matter how accurate, fail to generate emancipatory effects—ultimately, they only render the burden of the lie still more oppressive” (Žižek 2010, xiv). As in Kubrick’s dialogue between Spartacus and the pirate, the test for people’s assemblies lies not in the success of the attempt—however important success is as a personal and collective achievement—nor in its correspondence to some form of objective and higher knowledge; rather, it lies in its righteousness as a space of hope vis-à-vis the outcomes dreamed up by those engaged in radical democracy—that is, its trutheffect. RADICAL DEMOCRACY: THE DELIBERATIVE AND AGONISTIC TRADITIONS According to Katarzyna Jiezierska, the theoretical field of radical democracy is essentially a polarized one, meaning that the radical standpoint is disputed mainly between a deliberative tradition and an agonistic tradi-

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tion. Besides, the author notes that these two opposing standpoints have built up around the founding influence of Jürgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe, respectively. In Jiezierska’s words, the debate between Mouffe and Habermas reflects a larger dispute between on the one hand, critical theory, and on the other, post-structuralism. In many respects, they stand on two opposing sides of the barricade, one defending modernity, reason and Enlightenment and the other post-modernism, passion and the critique of reason. (Jiezierska 2011, 17)

Therefore, inquiring into the meaning of citizens’ assemblies in the context of radical politics demands a priori understanding of this dispute and the pragmatic effects at the grassroots level of citizens’ mobilization. As our camera moved back and forth from the garden to the factory, bent on documenting the commitment of a group of Algés dwellers to found alternative forms of political involvement, it became clear how this matter could be approached in terms of the relationship between politics and culture and the escape from the Weberian iron cage (stahlhartes Gehӓuse) constructed by Western situated rationalism. As Lawrence Scaff has noted, the relationship between politics and culture is defined by critical and adaptive responses to Western rationalism or, in the terms of my essay, by the search for alternatives to the “iron cage.” I shall argue that these alternatives disclose specific, politically relevant “solutions” to the discontents associated with modern rationalist culture but they do not do away with rationalism or reason as social foundations. (Scaff 1987, 737)

At the beginning of his essay, Scaff makes a relevant clarification for our own research on PAA, that by getting deep into the relationship between politics and culture through Weber and the modern, postNietzschean experience he shared, observed and criticized, it is possible to reflect upon the tangible phenomena connected with the meaning and consequences of modernity, and what Weber called “the fate imposed upon us” or “the fate of our times” as the expression of a rational-bureaucratic politics in a disenchanted world. If in Weber’s work the escape from the “iron cage” emerges from within the ethical, aesthetic, erotic and intellectualist life orders or value spheres in response to the modern, subjectivist culture, what to say about citizens’ assemblies and PAA more particularly? What kind of life order or value sphere do they represent and emerge from, and what kind of escape from the iron cage do they put forward as an alternative to the rational-bureaucratic politics and the modern city characteristic of the end times? Weber’s analysis of capitalism is linked to the “iron cage” metaphor, identified by Scaff as an Epimethean metaphor emerging from the inexorable power of modernity and its material culture. In Wirtshaft und Gesellshaft, Weber underlines that modern bureaucratic politics works as a

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“process of erecting a cage of bondage which persons—lacking all powers of resistance—will perhaps one day be forced to inhabit, as the fellahs of ancient Egypt” (Weber 1968, 1402). For Scaff, the modern subject is already constrained by the necessities of vocational activity devoid of its sustaining structures of meaning. In his words, We are all, as it were, conscripted as un-consenting participants in a universalized vocational culture, our horizons limited to the rationalized, inwardly meaningless certainties of “vocational humanity” (Berufsmenschentum). For one to attempt, as a “cultural being” (Kulturmensch), to “advance” this culture from the standpoint of its own assumptions, is only to advance farther along the path of modern discontents. (Scaff 1987, 741)

In different ways, though, modern discontents all rely on a certain reenchantment of the world against cultural rationalization and the concomitant iron logic of late capitalist cages and post-political neoliberal politics. Fighting the inevitability of living life within modern iron cages, we argue that the PAA experiment has asserted itself as a critical instance of utopianism bridging the gap between process and spatial form. By opening up renewed spaces of hope while mobilizing citizens to step outside all sorts of iron cages, PAA has assumed its utopian character by grounding a radical social process (between agonistic and deliberative domains) in a “hopeful” spatiotemporal form (between garden and factory, fluidity and closure). During a period of almost one year, our camera could witness the tensions emerging from within this process, something akin to what David Harvey identifies as the perversion of spatial utopias by a certain compromise with the social process they are supposed to control. In Harvey’s (2002, 179–80) words, “[w]e now see also that materialized utopias of the social process have to negotiate with spatiality and the geography of place and in so doing they also lose their ideal character, producing results that are in many instances exactly the opposite of those intended (e.g., increasing authoritarianism and inequalities rather than greater democracy and equality).” The particular translation of PAA in space is especially relevant to discuss this question, as the initial agora-like debate and deliberation (inherently open and fluid) became displaced as it were on behalf of the factory, a semi-private and “enclosed” space organized as a commoninterest civic association under Portuguese law. In fact, such a translation was itself the product of deliberation, in which PAA’s engaged members decided to devote more time and energy to collective activities in the semi-private, associational space than to strict debate and politicization in the public garden. Be that as it may, such translation can be seen as proof of the agonistic claim that the personal is political (Hanisch 1970). The factory has maintained an “open-door” policy vis-à-vis random visi-

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tors, in spite of the strict “members-only approach” inscribed in the law, hoping clearly to escape total closure and keep a creative flux between “in” (the private) and “out” (the public). BROADENING POLITICS, RE-POLITICIZING THE “PUBLIC” The importance of considering the radical—in radical democracy—in the debate about a citizens’ assembly lies in the assumption that politics and democracy must be understood in broader terms. In Mouffe’s language, this means that all domains of the “social” and the “public” must be politicized, in the sense that they must be open to public contestation. Therefore, one must recognize that projects of radical democracy are intended “to extend the democratic struggle to all those areas in which the relation of domination existed” (Ian 1998, 6), and public contestation plays the critical role of opening up space for questioning domination and the underlying social practices on which domination depends to reproduce itself. As noted by Jiezierska (2011, 19), “democratic politics is not to be merely restricted to the traditionally understood political domain, but for example economy should as well be the site of democratic struggle (e.g., against capitalism) and a wide mobilization of different social groups is supposed to vitalize and supplement parliamentary democracy.” Pushing democracy and politics as public contestation to spheres going beyond the traditionally defined political (in the sense of power games within formal state institutions) encapsulates the radical in radical politics, according to Mouffe. If there is something that individuals engaged in the PAA experiment, and coming from various backgrounds, do share is the deep-seated conviction that the “social” must be politicized and all domains of domination open to contestation by citizens and their informal grassroots organizations. During our research, we could witness how people articulated this claim daily vis-à-vis such concerns as the municipal plan of urbanization, the use and policing of public space (like the garden used by PAA for its meetings), environmental matters affecting the Oeiras municipality, the evictions connected to the crisis or the occupation movement, genetically modified food legislation or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the United States. From a different perspective, the Habermasian project also deals with the widening of democratic politics in a radical sense, not restricted to the functioning of the state but encompassing all societal arrangements and procedures aimed at finding consensus about public matters. In Jiezierska’s (2011, 20) synthesis, “the process of democratic politics also includes the phase of informal deliberations among citizens, where they define their identities, form their interests and preferences, and ideally come to a

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consensus.” Therefore, an open-air people’s assembly becomes the realm of lifeworld and deliberation, where space collides, as it were, in favor of an open discussion about the broader design of the “social,” and common positions are arrived at by consensus rather than by voting. Even without a clear theoretical articulation by its members, PAA weekly meetings in the garden took place in accordance with the Habermasian ideal speech situation. A central part of the collaborative ethnography we conducted there deals in fact with tangible situations in which people were willing to engage in communication procedures governed by implied rules of equality, reason and non-coercion, where the only force admitted was the force of the better argument. In the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas (1985, 145) clarifies that the further the lifeworld becomes structurally differentiated, “the more interaction contexts come under conditions of rationally motivated mutual understanding, that is, of consensus formation that rests in the end on the authority of the better argument.” What follows for Habermas is of huge relevance to our research, given his mention of a communication community based on the possibility of rational discourse, allowing for both self-realization and moral argumentation. According to the editor of Irish Politics Forum Elayne Byrne (2011, paragraph 2), “a Citizens’ Assembly is a means of citizens recapturing trust in their political process by taking ownership of the decision-making process.” As far as the rational or reasoned discussion structuring the process, Byrne underlines that citizens’ assemblies are not adversarial, in the sense that they tend to build on consensus rather than creating losing and winning sides. Disagreement is inevitable and valued, not stifled, as a sign of creativity and is central to moral argumentation and self-realization. Deliberation then is crucial to the meaning and practice of the radical in radical politics, and has assumed relevance in citizens’ assemblies due to the symbolic power of decision making in collective representations of emancipation. However, we should not overlook the agonistic side of radical politics, and of citizens’ assemblies for that matter, since they represent a deeper level of what “radical” means. In Jiezierska’s (2011, 23) view, the particularity of agonistic democracy is that “subjects are formed through their participation in politics. They shape their identities and define their subject positions in the confrontation with others, which is the central focus of agonistic democracy.” Therefore, people’s or citizens’ assemblies are located in the context of our study at the critical, or rather radical, juncture broadening democratic politics in terms both of the spheres reclaimed for politics (through politicization and contestation) and the space where politics should be performed (viz. taking it to a public garden), critiquing reason but resorting to reason as the only way to ground decisions, decision making and social engagement.

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RECLAIMING THE CITY: SOLIDARITY AND SPACE PAA’s reclaiming and appropriation of the public space on behalf of radical politics was assumed by its founders as a fundamental struggle for the right to the city (Mitchell 2003). As austerity and consecutive cuts in public spending were perceived as conducive to a shrinking of the public space, the PAA experiment has consolidated itself more and more as a fight for public space based on the solidarity of the shaken—to use Jan Patočka’s classic expression—in the end times. Writing on collective culture and urban public space, Ash Amin has underlined the importance of symbolic visualizations in public space of solidarity in a “minor key,” as a kind of public commitment to the margin. This is a form of solidarity towards the emergent and always temporary settlements of public culture, serving to reinforce civic interest in the plural city, the rights of the many, the margin brought to the centre, the legitimacy of the idiosyncratic and ill-conforming. (Amin 2006, paragraph 31)

Moving from garden to factory and back again, the camera could add to research a certain sense of organic witnessing and parttaking in the tangible manifestations of such solidarity, through the organization of a time bank and communitarian dinners prepared on the basis of reaping (respiga), but also the use of art to jolt cultural assumptions (Amin 2006, paragraph 33) and the setting up of an open-air library to reinforce the particular legitimacy of the “idiosyncratic” and “ill-conforming.” In fact, the whole process of naming and setting up a Factory of Alternatives attests to this urge for reclaiming the polis on behalf of plurality, conviviality and the many at the margins. Drawing once again on Amin, we must underline here that the “symbolic projections [of this kind of solidarity] are oriented towards aesthetic disruption rather than hegemonic confirmation, but always in the spirit of reinventing the ties that bind” (Amin 2006, paragraph 31). This is the exact context in which Amin emphasizes conviviality as a form of “solidarity with space.” According to this perspective, PAA could be described as an ethical practice emerging out of daily negotiations among engaged individuals (from different backgrounds) and their differences in a common space dreamed of as a space of hope, solidarity and justice. It can be said that, during these times of crises, a number of spaces managed to extend the margins of freedom and produce a sphere of social change in crisis-ridden Lisbon, spaces for maneuvering and popular inclusion, in which solidarity, social visibility and dwelling are remade and repoliticized. Moreover, this phenomenon can be approached as a kind of hybrid citizenship which is performative and culturally informed, made up of solidarity and “ties that bind” that some would

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perceive as beyond the state’s legality and the private ownership model of property. In our view, though, the PAA’s model of solidarity with space can be better perceived not beyond but in a fundamental tension with the official spheres of legality and order. In fact, part of the PAA as a citizens’ assembly has involved daily practice of negotiation and conviviality, with the concomitant drawing up of acceptable boundaries vis-à-vis the domain of formal politics, established regimes of truth and their tools of consent. Once the model for a Factory of Alternatives—conforming to a civic association model—was agreed upon, the more anarchic leaning was superseded in favor of a certain accommodation with legal and hegemonic life orders. Tensions have always persisted though, as when the police invoked the law to prohibit PAA’s open-air library set up on the garden’s benches, thereby triggering a citizens’ mobilization in defense of the PAA project, in November 2013. ESCAPING THE IRON CAGE: HETEROTOPIA AS GRASSROOTS POESIS As underlined above, the escape from the iron cage emerges from within ethical, aesthetic, erotic and intellectualist life orders in response to modern culture. But how is this embodied in the context of a people’s assembly, and PAA in particular? Arguably, it draws our attention to citizens’ assemblies as pragmatic experiments of living outside the cage of hegemonic life orders, opposing them from multiple standpoints of marginal and ill-conforming life orders. From what we have just underlined, it is possible to argue that the latter distinguish themselves in ethical and aesthetic terms, but probably also in the erotic domain of desire for recognition from the Other, in Lacanian terms, responsible for structuring not only our desires but also our drives (Lacan 2006). In this sense, PAA is a space of hope with underlying ethical, aesthetic but also erotic assumptions, within which the subject longs for recognition from others—a desire—of his inherent political ethos, robbed of him/her by market forces and formalistic democratic workings of modern post-political politics governing, or rather administering, bodies and consciousness in the end times. The particular “solidarity with space” instantiated by PAA as a spatiotemporal utopia (Harvey 2002, 182) links together ethical, aesthetic and erotic life orders in that the realm of aesthetics is assumed as a weapon to be used against the tyranny of modern (code-based) morality and politics. Addressing a topic related to Žižek’s apocalyptic end times, Timothy O’Leary (2002, 1) asks his readers whether “Foucault’s idea on an ethics which is based on an ‘aesthetics of existence’ [is] equal to the task of giving us—that is, anyone who experiences this crisis—the means with

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which we could answer the question ‘How is one to live?’” Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, the life orders we intend to connect to citizens’ assemblies embody an understanding of ethics as an aesthetics of the self, not as a field of rules, principles or precepts, but as the field of our selfconstitution as subjects (O’Leary 2002, 11), desiring recognition from the other as full political subjects capable of transforming our conduct and life like a work of art—an aesthetic work, a poesis. The bottom line here, as O’Leary (2002, 5) is keen to remind us, is that the relation of self to self—the ethical question—“should not be conceived in Sartrean terms, as either authentic or inauthentic: rather, it should be conceived as ‘a creative activity.’ The self is not a foundation, a source or a starting point: it is an end, a task, a work which, although constantly worked, is never completed.” At this juncture, we would like to pay tribute to Mancha, a man who found in PAA the motivation for refashioning his life according to such “poetic” terms. Finding a roof at the factory, his involvement with PAA went hand in hand with stone sculpturing. The interaction of individuals we set out to portray here draws attention to a certain grassroots poesis. Both the more straightforward political debates on Saturday mornings and the “convivial” activities developed at the factory are understood by engaged individuals as an ethical opportunity to conduct life according to critical standards and refashion the self in the same light. This ethical standpoint is clearly articulated with the “aesthetics of existence,” in Foucauldian terms, whose aspiration is the protection of individual and collective freedom enshrined in the utopian spaces of hope and grassroots solidarity. Against the background of a deplored crisis of subjectivity, articulated in much the same way as in the Husserlian “crisis of European man” (Vattimo 1991), PAA members never failed to voice the negative impact on society springing from the kind of morality that is made hegemonic by vested powers and mass communication—consent through standardization. Garden and factory are therefore taken as utopian spaces of difference—heterotopic as it were— capable of articulating otherness and marginalized aspirations (Unbehagen), springing from alternative and free subjectivities but developing from no universally recognized set of rules or code. In the context of generally amorphous societies stricken by crisis—but still incapable of leaving depression behind and embracing acceptance of emancipatory subjectivities (Žižek 2010)—experiments such as PAA take on the character of a grassroots heterotopia. In the Order of Things, Foucault writes that in contrast to utopias—stories that afford consolation— heterotopias are disturbing since they undermine language and therefore the very foundations of society: “Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language [whereas heterotopias] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of gram-

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mar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (Foucault 1970, xviii). Serving as critical mirrors showing what society at large has turned into, but also what it can aim at if it frees itself from the shackles of traditional morality, spaces like PAA disturb the order of things and mobilize people at a grassroots level, on the basis of alternative principles, conducts and social goals. Going back to the radical sources of politics embodied by such movements, we would like to argue that citizens’ assemblies represent a form of heterotopic and grassroots democracy in which the ordering of the “social” takes place in unconventional ways. In The Badlands of Modernity, Kevin Hetherington (1997) characterizes heterotopias as an unsettling model of spatial and social relations based on transgression, as they “organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate order marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things” (Hetherington 1997, viii). Even if the author recognizes that doing things in a different way is the hallmark of modernity, the bottom line here is that the way heterotopias function—and the ways people interact with each other in these contexts—ends up revealing that social ordering is a process, not a given fact, and that it is not beyond contestation, repoliticization and open public debate. JOUISSANCE So how has PAA as a people’s assembly fared as a grassroots model of democracy? According to David Harvey (2002, 183), “to materialize a space is to engage with closure (however temporary) which is an authoritarian act [and t]he history of all realized utopias points to this issue of closure as both fundamental and unavoidable.” In his book, Harvey draws attention to the inevitable disillusionment produced by foreclosure and the fact that matters of authority and order building cannot be evaded when looking at phenomena like these: “[t]o do this is to embrace an agonistic romanticism of perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire” (Harvey 2002, 183). Even if Harvey does not clarify the idea, we can link this to a desire for freedom and recognition. Before delving into issues pertaining to closure, let us consider PAA in connection to a particular issue of democratic practice, the way rights are exercised or enjoyed. As a tangible response to the crisis of formal democracy and the 1974 political regime in Portugal, the Factory of Alternatives (as an embodiment of PAA) could be approached as a space of jouissance too, in the Lacanian sense, beyond pleasure and encompassing the enjoyment of rights. Garden and factory become then the materialization of an ethic/aesthetic possibility only dreamed of by ordinary citizens constrained by liberal

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morality and formal politics, the possibility of becoming free citizens with tangible aesthetic options. Garden and factory become a spatiotemporal binomial (between fluidity and closure) allowing for the enjoyment, or rather jouissance, of civic rights and pleasures that make hope a tangible and open social goal. Arguably, and as part of the radical politicization at both garden and factory, individuals reclaim the right to pleasure as a civic bond to time and space, potentially transgressive in that it instantiates an alternative spatial community that does not renounce the desire for open and fluid interactions. This was manifest in the way eclectic artistic expressions found their space in the factory but also in the assumption of transgression—late night music jams or free poetry readings, for instance—as the accepted normality of a space freed from conventional morality and fixed practices and hierarchies. Furthermore, the assumed trust in alternatives to the market for ordering interactions at the factory is central to grasp what we mean here by jouissance. As we could witness, PAA was born out of the desire to redress the atomization of society imposed by market forces and relations. Renewed social bonds have been explored outside market relations (viz. a time bank or community dinners) in order to fortify both individual resilience against austerity and a sense of the public good, but also as the sign of a choice for an alternative ethical/aesthetic experience that is seen as increasingly transgressive by conventional morality. The role of money has always been problematic, with more radical individuals subscribing to a perspective that takes money “as the means which enables us to have contacts with others without entering into proper relations with them” (Žižek 2010, 41). Eventually, money found its place in PAA, with a part of activities being effected under the time bank and another part being paid by people taking part in them but not in the time bank. With Harvey’s quote about desire, we reach a critical juncture in our research. In fact, since the very beginning, our cinematic project within PAA developed with a basic interest in documenting the tensions that inhere in contemporary Portuguese society because of unfulfilled longing and desire—that is, a deep frustration in certain quarters vis-à-vis the “revolution betrayed” (and what is seen as the end of the welfare state created by the ideological program of the 1974 Revolution) and the more diffused Unbehagen in liberal capitalism. Since the beginning though, garden and factory have come to represent and embody the fundamental moral tensions between longing and desire (the fluidity of time) and closure (the materialization of space) inherent in all utopias. In the first year of PAA, all these tensions stood out as a sign of the problem vis-à-vis authority. From the point of view of those engaged in weekly debate in the garden, the issue was how to set up a tangible utopia of grassroots mobilization that could serve as a tool for the collective protection against the Troika-led austerity program. However, the utopia embodied in the Factory of Alternatives eventually brought

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about—since November 2013—the question of closure and authoritative, if not authoritarian, acts of ordering the new space. What started as an open debate on the public garden (working in the fluidity of time), restricted only by the implied rules of a communicative community, soon entered into tension with the fully materialized space of the factory where further (explicit and written) norms had to be defined for the sake of ordering its practices. More fundamentally still, written norms became unavoidable for the materialization of the factory as a civic association (whose legality was needed to sign contracts, viz. electricity and water). The forthcoming documentary shall try to encapsulate the tensions inhering in the fulfillment of utopia and the materialization of its space of hope, as this process could not avoid a certain closure and hierarchization, with counteracting claims in favor of opening it up again. Struggling to remain an open community, the PAA experiment also had to face recurring tensions linked to authority claims over the use of space—in the factory—that were not conceivable, meaningless or negligible in the garden context. As we perceived and lived through them, moral tensions between garden and factory persisted as a sign of the plurality of ideals enclosed in PAA. The need to articulate difference and plurality, on behalf of a consensual conviviality, leads us to recognize that at least some of the more radical members who stayed on board have revealed themselves as agonistic romantics, continually articulating a sense of unfulfilled longing and desire for a more radical-cum-fluid project. (FAR FROM A) CONCLUSION: SPARTACUS RE-ENACTED As with the ethos of resistance in Spartacus’s movement, a theme finely explored in the recent Stephen DeKnight’s TV series (2010–2013), so too the People’s Assembly of Algés turned out to be much different from what each of its founders had dreamed of. We hope that the forthcoming documentary will be able to convey the sense of process and negotiation embodied in PAA that alienates it from a fixed or abstract identity. As an expression of heterotopia, radical politics and grassroots democracy, PAA (and its Fábrica das Alternativas) encapsulates and puts into practice both the agonistic politicization and contestation of hegemonic discourses within contemporary Portuguese society and the deliberation needed for consensual decision making. Moving back and forth, from garden to factory, fluidity and closure, both camera and research have tried to capture the ethos of the experiment as a space of hope, solidarity, difference and jouissance, no matter how incapable it turned out to be of transcending moral tensions between closure and the unfulfilled desire for openness and fluidity. All in all, PAA is approached throughout this chapter as a creative articulation of Unbehagen in neoliberal capitalism

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(and resistance to its disciplinary effects) intent on rebuilding the ties that bind, eroded as they are by the excessive and still increasing marketization of Portuguese society. It deals with a very localized answer to neoliberalism—or austerity for that matter—and the impact on governance is far from scratching the foundations of it but can be crucial in mobilizing resistance and articulating alternative views of the ties that bind. Being a very fluid and informal mechanism, popular assemblies are always dependent on the will, capacity and engagement of particular people to take activities further or sustain those already in place. They work as interstitial spaces but that is precisely the nature of their resistance and how they can be mobilized as a critical resource when the next crisis comes. REFERENCES Amin, Ash. 2006. “Collective Culture and Urban Public Space.” Public Space webboard. http://www.publicspace.org/en/text-library/eng/b003-collective-culture-and-urbanpublic-space. Byrne, Elaine. 2011. “What is a Citizens’ Assembly?” The Irish Politics Forum Blog, May 1. http://politicalreform.ie/2011/05/08/what-is-a-citizens-assembly/. Connolly, William. 1995. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. The Theory of Communicative Action. (Vol. 2). Boston: Beacon Press. Hanisch, Carol. 1970. “The personal is political.” In Notes From the Second Year: Women’s Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, 76–77. New York: Radical Feminism. Harvey, David. 2002. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity. London: Routledge. Ian, Angus. 1998. “An Interview with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau.” The Knowledge Network. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://www.academia.edu/980709/ Interview_with_Chantal_Mouffe_and_Ernesto_Laclau_by_Ian_Angus. Jiezierska, Katarzyna. 2011. Radical Democracy Redux. Örebro: Örebro University. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Écrits. New York: Norton. Mitchell, Don. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guilford Press. O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum. Scaff, Lawrence A. 1987. “Fleeing the Iron Cage.” The American Political Science Review 81 (3): 737–56. Vattimo, Gianni. 1991. The End of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. Somerville, NJ: Bedminster Press. Wright, Erik Olin. 2009. Envisioning Real Utopias. London and New York: Verso Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

SIX The Crisis on the Wall Political Muralism and Street Art in Lisbon Ricardo Campos

In the period following the Carnation Revolution of 1974, Lisbon’s city walls were the repository for many political murals made by a wide number of political parties, especially those of left-wing ideology. These murals slowly vanished, giving way, in the 1990s, to the American-inspired graffiti. Inspired by a globalized hip-hop culture that was mostly popularized through the media, graffiti formats such as tags, throw-ups and masterpieces gradually acquired a significant place in the Lisbon metropolitan area. These were basically non-political forms of visual expression in public space. But in recent years a new willingness to engage in political communication has emerged, and is surfacing on Portugal’s urban walls. The serious economic and social crisis that broke out in response to the heavy austerity measures imposed by the ruling centerright coalition in power (2011–2015), seems to have mobilized citizens to act politically outside conventional mechanisms of political communication. The numerous protests and large demonstrations that have been held in the past years, organized by non-partisan associations and collectives, are a good example of the emergence of informal political expressions in recent times. The walls of Portugal are increasingly used to express, not only a widespread revolt, but also disgust with the political power, satirizing the ruling class, and defying the status quo. Words, slogans, spray-painted murals and stencil techniques are among the forms of protest that we find scattered around the streets of Lisbon today.

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In this chapter, I intend to address this issue, highlighting the increased relevance that streets and the urban public spaces have played in recent years in the Portuguese political context. Political inscriptions on walls have recently been appearing in various cities around the globe. Lisbon, Cairo, Athens or Istanbul are some of the examples invoked in this chapter. In all of these cases, the social, economic and political turbulence has driven citizens to the streets, in actions of protest and unrest. Political graffiti is an example of a wider movement toward the emergence of new formulas and grammars of political participation that take the city and its materiality as a central arena for ideological struggle. This chapter is organized in three sections. Firstly, I will theoretically discuss the importance of graffiti and political muralism as formulas of political participation in the public sphere, particularly driven by informal collective structures, as they take place at the margins of traditional politics. Secondly, in order to contextualize the case of Lisbon, I will briefly describe the history of political muralism in Portugal, dating back to its inception, the revolutionary period of 1974. The chapter’s final section is devoted to an analysis of the recent political inscriptions on the walls of Lisbon, taken as a reaction to the violent austerity measures imposed on Portugal by the so-called “Troika.” GRAFFITI AND POLITICAL MURALISM Throughout history, urban public spaces have been used by different social actors as a preferential stage for a wide variety of individual and collective manifestations. Rejoicing, celebrating or protesting are some of the most common motivations driving large numbers of people to occupy the streets and squares of their cities in demonstrations of a collective will. But streets are not used solely in gregarious or collective phenomena. The common citizen also uses public space as a channel to voice his/ her typically anonymous opinion. Urban public space can certainly be considered a communicational arena—complete with its very own set of mechanisms and devices—and the fact that it is frequently used by different political agents should therefore not come as a surprise. From organized political rallies and demonstrations, to sporadic actions of resistance and protest, we can find a wide array of political expressions being held in the street. But the street is not only a stage for those who want to make a political statement; it also becomes the repository for the kind of messages found in billboards, banners and other types of outdoor advertising, as well as for the type of unexpected phrases we find inscribed across walls or covering the surface of other urban equipment. Inscriptions conveying messages with political undertones are the expression of a timeless and universal will to communicate, for which we find instances all over the world. Waldner and Dobratz (2013) suggest

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that some graffiti styles can be understood as forms of “contentious political participation.” For these authors, political graffiti can be perceived as forms of participation and activism arising outside the traditional forms of doing politics. From this point of view, graffiti is thus a form of contentious politics that makes use of urban space as a platform of resistance and protest, similar to other phenomena such as squatting, culture jamming, or more recently, the Occupy movements or 15-M in Spain. According to Zaimakis: Political graffiti involve political actions ranging from big-P-Politics (party politics and career politics) and strategies, to small-scale subpolitics driven by issues of interests connected with the everyday life of citizens. . . . Graffiti space is a striking medium used by oppressed people and contingents to express their ideas and feelings about the unpleasant situations of precariousness, insecurity and existential anxiety. (Zaimakis 2016, 375–76)

Well known are the examples of May 1968 in France or the Berlin Wall—paradigmatic examples of the politicization of walls. More recently, however, various other examples are worthy of mention. Such is the case with Palestine, a context that has been marked by violence and military occupation where graffiti has come to function as a form of political resistance (Peteet 2016). Similarly, the work of Abaza (2016) observes the fundamental importance of graffiti manifestation following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that toppled the Mubarak regime. Thirdly, the upheaval experienced in Istanbul in 2013 also gave rise to different manifestations of political graffiti during the protests and clashes in Gezi Park (Yanik 2015). In these cases, public spaces were invaded by slogans of a subversive and satirical nature, aimed at politicians and the powers that be, in a clear demonstration of resistance. It is, however, the recent case of Greece, and more specifically that of Athens, that holds the most similarities with the case of Lisbon. Just like Portugal, in recent years, Greece also underwent a severe economic and social crisis, with strong austerity measures and the intervention of the “Troika.” Under this context, the political graffiti proliferated, functioning as a stronghold of commentary and resistance to the erosion and deterioration of the living conditions of the Greek people (Tsilimpounidi 2012; Alexandrakis 2016; Zaimakis 2015). Graffiti and street art served as a form of counter-hegemonic speech, questioning the narrative promoted by the mainstream media and the government, often working as bastions of resistance. Another issue should be highlighted when addressing the relation between graffiti and political participation. American-inspired graffiti culture (Castleman 1982; Cooper and Chalfant 1984) has been approached by various authors as youth culture (Macdonald 2001; Campos 2010, 2013, 2015). In this sense, it is relevant to frame these new political graffiti, taking into account the articulation between young people and

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political participation. Several studies point toward a lack of participation of young people in the public sphere, and to a certain discredit of the democratic system and its actors (Dahlgren 2009; Loader 2007; Kennelly 2011). Especially the young people distance themselves from conventional participation in politics and prefer other ways of political engagement (Bennet 2009). The political agency and civic participation of young people may develop in alternative and unorthodox ways, through expressions that combine ideological combat, creativity and the ludic aspects. The articulation between the fields of aesthetic creation and political participation has originated concepts such as “creative democracy” (Hankins 2017), “creative citizenship” (Hargreaves and Hartley 2016), or “aesthetics of protest” (Buser et al. 2013), which reveal the importance of creativity, not only in the micro-politics of everyday life, but also in more sporadic actions of contentious politics. What the cases of Greece, Turkey and Egypt reveal is that historical periods of turbulence, crisis or revolt tend to generate greater intervention in the public space, with an increased politicization of citizens that utilize different forms of unregulated informal expressions taking place on the streets. Lisbon is no exception. Far from being a new phenomenon, the history of political writings and murals in this city is both long and rich. In fact, during the period following the 1974 democratic revolution, city walls became the stage for many different forms of political propaganda and were amply used by all political parties. Over the decades, this phenomenon gradually waned and, as the walls were slowly depoliticized, other communication formulas began to take their place. Using Lisbon as my study case, this chapter intends to analyze all these forms of expression, with a special focus on recent events, marked by the disciplinary neoliberalism and the Troika bailout. The first task is to establish some conceptual boundaries that will allow for the clear distinction between different communication formats found in the urban public space. We can start by drawing a first taxonomic distinction between what could be defined as “official or legitimized mural forms of expression” on the one hand, and “unofficial informal or illegal mural expressions” on the other. It is a relevant distinction given their substantially different nature, manifested both in terms of the contexts in which they are produced, as in the content and symbolism of the messages conveyed in each case. The first of these pertain to forms of expression that are socially accepted as legitimate and are included in the communication formats used by different social agents. Such forms of expression are usually not considered illegal, and therefore do not imply the development of occultation strategies. The fact that they are perceived as communicational formulas inscribed within the framework of socially accepted conventions suggests that they possess limited disruptive power. Inversely, the second group can be referred to a vast tradition of messages with a vernacular, transgressive and subterranean nature,

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which elude the gaze and control of the powers in place, whether religious, social, political or economic. Their informal character is often accompanied by their illegal status and may generate different kinds of reactions from authorities. This kind of expression can generically be called graffiti. The term graffiti has an Italian origin, derived from the word graffiare, meaning something like scratching. Graffiti is plural for graffito, used to describe a mark or inscription made on a wall. 1 This was the term given to inscriptions made on walls during Roman times (such as the inscriptions found in the catacombs in Rome and Pompeii for example). The term has since become popularized and globally widespread, generally linked to phenomena whose communicational nature presents three basic features: they are executed in public spaces or premises; they have an unofficial, transgressive and illegal nature; they are generally anonymous. Juan Gari (1995) classifies them according to two traditions. On the one hand, there is a kind of graffiti that has become hegemonic, and which corresponds to the American tradition, being strongly connected with the pictorial and graphic forms of expression and heavily inspired by popular culture. 2 On the other hand, in contrast to graffiti of American inspiration, there is a European (or French) model, heir to a philosophic, poetic, and humoristic tradition of aphoristic thought. In short, all of these manifestations have the same basic underlying idea of using public space to inscribe unauthorized verbal or pictorial inscriptions. Transgression is an essential element of contemporary graffiti (Campos 2010 and 2013; Ferrell 1996; Macdonald 2001). This is a form of expression which is socially construed as transgressive, insofar as it is illegal, criminalized and associated with deviant actions. That is why it is socially labeled as a form of vandalism. Consequently, those who practice it consciously incur an illegal action, aware that that they are defying a set of social norms and conventions, and thus assuming transgression as an inherent part of their act. I believe that the transgression occurs on two levels. My assumption stems from the fact that graffiti always carries with it a double message: the message conveyed by the text (verbal, iconographic or other kind of content) and by the context (illicitness, deviance, risk) (Campos 2015). The first is linked to the visible realm (perceived by the observer) while the second belongs to an invisible domain (that which is not seen, but merely imagined). In other words, the former is strictly connected to the semantic nature of what is inscribed on city walls, and the latter points to the social practices involved in illegal graffiti, whose meaning is conveyed, not through what they disclose, but precisely through what they conceal. Painting or writing in the street, as a gesture that can be quite elementary from the technical point of view, is always extremely meaningful from the symbolic perspective. One of the features of graffiti as a communicational phenomenon is its tremendous effectiveness: with very little

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means and basic grammatical formulas, it is possible to convey a symbolically powerful message. And to a great extent, it is powerful because it is illegal, unexpected and transgressive. It is powerful because it is disruptive, breaking with the socially sanctioned and legitimate rules of communication. It is powerful because it manages to elude different kinds of control and censorship. Regarding the political dimension in these forms of expression, I find that there are two ways of addressing the issue. An evaluation of their political nature may consider the “act,” as much as the “content” of this kind of manifestation. Thus, regardless of the content, and since it expresses dissent and rejection of existing social and legal norms, illegal graffiti is always perceived as a political act. Nevertheless, there may be cases in which the content of the message itself may address political issues, combining the transgressive nature of the act with the expression of a political statement. The problem is slightly different in the case of non-illegal and institutional murals. In this case, we are dealing with languages that are socially tolerated or legitimized by the different powers, and hence there is no element of transgression attached to the act. At present, I am interested in addressing graffiti and murals that assert themselves as ideological vehicles, or in other words, that result from a consciously political act meant to state an ideological position on certain issues, figures, or events in a given context. These are the examples I will be focusing on. There are substantial differences between the political mural and graffiti, even though they have in common the use of public space as a communicational arena, and a set of formal elements that constitute these forms of expression (writing, painting, drawing, etc.). Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the boundaries are faint and permeable, as some of the examples presented here will precisely show. When referring to urban public space, walls, murals or political graffiti, one must bear in mind that we are dealing with a particular “field of visibility” (Brighenti 2007), which compels us to consider the street as a “battle field,” to use Figueroa-Saavedra’s (2006) expression. The idea of a field of visibility highlights the relevant role that the gaze and visual communication play in the way we structure our world and the hierarchies of meaning. It is an issue that inevitably points to a political dimension. The ability of beholding, scrutinizing, and naming the visible world is bound up with exercises of power. 3 Power has always used the control over visuality as a means of ideological inculcation, of conquering and maintaining power, achieved with the aid of a potent technological apparatus. This can be seen, not only in the staging strategies used by power (Balandier 1980), but also in areas such as surveillance, military control and confrontation or propaganda (Robins 1996; Mirzoeff 1999; Brighenti 2007), amongst others. However, in a society immersed in imagery and highly mediatized, counterpowers and resistance forces are also heavily reliant on audiovisual communication.

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To discuss murals and graffiti therefore implies considering a field of visibility that includes a group of agents who use a variety of means in order to make their messages visible for a given audience. Currently, contrary to what would be expected, this public is not limited to urban residents and passers-by, but increasingly includes a vast relocated audience whose access to such messages is made through a number of electronic circuits. Thus, the field of visibility in question expands and becomes more complex from the moment that the local arena becomes a translocal and global arena with the help of multiple media. That is why the performative aspect in many of the recent demonstrations in different cities around the world has been so vastly replicated. This is certainly an aspect that is not ignored by many of those who use the streets as a stage for protest. POLITICAL MURALISM IN PORTUGAL Portugal lived a big part of the twentieth century under a dictatorship, between 1926 and 1974, a regime which left an indelible mark on Portuguese society and political life. António de Oliveira Salazar became the Minister of Finances in 1928 and in 1933, under his direction as Prime Minister, the regime adopted the official designation of Estado Novo (New State), which came to an end via a military coup on 25 April 1974. This became known as the “Carnation Revolution.” 4 The revolutionary movement of 25 April was the culmination of the regime’s gradual decline, resulting from growing discontentment, in a country tied up in a drawn out and apparently endless war with its former African colonies. The war with its so-called “overseas territories” 5 (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau) consumed not only significant financial resources, but also large numbers of Portuguese youths drafted into the army. The 1974 Carnation Revolution inaugurated a democratic regime that brought with it a new political life marked by freedom of expression and ideological confrontation. The post-revolutionary enthusiasm of the early years was also marked by episodes of some tension. After more than forty years of political persecution and repression, this new-found freedom opened the way to a previously unseen wave of public intervention. The streets became the main stage of free expression, city walls playing a symbolic role whose significance is still remembered today. The wall became a vital channel for political communication, being used by leftand right-wing parties alike, although predominantly by the former (Aurélio 1999; Caldeira and Marques 2009). 6 As would be expected in that context, the iconography used in these forms of propaganda was infused with revolutionary imagery alluding to the ideological environment of the period. 7 Given that most of the murals were painted by left-wing movements, it was not surprising to see figures

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such as Marx, Lenin, or Mao becoming familiar faces. These portraits were often accompanied by representations of collective types such as the people, the worker or the farmer, in mural compositions that were veritable revolutionary tours de force. A large part of these works was inspired by Soviet and Chinese muralism, reproducing the same technical and formal devices. However, we should stress that there was a wide range of works, and it was easy to find murals displaying a wide variety of formats and techniques. This owed not only to the number of “schools” connected to the different political players involved, but also to the type of militants recruited for these kinds of operations. Murals possessed a markedly collective element, and, in many cases, they were painted under the direction of artists. These pictorial murals coexisted with other forms of political expression, such as graffiti that were essentially in written form, usually made either to celebrate or to criticize certain events, political parties or figures. In these times of political combat, this kind of debate was frequently fought on street walls. Given the ephemeral and unprotected nature of murals, their presence marked Lisbon’s cityscape for as long as they lasted on the walls. These paintings gradually disappeared, due to the inability or unwillingness of official entities to grasp their historical and cultural value. Nevertheless, the lack of conservation did not prevent them from becoming an integral part of the collective imagination and memory of all the Lisbon dwellers fortunate enough to live through this period. The slow fading of this kind of expression is surely connected with the development of new strategies of political communication, namely those involving mass media (television, radio, etc.) and other kinds of urban communication channels (posters and billboards). The wall gradually lost its effectiveness, remaining symbolically associated with the post-revolutionary period. This link to the 1974 Carnation Revolution will perhaps explain the fact that some parties to the left of the political spectrum—such as the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Left Bloc (BE)—have ever since occasionally promoted a few mural painting actions. In my view, this kind of event has an essentially symbolic character, seeking on the one hand to place the center of political action back on the street and public space, and on the other hand to revive muralism as an essential legacy of left-wing movements. While during the 1980s and 1990s it was still possible to find a few surviving examples of revolutionary murals in Lisbon, by the end of the century a different kind of expression had definitely started to stand out. Graffiti of American inspiration replaced the old political murals, flooding Lisbon’s cityscape. This kind of graffiti is made by youths, individually or in crews, 8 and has an essentially apolitical character (Campos 2010 and 2016). Mimicking the American graffiti linked to the hip-hop movement, it is a game of competition and risk, based on a practice of urban territorial marking and appropriation, in which boldness and commit-

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Figure 6.1. “Mural of PCTP-MRPP (Communist Party of Portuguese WorkersReorganizing Movement of the Proletariat Party, a radical left-wing party).” Image © Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Colecção Neves Águas, PT/AMLSB/NEV/000996

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Figure 6.2. “Mural of UDP (Popular and Democratic Union, a radical left-wing Portuguese party).” Image © Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, Colecção Neves Águas, PT/AMLSB/NEV/001053

ment are prized (Ferrell 1996; McDonald 2001). Marking the city with signature names (tags) is the most basic form of this practice. However, many of those who stand out through the refinement of their technical skill use large-scale murals as a strategy to gain recognition. Works known as Wall of Fame, given their size and visual impact, occupy a place of prominence in today’s cityscapes. The source of inspiration for this type of expression is derived from a globalized mass culture and the entertainment industry, and often these include cartoon and comic-strip characters, movie and music stars, and the like. THE CRISIS, THE TROIKA, AND THE CITY WALLS OF LISBON Over the last years, Portugal has suffered the impact of a serious economic crisis that has befallen a number of European countries, especially in the south of Europe. This crisis has been followed by a growing discredit of the political class and Portuguese and European institutions. As a result of the deteriorating economic situation, the streets have become the stage for a number of demonstrations and protests organized both by political parties and trade unions, and by social movements that have recently emerged on the national scene. In these circumstances, the wall

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has recovered the prominent political role lost over the years. Slogans, watchwords, murals began to crop up all over the city alluding to the current state of affairs. The Portuguese government’s request for international financial aid in 2011, the ensuing intervention of the so-called troika team (IMF, ECB, and EC), and the resulting implementation of strict austerity policies has been a defining moment in the triggering of stronger contestation. These policies had an impact on unemployment, which soared to unprecedented numbers. Cuts in social benefits, increase in taxes and reduction in salaries affected large sections of the population, namely civil servants. This situation caused countless popular demonstrations, being at the root of the emergence of several protest movements, mostly inspired by similar phenomena seen in other countries in the wake of the financial crisis. The transnational movement “Occupy,” the Spanish “indignados” movement, or the violent demonstrations in Greece, also reverberated in Portugal. On 15 September 2012, one of the largest demonstrations ever seen since the 1974 Carnation Revolution took to the streets, curiously not organized by any political party or trade union but by a social movement going under the name Que se Lixe a Troika (“Screw the Troika”). This atmosphere of strong civic mobilization and contestation, which claimed the street as a strategically important stage of political struggle, has brought on a tentative revival of politically-charged mural expressions. These new political statements assume different forms. In keeping to my initial distinction, one should, on the one hand, consider mural expressions of the institutional, officially sanctioned kind, and on the other hand illegal, spontaneous and informal examples. The former are promoted, sponsored and executed by various kinds of institutions (political parties, associations, worker unions, etc.) and serve a clearly identifiable ideological framework. The latter are of a more ambivalent, subterranean and anonymous nature, emerging unexpectedly and officially unsanctioned. Additionally, one must distinguish between examples that solely use written messages from other essentially pictorial instances. The first of these falls into the category defined by Gari (1995) as the European tradition, basically amounting to watchwords, slogans, and more. They are generally painted with spray paint and have no aesthetic concerns. The most important element in this case is the power of the words and the impact conveyed by the message. Within this type there are 9: a) messages inciting popular action and revolt; b) messages rallying people for an event (demonstration, strike, etc.); c) messages of protest and discontentment, often describing a current state of economic and political affairs; d) messages of criticism and insults directed at specific politicians or a Portuguese political class as a whole. The blunt and vernacular language employed, sometimes making use of slang or obscene expressions, is a distinctive feature of these forms of expression, and is meant to distance

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them from the kind of communicational rhetoric used by institutional political agents (trade unions and parties). “Merkel out!” graffiti (figure 6.3) contains a clear reference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who visited Portugal in 2012, in a full climate of social unrest during the imposition of a series of austerity measures. It is worth pointing out that, at the time, Angela Merkel was clearly associated with a pro-austerity position, having been accused by the Portuguese left-wing political parties and some media of exerting pressure on Portugal, and other countries also subjected to austerity, to impose certain policies. Figure 6.4 shows a mobilization graffiti announcing a general strike authored by one of the largest Portuguese trade union confederations. The words on the wall state the reasons for this strike: “low wages, unemployment, precariousness, sacrifices, increased working hours, theft of the Christmas bonus, increased VAT and increased gas prices.” This stencil depicted in figure 6.5 alludes to the idea that sacrifices are not for everyone, pointing out that the big companies and the rich are safe from the austerity measures imposed on the majority of the population. Some of the biggest Portuguese entrepreneurs are named. The stencil concludes with the statement: “fuck sacrifices!”

Figure 6.3. “Merkel Fora!” (“Merkel Out!”). Photo © Ricardo Campos.

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Figure 6.4. “Greve Geral” (“General Strike”). Photo © Ricardo Campos.

The second category of graffiti does not resort to words alone, but mostly to images as its main communicational device. Above all, the important thing is ensuring that the image carries sufficient impact, whether through the quality of the graphic work, its scale, or the complexity of the narrative construction. We are dealing with visu-

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Figure 6.5. “No Bolso Dele Estão os Teus Sacrifícios” (“Your Sacrifices Are in His Pocket”). Photo © Ricardo Campos.

al representations that are executed with different techniques, ranging from the kind of spray painting commonly used in graffiti art, to the use of stencils and other less common technical solutions. Although this kind of work is probably not as recurrent as the previous ones, insofar as it is more time consuming and entails greater logistical investment due to its higher technical difficulty, it is surer to attract more public attention. This fact is due to its potential for dissemination, given that although this kind of work is physically located on a specific site, it is also circulated in social networks or aired on television. Some of the images presented here caused considerable stir, not only in the national media (in the press and national television), but even in some international media. Portrayed in figure 6.6 is Angela Merkel, represented as someone who is a puppet master, handling two puppets: Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime Minister between 2011–2015) and Paulo Portas (Minister of Foreign Affairs in Passos Coelho’s cabinet), clearly alluding to that idea previously touched upon—that of the role of Germany as imposing austerity policies on Portugal. Figure 6.7 represents a fierce criticism of the political class, utilizing a well-known film title as its source, that of Ettore Scola (1976), “Ugly, Dirty and Bad” (“Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi”), substituting the word “Por-

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Figure 6.6. Merkel’s Puppets. Photo © Ricardo Campos.

cos” (which in Portuguese can mean both pig and dirty) by “Políticos” (politicians). In this particular case, there is an explicit reference to the former Portuguese Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, represented as the pig. In the last mural (figure 6.8), the former Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho is portrayed as a bank robber from the Old West, an obvious insinuation to the austerity policies enacted by his cabinet in which the government is understood as the thieves stealing from the people. Which characteristics can be emphasized in these cases? The majority of these graffiti are anonymous and informal, and not directly linked to any conventional political organization. 10 Another feature that stands out in several cases is the critical and satirical nature of the message. Humor is an important element, echoing a long graphic tradition of using satire and irony to expose and denounce the institutions of power. 11 But this is not an exclusive feature of the Portuguese context. The Egyptian-born writer Albert Cossery, in his magnificent novel La violence et la derision, makes a clear case for humor and irony as a counter-power weapon, as the most effective instrument that the people have at their disposal to challenge the establishment. Several authors have pointed out humor and

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Figure 6.7. “Feios, Políticos e Maus” (“Ugly, Politicians and Bad”). Photo © Ricardo Campos.

satire as important rhetoric strategies used to confront the powers in place (Hart 2007; Balandier 1980). Hart (2007) observes that many of the social movements of the twentieth century frequently used humor as a strategic discourse, and if one follows his argument, understandably so: As a communication strategy, humour belongs to the rich treasury of the instruments of politics and can be used in political protest. . . . Criticism expressed in a joking manner is more difficult to refute by “rational” arguments. Authority and power can melt, as the invitation to laugh with one another appeals to all human feelings and breaks down “official” barriers. As such, humour certainly constitutes one of the “weapons of the weak.” (Hart 2007, 8)

Balandier (1980, 45) directs our attention to the long historical tradition of such forms of expression: “Collective satirists (under the anonymity of the popular literatures) and individual ones (more daringly) use sarcasm to define the limits of power.” The author argues that order and conformism are always threatened by antagonistic forces. While many different societies coexist with these polarities, certain actors and arenas assume a subversive vocation. 12 Whether in the form of obscene statements or indecorous iconography, surreal or satirical allusions, they

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Figure 6.8. “The Law of the Strongest.” Photo © Ricardo Campos.

cause commotion, shock or indignation, disturbing the traditional seriousness and temperance of authorities and institutions. Humor could equally be associated with a carnivalesque dimension found in many acts of popular resistance and protest (Hart 2007; Yanik 2015). The carnivalesque enables a temporary inversion of a conventional world order, a suspension of moral orders and hierarchies. Furthermore, irony and humor play an extremely important role in this domain, namely in many of the recent actions carried out by some of today’s social movements. The history of graffiti seems to be strongly linked to this dimension. The fact that they are generally anonymous favors the satirical and obscene vein of their content, protecting the author against the dominating mechanisms of censorship and control. CONCLUSION Over the last few years, Portugal has witnessed a wave of popular indignation and social mobilization, not seen since the revolutionary period. Large demonstrations were organized and promoted, not only by the traditional political party structures, but also by new civic movements. This politized atmosphere was unquestionably a direct consequence of the serious economic crisis that overcame many European states and not just Portugal. The streets became the main stage for these actions, in

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countries like Greece, Spain, Italy or Portugal. 13 As a global wave of social protest swept world cities, the widespread involvement of young people has been striking, and so have the unorthodox strategies of mobilization, action, protest and communication involved. Whilst the tangible effects of such initiatives are infinitively debated, the creative and innovative power of these new tactics and strategies is undeniable, in a simultaneously analogical (on the urban streets) and digital (on the web 2.0), as well as local and global articulation (Campos, Pereira and Simões 2016). 14 Young people played a very prominent role in these recent dynamics. As several authors pointed out (Dahlgren 2009; Kennelly 2011; Loader 2007; Olson and Dahlgren 2010), the political agency and civic participation of young people may develop in alternative and unorthodox ways, through expressions that combine ideological combat, creativity and the ludic aspects. These creative, conflictual and alternative praxes play a key part in the way through which youth commits to social causes, joining movements of contestation or resistance. A tour through Lisbon’s streets is enough to reveal ample evidence of this. The walls bear witness to these moments of greater civil unrest and popular protest. The present chapter has sought precisely to give an account of this situation in the context of the Troika bailout and disciplinary neoliberalism in Portugal. If we take as our reference the decades immediately following the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship, in 1974, we find that while on the one hand large-scale political murals have since gradually faded from the walls of Lisbon, on the other hand wall writing has managed to maintain its presence in this urban cityscape. These writings present an apparently more spontaneous nature, being executed by anonymous citizens. Among them we find messages that may intend to mobilize, alert, or simply scorn certain public figures or institutions. Very rarely, there emerged mural works—usually made by a group of members from some left-wing party—but in any case, this was not enough to justify claiming that political graffiti find any kind of relevant expression today. However, it also seems equally obvious that the recent crisis has revived the significance of public space as a political arena, and with it, the role of wall writing and murals. The forms of expression that have meanwhile appeared are completely different from the works produced during the post-revolutionary period. To begin with, the first major distinction has to do with their context and authorship. While the post-revolutionary mural resulted directly from political party propaganda and was clearly and strictly bound to an ideological agenda, current works do not partake of these traits. 15 The recent political demonstrations essentially developed outside the sphere of political parties and were promoted by independent individuals or by groups traditionally removed from the political scene. 16 This is a new phenomenon, apparently brought on by the severe crisis, which created

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the need for political participation through the demonstration of an active citizenship. Some of the murals that have surfaced in the Lisbon region are characterized as much by their criticism of the current situation as by their derision of the political class, particularly those political parties which have ruled Portugal over the last decades (the Socialist Party and the Social Democrat Party). These expressions follow a vast tradition of unauthorized and transgressive manifestations of a vernacular nature, whose aim is to inflict damage on the centers of power (and its representatives), using satire and vulgar language as their communicational formats. The return of this kind of expression seems to reveal that, despite its latency in periods of relative political appeasement, and economic and social stability, the streets and the walls continue to be the preferred location for the less powerful to express themselves. The streets are, par excellence, the natural stage for civic demonstrations, and especially for those who do not have access to other channels of political expression and communication. The literature dealing with political graffiti is relatively scarce. However, in recent years, academic publications devoted to the issue have increased substantially, as a direct consequence of a changing empirical reality. In various contexts, there is visible evidence of the growing politicization of the urban landscape, as a response to economic crisis, social unrest and political turmoil. Future research on this subject should be much more aware of the power of the articulation between aesthetics and politics, namely in what concerns the emergence of new grammars of activism and political participation in urban settings. FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was supported by national funds through the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) with post-doctoral research fellow Grant SFRH/BPD/99671/2014. Centro Interdisciplinar de Ciências Sociais CICS.NOVA—FCSH-UNL/Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences—CICS.NOVA—FCSH-UNL is also supported by national funds through FCT/MEC (UID/SOC/04647/2013). NOTES 1. The term graffiti is now commonly used indistinctly in the singular and plural. 2. According to the existing literature, graffiti first emerged in New York, during the early 1970s (Cooper and Chafant 1984; Castleman 1982). However, several authors have pointed out the previous existence of graffiti-tagging in the city of Philadelphia (Dickinson 2012; Snyder 2009). This kind of graffiti refers to a cultural universe sustained by a group of people who share an identity and a sense of community, using

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their own vocabulary and form of expression, following a set of rules, values and practices. 3. History shows how the agencies of power (political, ideological, religious or military) have perfected the mechanisms that enable the strategic use of vision and visual communication. 4. The Carnation Revolution was led by junior military officers. It was accomplished with minimal bloodshed, since it found little resistance from the powers in place and the sections of the military that had remained faithful to the regime. On their arrival in Lisbon, the revolutionary forces were met by the civilian population who received them with carnations, thus the name “Carnation Revolution.” 5. War fought between 1961 and 1974. 6. The left wing in Portugal comprised many different parties of varying size (the main being the Portuguese Communist Party and the Communist Party of Portuguese Workers-Reorganizing Movement of the Proletariat Party), and almost all of them used mural painting as a form of political and ideological propaganda. 7. Several historical examples of the use of political murals as vehicles of propaganda for different regimes can be found, such as the Soviet and Chinese mural paintings, or Mexican muralism. 8. Groups of young graffiti writers act collectively and build a special group identity generally symbolized through the use of a specific acronym or alias. 9. Zaimakis (2015), working on a context very similar to that of the Portuguese case, proposed the following political graffiti typology: 1) the protest graffiti, a graffiti that rebels against the crisis and the worsening of economic conditions; 2) the revolt graffiti, a graffiti that incites civil disobedience and resistance against neo-liberal austerity measures; 3) the conflict graffiti, a graffiti that highlights and provokes divisions and ideological discussions between groups with different political views. In relation to formats, three different types are highlighted: slogans, stenciling and mural. 10. Although some left-wing parties have also used this kind of communication device. Nevertheless, they use it sparingly and are much more contained in terms of language, given that, as institutional political actors, they must protect their public image, which is incompatible with certain excesses of language that are typical of this form of expression. 11. Perhaps the most paradigmatic case in Portugal is Bordalo Pinheiro and his graphic work (see França 1976). 12. This anthropologist mentions the importance, for instance, of the role played by jesters, who used humor and satire to question order, expose the rhetoric of power and its ideological fabric. 13. We must also not forget the events connected with the so-called “Arab Spring,” which inspired many of those who took to the streets, believing in the possibility of change through popular contestation. 14. See also chapter 4 of this volume on digital activism in Portugal. 15. However, it should be stressed that left-wing political parties (PCP, BE) still continue to make political murals and in the period of crisis this production has increased. 16. Many activists in these groups are connected with left-wing parties.

REFERENCES Abaza, Mona. 2016. “The field of graffiti and street-art in post-January 2011 Egypt.” In Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross, 318–33. London & New York: Routledge. Alexandrakis, Othon. 2016. “Indirect activism: Graffiti and Political Possibility in Athens, Greece.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2): 272–96. Aurélio, Diogo. 1999. “Mitos, murais e muros.” Camões—Revista de Letras e Culturas Lusófonas 5: 83–89.

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Balandier, George. 1980. Le pouvoir sur scène. Paris: Fayard. Bennet, W. Lance. 2009. “Young citizens and civic learning: two paradigms of citizenship in the digital age.” Citizenship Studies 13 (2): 105–20. Brighenti, Andrea. 2007. “Visibility: a category for the social sciences.” Current Sociology 55 (3): 323–42. Buser, Michael, Carlo Bonura, Maria Fannin and Kate Boyer. 2013. “Cultural activism and the politics of place-making.” City 17 (5): 606–27. Caldeira, Alfredo and Carlos Marques. 2009. Os murais de Abril. Lisboa: CML. CDROM. Campos, Ricardo. 2010. Porque pintamos a cidade? Uma abordagem etnográfica ao graffiti urbano. Lisboa: Fim de Século. ———. 2013. “Graffiti writer as superhero.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2): 155–70. ———. 2015. “Graffiti, street art and the aestheticization of transgression.” Social Analysis 59 (3): 17–40. ———. 2016. “From Marx to Merkel. Political muralism and graffiti in Lisbon.” In Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross, 301–17. London & New York: Routledge. Campos, Ricardo, Inês Pereira and José A. Simões. 2016. “Activismo digital em Portugal: um estudo exploratório.” Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas 82: 27–47. Castleman, Craig. 1982. Getting Up—subway graffiti in New York. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Cooper, Martha and Henry Chalfant. 1984. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Dahlgren, Peter. 2009. Media and political engagement. Citizens, communication and democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickinson, James. 2012. “From graffiti to murals and back again: Philadelphia’s spectacular streetscape.” Visualidades 10 (1): 63–80. Ferrell, Jeff. 1996. Crimes of style. Urban graffiti and the politics of criminality. Boston, Massachussets: Northeastern University Press. Figueroa-Saavedra, Fernando. 2006. Graphitfragen. Una mirada reflexiva sobre el graffiti. Madrid: Ediciones Minotauro Digital. França, José-Augusto. 1976. Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro, caricaturista politico. Lisboa: Terra Livre. Gari, Juan. 1995. La conversación mural—Ensayo para una lectura del graffiti. Madrid: Fundesco. Hankins, Katherine. 2017. “Creative democracy and the quiet politics of the everyday.” Urban Geography 38 (4): 502–6. Hargreaves, Ian and John Hartley (Eds.) 2016. The Creative Citizen Unbound. How social media and DIY culture contribute to democracy, communities and the creative economy. Bristol: Policy Press. Hart, Marjolein. 2007. “Humour and Social Protest: An Introduction.” International Review of Social History 52: 1–20. Kennelly, Jacqueline. 2011. Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism, and Agency in a Neoliberal Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Loader, Brian D. (Ed.). 2007. Young Citizens in the Digital Age: Political Engagement, Young People and New Media. London & New York: Routledge. Macdonald, Nancy. 2001. The graffiti subculture. Youth, masculinity and identity in London and New York. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. An introduction to visual culture. London and New York: Routledge. Olsson, Tobias and Peter Dahlgren. 2010. “Introduction.” In Young People, ICTs and Democracy, edited by Tobias Olsson and Peter Dahlgren, 9–15. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Peteet, Julie. 2016. “Wall talk: Palestinian graffiti.” In Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross, 334–44. London & New York: Routledge. Robins, Kevin. 1996. Into the image. London & New York: Routledge.

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Snyder, Gregory. 2009. Graffiti lives: Beyond the tag in New York’s urban underground. New York: New York University Press. Tsilimpounidi, Myrto. 2012. “Athens 2012. Performances ‘in crisis’ or what happens when a city goes soft?” CITY 16 (5): 546–56. Waldner, Lisa K. and Betty A. Dobratz. 2013. “Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation.” Sociology Compass 7 (5): 377–89. Yanik, Lerna. 2015. “Humor as Resistance? A Very Short Analysis of the Gezi Park Protest Graffiti.” In Everywhere Taksim. Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, edited by Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış, 153–84. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Zaimakis, Yiannis. 2015. “‘Welcome to the civilization of fear’: on political graffiti heterotopias in Greece in times of crisis.” Visual Communication 14 (4): 373–96.

III

Beyond Crisis and Stereotyping: A Laboratory for Innovative Practices

SEVEN Demolishing Portugal’s “Berlin Wall” The Portuguese Left Against Austerity Policies Maria João Ferreira and Pedro Fonseca

In 2011, the Portuguese government led by the left-wing Socialist Party (PS) signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding on Specific Economic Policy Conditionality (MoU) with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC) in order to implement a structural adjustment plan in return for financial assistance. After the signing of the MoU, early parliamentary elections were called and a right-wing coalition between the Social Democrat Party (PSD) and the conservative Democratic Social CenterPeople’s Party (CDS-PP) formed a new government in mid-2011 with a majority parliamentary support. Between 2011 and 2014, the new rightwing government’s political action was focused on compliance with the MoU, which demanded a “structural adjustment” plan based on austerity policies (reduction of the cost of public welfare, health and education system, a broad privatization program and the flexibilization of the labor market). In 2015, on the eve of new parliamentary elections, despite the negative social and economic consequences of austerity policies throughout its four-year term, the right-wing coalition between PSD and CDS-PP was in a strong position. Firstly, because the Portuguese adjustment program was concluded and the economy showed some signs of recovery in 2015. Secondly, because the PS, led by António Costa since November 2014, showed difficulties in affirming its political leadership and its political program. 133

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The right-wing coalition won the 2015 parliamentary elections without an absolute majority and formed a new government which lasted less than one month due the approval, for the first time since 1976, of a motion of rejection to the government program. The motion was passed with the votes of the entire left, comprising the PS, the Left Bloc (BE, a far-left party akin to Greece’s Syriza), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP, an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party) and the Greens (PEV, who run for elections in coalition with the PCP). Subsequently, the PS (second most voted party in the elections) formed a minority government and received, for the first time in Portuguese democracy, the parliamentary support of the BE, PCP and PEV. The support was secured through the signature on November 2015 of three separate agreements, the “Joint Positions,” between the PS and the PCP, BE and PEV. In fact, the agreements represent a great novelty in Portuguese politics due to the bitter and profound historical and ideological divisions among these parties since the Carnation Revolution in 1974 (see Lisi 2011 and 2016; Jalali 2017; Freire 2017; Tavares 2015). Between 1976 and 2015, the PS led seven governments (four without a parliamentary majority support) and never received the support of the far-left parties. António Costa, leader of the PS and the new Portuguese Prime Minister since 2015, has designated the schism among the Portuguese leftwing parties as Portugal’s very own 40 year-long “Berlin Wall” (The Economist 2015b). From an analytical perspective, the left agreement can be discussed as a polycentric agreement, since it involves political forces with quite different structures and political agendas (Bennett 2005). It is also true that in 2015 electoral programs, PS (2015), BE (2015) and PCP (2015) called for the end of the austerity policies. However, the PS’s proposals are very different, and in some cases even opposed, to those of the BE and PCP. The BE has proposed the restructuring of the Portuguese debt and a profound reform of the Economic and Monetary Union (BE 2015). The PCP (2015) advocates the restructuring of the Portuguese debt and the preparation of Portugal’s withdrawal from the Eurozone. The electoral program of the PS (2015) does not mention the restructuring of the debt and emphasizes the importance of Portuguese Eurozone membership. Under this context, the formation and the maintenance of a parliamentary agreement are very challenging tasks. The picture is even more complex because the European institutions, some European political officials, and the IMF have been emphasizing, since the beginning of the left agreement, that it is crucial to maintain fiscal consolidation and the structural adjustment reforms followed by the previous right-wing Portuguese government. This chapter discusses the left agreement in Portugal, taking into consideration its innovatory character, but also its nature and development. The main goals of this chapter are twofold—firstly, to identify the main

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reasons that explain the left agreement “innovation” (first and second sections of the chapter). It does so by exploring the context that favored the emergence of the left agreement, taking into account the evolution and main characteristics of the Portuguese party system and the dilemmas that the left parties face in Europe and in Portugal. Secondly, the chapter deals with the nature and functioning of the left agreement, seeking to explain how parties with different and, in some cases, opposed political agendas and ideologies manage the agreement without compromising their political identities and ideological coherence (third and fourth sections of the chapter). We argue that “disciplinary neoliberalism” (Gill 1995) and the austerity policies created the conditions for the left agreement in Portugal. Concerning its nature and functioning, we argue that the left agreement should be considered as a “brokered strategic coalition” through the establishment of a process of “relationship building” based on a “loose metaframe” as well as on political mechanisms of “frame bridging” and “relaxed framing” which entail “brokerage costs” and strategies of “opting in/opting out” (Bennett 2005). These concepts emerged within social movement literature and we believe that they accurately capture the agreement to the left, also known as “contraption.” THE DILEMMAS OF THE PORTUGUESE LEFT In Europe, between the end of World War II and 1989, the Finnish Communist Party was the only far-left party that participated regularly in government formation. However, after 1989, some far-left parties in several countries have been participating in coalition governments, supporting social-democrat minority governments and, in a few cases, becoming even dominant governing parties (see March 2008 and 2011; Dunphy and Bale 2011; Bale and Dunphy 2011; Chiocchetti 2017). This relevant change in the far-left parties’ strategy is explained by several factors: a) “the need to avoid isolation and pariah status” (March 2011); b) to demonstrate that they are suitable for governing and are not just protest parties (Dunphy and Bale 2011, 492); c) the “success in appealing to disaffected centre-left supporters” (March 2011); d) to “resist government neo-liberalism and steer the governmental centre of gravity to the left, by making incremental advances for their own policy agenda” (March 2008, 13). However, entering into a government or supporting social democratic governments poses significant challenges to the far-left parties. As March (2008, 14) argues, the dilemma is to choose, on one hand, “between the populist anti-establishment strategy,” which may guarantee a “mediumterm electoral success and mobilizing discontent against the social democrats” but limits the influence capacity in the policy-making process. On the other hand, to adopt a “pragmatic attitude to governmental compro-

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mise and partnership with the social democrats.” This may increase the capacity to influence the policy outputs, but increases the risks of deradicalization, may jeopardize the ideological purity and identity and may cause a loss of support and members due the difficulties to demonstrate the concrete benefits of government participation or, in the limit, a disruption in party unit (see Dunphy and Bale 2011; Katsourides 2016). The 2008 financial crisis that later turned into an economic and social crisis in several European countries offered a great opportunity for radical parties in Europe, both far left and far right. Also, the European social democratic parties, traditionally concentrated on the defence of the welfare state, face important challenges in the context of dominant austerity policies and neoliberal economic orientation. In fact, the financial crisis disrupted the politics of consensus and strongly questioned the “status quo” (Campbell and Schoolman 2008, 5). Particularly in the far-left spectrum, after the 2008 financial crisis, “left-wing ideas have appeared to move from marginality to the mainstream” with a renewed interest in Marxian and Keynesian ideas (March and Keith 2016, 8–9). In this context, several far-left parties “consolidated their occupation of the vacant social democratic ideological space” and, criticizing neoliberalism, “promoted Keynesianism as an alternative programme that could avoid the need for austerity and secure a return to growth” (Bailey 2016, 67). The electoral success of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain has guaranteed to the far-left parties greater media attention (March and Keith 2016, 9) and demonstrated that they could become central political actors in some European countries. In Portugal, the far-left parties PCP and BE have taken a central role like never before with their support to the minority PS government since 2015. From 1976 until 2015, the Portuguese party system has been consolidated around two main axes: 1) the monopoly of two parties concerning government formation and composition, namely the center-left PS and the center-right PSD (Jalali 2017, 72–74); 2) the systematic exclusion of the far-left parties with significant parliamentary representation (PCP and, since 1999, BE) from any kind of national government participation or support (see table 7.1).

Table 7.1. Government Composition, Parliamentary Support and Representation in Portugal (1976–2015) Government Composition (Parties)

Support in Parliament (percentage of members of parliament)

Parliamentary Representation (members of parliament)

1976–1977

PS

40.7 (PS)

PS: 107; PSD: 73; CDS: 42; PCP: 40; Others: 1

1978

PS+ CDS

56.7 (PS+CDS)

PS: 107; PSD: 73; CDS: 42; PCP: 40; Others: 1

1978

Presidential initiative government

PS: 107; PSD: 73; CDS: 42; PCP: 40; Others: 1

1978–1979

Presidential initiative government

PS: 107; PSD: 73; CDS: 42; PCP: 40; Others: 1

1979–1980

Presidential initiative government

PS: 107; PSD: 73; CDS: 42; PCP: 40; Others: 1

1980–1981

PSD+CDS+PPM 1

51.2 (PSD+CDS+PPM)

PS: 74; PSD: 80; CDS: 43; PCP: 44; Others: 9

1981

PSD+CDS+PPM

53.6 (PSD+CDS+ PPM)

PS: 66; PSD: 82; CDS: 46; PCP: 39; Others: 17

1981–1983

PSD+CDS +PPM

53.6 (PSD+CDS+ PPM)

PS: 66; PSD: 82; CDS: 46; PCP: 39; Others: 17

1983–1985

PS+PSD

70.4 (PS+PSD)

PS: 101; PSD: 75; CDS: 30; PCP: 41; Others: 3

1985–1987

PSD

35.2 (PSD)

PS: 57; PSD: 88; CDS: 22; PCP: 35; Others: 48

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138

Government Composition (Parties)

Support in Parliament (percentage of members of parliament)

Parliamentary Representation (members of parliament)

1987–1991

PSD

59.2 (PSD)

PS: 60; PSD: 148; CDS: 4; PCP: 29; Others: 9

1991–1995

PSD

58.7 (PSD)

PS: 72; PSD: 135; CDS: 5; PCP: 15; Others: 3

1995–1999

PS

48.7 (PS)

PS: 112; PSD: 88; CDS: 15; PCP: 13; Others: 2

1999–2002

PS

50 (PS)

PS: 115; PSD: 81; CDS: 15; PCP: 15; BE: 2; Others: 2

2002–2004

PSD+CDS

51.8 (PSD+CDS)

PS: 96; PSD: 105; CDS: 14; PCP: 10; BE: 3; Others: 2

2004–2005

PSD+CDS

51.8 (PSD+CDS)

PS: 96; PSD: 105; CDS: 14; PCP: 10; BE: 3; Others: 2

2005–2009

PS

52.6 (PS)

PS: 121; PSD: 75; CDS: 12; PCP: 12; BE: 8; Others: 2

2009–2011

PS

40.2 (PS)

PS: 97; PSD: 81; CDS: 21; PCP: 13; BE: 16; Others: 2

2011–2015

PSD+CDS

57.4 (PSD+CDS)

PS: 74; PSD: 108; CDS: 24; PCP: 14; BE: 8; Others: 2

2015 . . .

PS

53 (PS+PCP+BE+PEV)

PS: 86; PSD: 89; CDS: 18; PCP: 15; BE: 19; Others: 3

Source: Comissão Nacional de Eleições and Assembleia da República.

Maria João Ferreira and Pedro Fonseca

Time Period

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In Portugal, the absence of agreements to the left related with government formation and support between the end of the Cold War and 2015 is explained by Freire (2017, 84–93) through several factors: 1) the Portuguese electoral system and some constitutional provisions discouraged cooperation between parties for the achievement of a majority; 2) major ideological differences between the far-left parties (PCP and BE) and the center-left PS; 3) the Portuguese left parties’ lack of will to cooperate and to make a consistent effort for a political and ideological rapprochement needed to “build” political agreements (with political and programmatic concessions); 4) far-left parties’ fear of losing their identity with high electoral costs as a result of supporting the PS; 5) the limited experience of coalitions to the left on the local level. The impacts on the political system and on the left parties that emerged from the absence of left agreements (until 2015) for government formations are relevant. According to Freire (2017, 96) this caused an imbalance in the political system because, unlike the left-wing, the rightwing parties have been able to establish government coalitions. Consequently, the far-left parties (PCP and BE), despite having a significant number of parliamentary seats (see table 7.1), represented minorities that “had been systematically marginalized in the access to the government.” Additionally, it had been much harder for the PS to obtain parliamentary majority support than for the PSD. Consequently, until 2015, the Portuguese political system presented systematically few innovations in government formation (Ibid., 96), with several right-wing coalition experiences and none of the left-wing (Jalali 2017, 74) and with a higher level of fragmentation of the Portuguese left when compared with the rightwing political spectrum (Freire and Lisi 2016, 280). After the 2015 elections, the Portuguese left parties faced a clear dilemma: to allow a new government led by the right-wing PSD and CDSPP or enter into negotiations in order to achieve an understanding that would allow a left government. The starting point was not easy due to the historical record previously discussed and the great ideological and political differences within the left. That dilemma leads us into discussing the establishment and the recent evolution of the Portuguese left agreement. FACING DISCIPLINARY NEOLIBERALISM: “RELATIONSHIP BUILDING” THROUGH A LOOSE “METAFRAME” The left agreement that allowed the formation of the PS government in 2015 represents an important innovation in the Portuguese political system. Structural changes in consolidated party systems may occur in “critical historical moments that radically alter the political scenario,” such as

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the financial bailouts in some European countries since 2010 (Jalali 2017, 96). The structural adjustment implemented in Portugal by the right-wing government between 2011 and 2014 relied on the principles of neo-liberalism (reduction in the general government deficit; reform and the reduction in public welfare, health and education system costs; broad privatization program; flexibilization of the labor market). In fact, the context of the sovereign debt crisis has been employed to enforce “disciplinary neoliberalism” throughout the EU and Eurozone governance through austerity policies, as well as the imposition of significant constraints to the national budgets of the Eurozone countries (see Patomäki 2013, 95; Rommerskirchen 2015). Gill (2015, 20) defines “disciplinary neoliberalism” as the “neoliberal politico-economic structures and processes associated with the project of capital to expand the scope and increase the power of market-based actors, structures and forces so that governments and other economic agents are disciplined and increasingly governed by market mechanisms.” From the discourse of “disciplinary neoliberalism” emerges the “new constitutionalism” (Gill 1998, 5), a political-legal dimension which is an “international governance framework” that “seeks to separate economic policies from broad political accountability in order to make governments more responsive to the discipline of market forces and correspondingly less responsive to popular-democratic forces and processes.” “Disciplinary neoliberalism” is, since its beginning, at the core of the Economic and Monetary Union (see Gill 1998; Rommerskirchen 2015), but the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone created the conditions “to further the constitutionalization of disciplinary neoliberalism” in the EU (Patomäki 2013, 95). The European Fiscal Compact signed in 2012 is based on the idea that “in order to gain and maintain the confidence of the markets, stability and growth are sought from economic disciplinary mechanisms that are applied to states. The right of national parliaments and governments to devise their own budgets becomes conditional” and “Budgetary control is now being transferred into the hands of technocratic EU bodies” (Patomäki 2013, 99), undermining democratic political choices at the national level and largely restricting national political and economic options (see Bakker 2015). The right-wing coalition government (PSD and CDS-PP) between 2011 and 2015 seemed comfortable with the “constitutionalization” of “disciplinary neoliberalism” in the EU and understood austerity policies as the way to ensure a sustainable future growth (see Fonseca and Ferreira 2015; Fonseca and Ferreira 2016; Moury and Standring 2017). In contrast, the Portuguese far-left parties, namely the PCP and BE, claimed that the right-wing government exacerbated the crisis with its subservience to externally imposed austerity policies (see Sousa 2016; Negócios 2016). In 2011, the PCP and BE refused to meet with the Troika and, soon

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after the signing of the MoU, Jerónimo de Sousa, the PCP’s leader, considered the agreement an “aggression pact” against Portugal (Expresso 2012), reinforcing the PCP’s nationalist and patriotic discourse (see Freire and Lisi 2016). Although it was a PS government that signed the MoU in 2011, the PS as an opposition party progressively moved away from its implementation, first timidly under António José Seguro’s leadership and more consistently and assertively after the arrival of António Costa to the party leadership in 2014 (see Freire 2017, 127–31; Costa 2016). In fact, some surveys about the ideological placement of the parties on the left-right political spectrum before and after the euro crisis suggest “a clear move of right-wing parties (PSD and CDS-PP) further to the right, while left-wing parties (PS, BE and PCP) moved further to the left,” polarizing the party system more than ever (Freire and Lisi 2016, 287). We argue that the enforcement of “disciplinary neoliberalism” in Europe, and particularly in Portugal, created the unique conditions for the emergence of an unprecedented left agreement. The agreement was supported by a process of “relationship-building” based on a loose “metaframe” (Bennett 2005), namely the need to oust right-wing political parties from power, to adopt anti-austerity measures in order to promote income restitution to the Portuguese people and to roll-back some economic and social policies of the previous government that were perfectly aligned with the predominant neoliberal agenda in Europe. The supporting “metaframe” that was adopted was loose. In fact, Prime Minister António Costa has argued that he intends to “roll back austerity measures,” while maintaining “fiscal consolidation” and keeping Portugal in the Eurozone (The Economist 2015a, para. 5). However, his agreement partners have pushed for debt restructuring and, in the case of the PCP, even for the withdrawal from the Eurozone (Ibid.). Since the EU has a profound market-liberal orientation and thus a project opposed to the far-left policy goals (see Katsourides 2016, 6–11), in the Joint Positions among the PS, PCP, Greens and BE, the parties made clear that they recognize the “distinct nature” of their programs and the differences in the way they “observe” and “frame” “structural aspects” of the Portuguese situation, namely Portuguese participation in the Eurozone and the debt restructuring. However, despite the divergences, the three parties justified the left agreement because the “points of convergence” are much more important, for three reasons: in order to “ensure the interruption of the course pursued by the previous government,” ending the “cycle of economic and social degradation” pursued by the PSD/CDS-PP government, and to “adopt measures and solutions that can translate into an indispensable sign of change” (PS and BE 2015; PS and PCP 2015). In the debate on the 2015 PS government program, Prime Minister António Costa argued that his government wants “to end austerity” and “find new policies based on growth, jobs and equality” (DRE 2015, 12). In

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the same debate, Catarina Martins, BE’s leader, argued that the new government enabled by the left-wing parties is a “solution” to “stop the impoverishment of the country” (Ibid., 16) and to “cut with the legacy of the political right” (Ibid., 18). Jerónimo de Sousa, PCP’s leader, claimed that the new government emanates from the will of the “majority of the Portuguese people to evict from their lives” the right-wing government, in order “to stop the policy of exploitation and impoverishment” (Ibid., 25). In the debate concerning the country’s 2016 budget, Costa returned to the argument, claiming that governmental action aimed at “turning the page of austerity” (DRE 2016a, 7) and “putting an end to the sacrifices” imposed by the right-wing government (Ibid., 11). Martins argued that the country’s general budget for 2016 was the first step that could “begin to bring oxygen to an economy that austerity” had “stifled” (Ibid., 17). Sousa argued that the country’s general budget for 2016 represented an “inversion of the path of social and civilizational regression” pursued by the right-wing government (Ibid., 24). However, unlike far-left parties, António Costa does not speak about debt restructuring and aims to maintain Portugal within the Eurozone, arguing that his government is “committed to the European project and to Portuguese participation in the Eurozone” (DRE 2016a, 5). However, Catarina Martins, leader of the BE, stated that the Portuguese situation demands “strong answers” like debt restructuring (Ibid., 17) and the end of the European Fiscal Compact (DRE 2016b, 17). Finally, the PCP always argued for the withdrawal of Portugal from the Eurozone and for debt restructuring, aiming to “free the country from European and other external constraints, in particular those resulting from the debt service” (DRE 2016a, 24). Following Bennett (2005, 205), to construct an exercise of “relationship building” implies the “diffusion of an organization code . . . based on metaframes.” Such “relationship building” intends to ensure, at the “collective level,” the existence of “trust, commitment and credibility” (Ibid.). In this context, the socialist government faces a difficult position since it needs to ensure Brussel’s approval on budget and financial policy questions in order to maintain Portugal within the Eurozone but, at the same time, needs to maintain a “relationship building” exercise with both the BE and PCP. The above-mentioned process of “relationship-building” is even more complex because it faces, since the beginning, the external pressure from the EC, the Eurogroup, the IMF and from some European political officials to maintain the structural adjustment reforms followed by the previous Portuguese right-wing coalition government (see EC 2015; EC 2016; IMF 2016a; IMF 2016b; Observador 2016a; Reuters 2016). In a clear example of “disciplinary neoliberalism” enforcement, at the European level, the demands of the EC for additional measures in order to make the Portuguese budget compliant with the Stability and Growth Pact, as well as the

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threat to impose sanctions on Portugal due to the excessive deficit, were central political issues in the first half of 2016. Although the final decision was to not impose any sanction, this process tested the cohesion of the left alliance. Catarina Martins, leader of the BE, announced in mid-2016 that if the EC decided to impose sanctions, Portugal should answer with a national referendum to refuse the sanctions (Martins 2016b). In June 2017, the European Council formally ended the disciplinary process against Portugal on the excessive deficit procedure started in 2009. The decision was celebrated by the PS. However, Commissioner Pierre Moscovici immediately warned Portugal that this “is not the end of the structural efforts” and it “is necessary to maintain the effort to reduce the structural deficit” (Expresso 2017a). Facing those considerations, João Oliveira, PCP’s parliamentary leader, immediately argued that the end of the excessive deficit procedure “puts an end to an instrument of blackmail and pressure, but it will probably not be enough reason for the EU to stop blackmailing and pressuring Portugal” (Negócios 2017). It is true that, under pressure from Brussels, Prime Minister António Costa was forced to agree to tax rises and spending cuts in case of need in 2016 (The Economist 2016, para. 10). Commenting on the agreement, Costa argued that the deal with the EC proved that it is possible for memberstates to respect their fiscal responsibilities and “still follow their vision” (Ibid.). On 5 December 2016, Costa recognized that the rules of the EU should be “adjusted” in order to promote “economic convergence,” to stop “impoverishment” and “prolonged stagnation,” adding that “while the rules persist,” Portugal should “abide by them” (Jornal de Notícias 2016). However, the Portuguese government has also advocated, at the European level, some policy options criticized by the European institutions and some political officials, particularly in the context of the budgetary proposals and in the debate about possible sanctions against Portugal. The Portuguese Prime Minister’s “vision” of balanced anti-austerity is at the core of the “metaframe” that sustains the exercise of “relationship building” with the other left-wing parties. The “vision” is to overcome four years of excessive austerity, to raise salaries, to promote economic competitiveness, to stop “impoverishment,” and to build a prosperous and fair society (Costa 2016, 3). António Costa’s Global Strategic Motion, presented at the PS Congress in 2016, demonstrated that the purpose was not only to halt right-wing policies, but also to establish an articulation between the socialist policy proposals and other left-wing parties’ policy suggestions, since all left-wing forces wished to restore the income of Portuguese workers (Ibid., 6). An analysis of the discourses of the leaders of the PCP and BE demonstrates the contingency of this “relationship building.” Catarina Martins, the BE’s leader, argued that the left agreement was based “on a commit-

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ment to defend the salaries and the welfare state” (Martins 2016a) since the left parties have a common goal: “to stop the impoverishment of the country” (Negócios 2016). She also argued that the common agenda of the left-wing Joint Positions was to “recover salaries, pensions and wages, stop privatizations and protect public services and the welfare state” (Ibid.). Despite some important and very well-known divergences, Martins argues that, as long as the PS maintains the will to restore salaries, the BE “is also here to give its parliamentary support” (Público 2016a). On 2 December 2016, the PCP organized its XX Congress. The PCP’s leader, Jerónimo de Sousa, highlighted some virtues of the left agreement since it allowed for some social and labor “progress.” The possibility of overturning the policies adopted by the right-wing coalition was a prerequisite imposed by the PCP in order to enable the “Joint Positions” (Oliveira 2016). In the words of João Oliveira, PCP’s parliamentary head, the main goal is purposefully to establish a “rupture with right-wing policies” and to establish an “alternative, patriotic and left-wing policy” (Oliveira 2016). As previously mentioned, “disciplinary neoliberalism” created in Portugal unique conditions for the emergence of a “metaframe” that united the Portuguese left against austerity policies and the right-wing government. However, the maintenance of an agreement among political parties that have different and even opposed proposals about key fundamental topics is a very challenging task, because, naturally, ideological struggles and identity problems may emerge. IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLES, IDENTITY PROBLEMS AND BROKERAGE COSTS On 2 December 2016, during PCP’s Congress, Jerónimo de Sousa (2016) claimed that “[t]he new phase of Portuguese domestic politics does not substantiate a left-wing government, nor a situation in which the PCP is a supporting pillar for the PS government through any kind of parliamentary agreement that does not exist.” Despite some improvements, argued Sousa (Ibid.), these are limited since the socialist government “has chosen not to liberate itself from European impositions and from great capitalist forces.” The most contentious issue that disturbs the “Joint Positions” is, clearly, the European question. The PCP continues to argue that Portugal’s accession to the EU and the Euro was a mistake that contributed to reversing the “conquests” achieved by the 1974 Carnation Revolution (Ibid.). Sousa (Ibid.) considers the EU a “capitalist” construction whose “political and ideological frame does not allow it to be democratized, humanized or re-founded.” In the same vein, Catarina Martins argued that Portugal must promote employment, investment and the welfare state. Such goals require

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the restructuring of the debt, rejected by the Socialist government, which, following Martins, is a “mistake” (Público 2016a). Martins also stated that the Left Bloc’s 10 percent of the share of votes is enough to influence government but not to “make the government,” otherwise some of the policies that have been adopted would be radically different (Ibid.). Despite the left-wing agreement, Martins (2016b) argued that “the Left Bloc does not give up on its political flags and proposals.” Such claims widely demonstrate the existence of “ideological frame struggles” that derive from “collective identity problems” that hamper the left-wing agreement (Bennett 2005, 216). The existence of “ideological frame struggles” demonstrates the importance that “frame bridging” assumes for the sustainability of the left agreement. Frame bridging was defined by Snow and associates (1986, 467) as the “linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem.” The question with the “Joint Positions” concerns ideological congruency, since issues like the EU, the Eurozone and debt restructuring seem to be unsurmountable ideational clashes that impinge on the future of the left-wing agreement. The reality of those ideological clashes has required a permanent process of “brokerage” between left-wing parties. It is a clear case of a highly intensive “brokered strategic coalition” (Bennett 2005, 215). The strategic advantages for all parties that brokered such an alliance seem to compensate for the ideological incongruences that follow from the association between a moderate left-wing Europeanist party with far-left parties. Taking into consideration the domestic and foreign contexts, namely the PS minority in Parliament, the crisis of social democracy in Europe and the neoliberal European orientation, the PS absolutely needs the solidarity of other left-wing parties in Parliament to be able to rule. The political position that seems to be adopted by the PCP and the BE is that they will remain committed to the “Joint Positions” insofar as they are able to influence public policies. This endows the left-wing agreement with an explicit utilitarian nature. João Oliveira, the PCP’s parliamentary head, has claimed that the PCP “will profit the most from the current [parliamentary] positions and achieve everything that is possible for the workers and for the people (Oliveira 2016). Similarly, Catarina Martins argues that the “BE had 10 percent of the votes but does not give up doing its best” to fight the austerity policies (Negócios 2016). In fact, despite significant “brokerage costs” associated with the “Joint Positions” for the PCP and BE in terms of ideological coherence, both parties now have much more political influence over public policies with the left agreement. Additionally, this influence is publicly announced as the essential condition to remain loyal to the agreement. The importance of “frame bridging” and the contingency of the “brokered strategic coalition” that sustains the Portuguese government demonstrate that both processes intend to maintain the identities of the left-

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wing parties, mainly the far-left parties, who seek to ensure to the public that they will not make serious foundational policy concessions regarding such identity. This is a very serious conundrum, since the results achieved by the socialist executive influence its relations with Brussels. On the other hand, the relations between the PS and Brussels influence the bonds of the socialists with the PCP and BE. Communist João Oliveira recognized that the Portuguese political reality is increasingly “contradictory” due to the PS’s ties with the EU (Oliveira 2016). Similarly, Catarina Martins argued that waiting for Europe, as the socialist government does, is a mistake because the “European Union is collapsing” (Público 2016a). The exercise of “frame bridging” is being forged through a process of a “brokered strategic coalition” whose volatility and uncertainty is due to the existence of “brokerage costs” that underpin the essential significance of the left-wing leaders’ discursive practices (Bennett 2005, 215). These leaders do not wish to endanger the agreement since they strategically profit from it. However, they also do not desire to give the impression that their political identities are dangerously compromised, which leads to a permanent balance between words and agency visible through discourse as “brokerage costs” (Ibid.). Among the four parties that signed the Joint Positions, the PCP is the party with the strongest and oldest identity and embodies one of the most serious issues that the Portuguese left-wing faces: the question of “brokerage costs” (Bennett 2005). For instance, the PCP considers that the Portuguese debt has to be renegotiated and that Portugal must prepare to withdraw from the Eurozone, something that is rejected by the PS (Jornal de Notícias 2016). Faced with these disagreements and with the difficulty of explaining to its voters and militants the alliance with the PS, the official discourse of the PCP emphasizes that the “Joint Positions” do not endanger the party’s foundational identity, ideology and values (Sousa 2016). On 2 December 2016, during the XX PCP Congress, Jerónimo de Sousa stated that, in this new stage of national politics, Portugal does not have “a left-wing government” (Sousa 2016). Therefore, Sousa claims that the “Joint Positions” are not even a parliamentary agreement and only represent a “political solution” that allows the PS minority government to rule, in order to put an end to the right-wing coalition and with the “commitment to restore the rights and the income taken away from the workers and the people” (Ibid.). Avoiding characterizing the “Joint Position” as an agreement or coalition, Sousa (2016) claims that the “PCP affirms its full independence and identity in this new era of the country’s political life” and with the “same communist identity it has always had.” Consequently, Sousa (Ibid.) argues that “our problem is not . . . to make commitments,” but only commitments that do not endanger the PCP’s “principles.” In this sense, the PCP, with “full political liberty and indepen-

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dence,” will continue to intervene” in order to promote “its commitments with the workers and with the people.” In the same vein, at the PCP Congress João Oliveira claimed that there is “neither a parliamentarian agreement nor a left-wing majority in the Portuguese parliament” and that the PCP “is not committed to the socialist government program” (Oliveira 2016). Consequently, the identity of the PCP is not being “diluted” since the party keeps its “independence and autonomy” (Ibid.). The PCP has accused the PS of not directly and clearly “opposing foreign impositions and constraints” (Ibid.). In the same vein, PCP member João Ferreira poignantly argues that “the submission of Portugal to EU impositions has had a deeply harmful impact in the country and goes against the national interest—and PS is to blame for such subjugation” (Sapo24 2016). For him, the goal would be to “terminate” European policies (Ibid.). PCP member Francisco Lopes also added that the party aims to contribute to the dismantling of the capitalist system and to recover national and left-wing values (Lopes 2016). Catarina Martins, BE leader, recognizes that within the “Joint Positions,” “each day is a struggle to see what can be done with the existing correlation of forces” (Público 2016a). In order to reinforce BE identity and test the boundaries of the left agreement, in December 2016, the BE presented its priorities for 2017 and announced that the new year would be “a challenge for our relationship with the Government” because “there are issues that were not initially in the agreement (with PS) but are essential for . . . people’s lives.” The BE “wants to make progress” in these issues, namely the revision of the labor legislation, the fight against public-private partnerships in the health sector and the debt restructuring (Público 2016b). In the process of “relationship building” through a loose “metaframe,” the PCP and BE endeavor to discursively highlight the idea that the “Joint Positions” do not undermine the coherence of their political programs, or weaken their identity, opening venues for the fight against austerity policies. However, at the same time that key political officials from the PCP and BE criticize the Socialist Party due to its stance on the EU and the Eurozone in order to reaffirm their identity, they also emphasize what in their vision are the positive outcomes of the “Joint Positions”: the rolling-back of austerity measures adopted by the previous right-wing government, aiming to reaffirm their ability to influence public policies. In fact, this is a difficult exercise that seeks to minimize the “brokerage costs” associated with the “Joint Positions,” which are potentially dangerous for the PCP and BE, since the “Joint positions” demand significant identity concessions from far-left parties. Concerning “brokerage costs,” Prime Minister António Costa, for clear strategic reasons, does not consider the “divergences” important, arguing instead that the “government solution” is sound, since the “Joint Positions” ensure that the government has “solidity and a horizon of

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stability”—something that other minority and majority governments did not have (Costa 2016, 6). “RELAXED FRAMING” AND “OPT IN/OPT OUT” COMPROMISE In conceptual terms, “relaxed framing” means that the narrative and discursive focus of a coalition is comprehensive in terms of range and presents variations in “interpretative scope and influence” (Benford and Snow 2000, 618). In its Global Strategic Motion, António Costa (2016, 6) embraces the nature of “relaxed framing” arguing that “the plurality of the lefts . . . recognizes wide space for the natural expression of divergences. But it also demonstrates that there is room for convergence and determination to honor commitments that were made to enable a solution of government needed to fulfil . . . the change of politics desired by the majority of voters.” In fact, the “relaxed framing,” empowered by “flexible identities,” enabled the left parties to reaffirm their diverse political programs and ideologies, in other words their identity, without compromising the left agreement. It is noteworthy how Costa (2016, 6) claims that divergences should be managed through political discourse and debate. The other left-wing leaders who signed the “Joint Positions,” while approving the government program and the national budgets for 2016 and 2017 (fundamental to maintain the PS in power), systematically emphasized their differences vis-à-vis the PS government political and budgetary options. Evidence of this effort to emphasize their distinct identity and ideology is PCP member João Oliveira’s (2016) argument that the Portuguese government is not a PCP “solution” and does not correspond to the communist’s goals, but rather a “minority socialist government” dictated by the current “correlation of forces” in the parliament that “executes its own program.” Additionally, in the debate on the 2017 general budget, Jerónimo de Sousa returned to the claim that the document “contains insufficient and limited measures and options vis-à-vis the scale and the depth of the country’s structural problems” and “falls short of the country’s needs and possibilities as a result of the PS and its government’s choices to not confront the interests of the monopoly groups and the constraints arising from their submission to the Euro and the EU” (DRE 2016c, 69). In the same vein, Catarina Martins argued that one year after the PS government took office, results show that government action delivered important measures on the rights and income recovery but faces profound limitations because the “range of possibilities of our country remains mutilated by European extremism” (DRE 2016c, 75). In coalitions based on “relaxed framing” there is frequently room for a particular phenomenon designated by social movement literature as a

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collective agenda set on an “opt in/opt out” compromise (Bennett 2005, 215) in order to accommodate the diversity of visions that left-wing parties have for the future of the country. Consequently, the policy process is clearly adaptive. In order to maintain the PS in power, it is essential that the PCP and the BE approve the general budgets in parliament. However, the parties involved in the left agreement seek to disengage themselves from the policies which clearly affect their identity and political program but do not seriously endanger the socialist government. The parliamentary debate on the board of the bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos, in December 2016, illustrates this “opt in/opt out” compromise. In this case, the BE voted against the socialist government (opt out) together with the right-wing parties (PSD and CDS-PP) in order to impose the obligation of the board members to declare their incomes and estate to the Constitutional Court (Observador 2016b). Similarly, in 2014, after the collapse of Banco Espírito Santo, the so-called New Bank was created. Since the beginning, the announced objective was to privatize the New Bank, a decision taken in March 2017 and supported by the PS. However, both the PCP and BE, always very critical about the financial system, clearly opposed the privatization and proposed the bank’s nationalization (opt out) (Expresso 2017b). At the end of 2016, the PS government agreed with the Employers’ Union on a reduction in the Single Social Tax (paid by employers to the social security system) as compensation for the national minimum wage rise. However, the proposal was rejected by the PCP and BE (Rádio Renascença 2017). The reduction in the Single Social Tax is unacceptable for the PCP because it favors the employers and decapitalizes the social security system. Similarly, the BE claims that a reduction in the Single Social Tax is a bonus given to the employers paid by the taxpayers (Diário de Notícias 2017). Since the so-called “protection of the employees,” the rise of the national minimum wage, the expansion of labor rights and a certain animosity with the Employers’ Union are at the core of PCP and BE political programs, the refusal to reduce the Single Social Tax (opt out) is a clear strategy to preserve their identity and to establish a difference regarding the PS. The above-mentioned opt out strategies are only a few examples, since it is possible to find several examples involving all the parties that signed the “Joint Positions.” In fact, the PS has also rejected several PCP and BE legislative proposals, mainly those that may have a budgetary impact or that are related with the Portuguese participation in the EU and Eurozone. It is clear that the collective agenda set on an “opt in/opt out” compromise (Bennett 2005, 215) is a complex and, in some way, a dangerous “game” with the potential to challenge the cohesion of the left agreement, particularly as the parties involved in the left-agreements, particularly as the far-left parties promote the inclusion of new issues and policies which

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were not mentioned in the “Joint Positions.” However, the above-mentioned opt out strategies have not caused serious damages to the left coalition until the moment of this writing (June 2017), since in critical moments that could undermine the PS government—like the approval of the national budgets for 2016 and 2017, the left remained united. CONCLUSION “Disciplinary neoliberalism” (Gill 1995) and the austerity discourses that followed in Europe and in Portugal in the context of the financial and sovereign debt crisis, as well as the results of the 2015 Portuguese parliamentary elections, have posed a serious dilemma to the Portuguese left: to enable a new right-wing government in 2015 or entering into historical negotiations to enable a new left government, even if important ideological and programmatic political concessions, mainly by the far-left parties, had to be made (as has been the case). For the first time in Portuguese democratic history, the decision of the main left parties (PS, PCP, BE) was to sign the so-called “Joint Positions” to support a new PS government. The left agreement was based on a process of “relationship building” and justified through a loose supporting “metaframe” that advocated the necessity to oust the right-wing political parties from power, to put an end to orthodox austerity (which left-wing parties perceived as being exogenously imposed), as well as to develop anti-austerity policies based on the end of income cuts. Therefore, we argued that “disciplinary neoliberalism” (Gill 1995) and the austerity policies in Portugal and Europe created the conditions for the left agreement, which was a clear response to “disciplinary neoliberalism” and austerity policies. However, the left agreement involves political parties with substantially different and even opposed identities, ideologies, and political programs, particularly on issues like debt restructuring and Portuguese participation in the Eurozone. The “Joint Positions” do not mention these issues, focusing instead on ending austerity policies pursued by the previous right-wing government and on the promotion of income return. In fact, the acceptance by the far-left parties to support a PS government and to participate in a process of “relationship building”—knowing that important changes in the topics of debt restructuring and the Portuguese participation in the Eurozone seem impossible under a PS government— is in line with the observation that “the main raison d’être of the radical left parties is no longer the revolution, but the preservation and enhancement of the traditional social democratic welfare consensus” (March 2008, 18). Consequently, as March (2008, 13) argues, “far left parties join coalitions in order to resist governmental neo-liberalism . . . and to steer the governmental centre of gravity to the left, by making incremental advances for their own policy agenda and acting as the left-wing con-

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science of social democrats” (March 2008, 13). This corresponds to a more pragmatic attitude of the far-left parties in order to, through the increase of their capacity to influence the policy outputs, become the “first to successfully mount a rear-guard defence of the Keynesian welfare state before even considering a more proactive transformation of capitalism” (March and Keith 2016, 54). In other words, they mean to adopt a more anti-neoliberal attitude than an anti-capitalist attitude in the context of the formation of anti-austerity movements in Europe (see Bailey 2016, 69–75). However, this does not mean that the far-left parties that support the PS government in Portugal, mainly the PCP, have profoundly and definitively changed their identity, ideology or political program based on a severe critique of the capitalist system. It is, however, important to underpin that to participate in a left agreement under the conditions above described requires important ideological concessions from the farleft parties in the sense of some sort of de-radicalization, even if it is understood/explained as something instrumental and temporary, and even if the far-left parties discursively strive to permanently reaffirm their ideological and political purity, as is the case. In order to deal with the ideological struggles and identity problems arising from the left agreement that may endanger its coherence and sustainability, we argued that the left-parties embrace an exercise of “frame bridging” in order to construct a “strategic coalition” based on the belief that it is possible to surpass the ideological divisions that have, for decades, fragmented the Portuguese left-wing parties on behalf of the need to overcome austerity policies and to expel from power a “neoliberal right-wing” coalition. The reality of those ideological clashes and identity problems has required a permanent process of brokerage between coalition members through a “relaxed framing” where there is room for a collective agenda set on an “opt in/opt out” compromise. The process of brokerage, the “relaxed framing” and the “opt in/opt out” compromise have allowed for the continuation of the left agreement and, at the same time, enabled far-left parties to underscore that their identities and ideologies as political formations are not threatened. Therefore, the Portuguese left-wing agreement has had an adaptive evolution process and not a pre-determined path. In fact, the PS government has been able to maintain the majority parliamentary support and, so far, no disruption concerning party unity can be observed among the left parties. However, the introduction in the political debate of new issues and policies which were not mentioned in the “Joint Positions” will certainly entail important challenges for the cohesion of the left agreement. Additionally, as new elections approach, the anxieties related with electoral support increase and drive the left parties to a more competitive and egotistic attitude in order to gain support, or at least to avoid losing

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support, as well as to demonstrate the concrete benefits of their support to the government. NOTE 1. PPM is the acronym for People’s Monarchist Party, a small monarchist party with little political and electoral support.

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March, Luke. 2008. Contemporary Far Left Parties in Europe: From Marxism to the Mainstream. Bonn/Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id/ipa/ 05818.pdf. ———. 2011. Radical Left Parties in Europe. Oxon: Routledge. Martins, Catarina. 2016a. “Tivesse o Bloco mais força e o Banif não tinha sido entregue ao Santander.” Esquerda.net, June 25. http://www.esquerda.net/artigo/tivesse-obloco-mais-forca-e-o-banif-nao-tinha-sido-entregue-ao-santander/43401. ———. 2016b. “Sanções a Portugal serão ‘declaração de guerra’ e podem provocar referendo.” Esquerda.net, June 26. http://www.esquerda.net/artigo/sancoesportugal-serao-declaracao-de-guerra-e-podem-provocar-referendo/43417. ———. 2016c. “Não podemos deixar que o Tratado Orçamental seja o tratado das sanções para sempre.” Esquerda.net, July 2. http://www.esquerda.net/artigo/naopodemos-deixar-que-o-tratado-orcamental-seja-o-tratado-das-sancoes-parasempre/43528. Moury, Catherine and Adam Standring. 2017. “‘Going beyond the Troika’: Power and Discourse in Portuguese Austerity Politics.” European Journal of Political Research 56 (3). DOI: 10.1111/1475–6765.12190. Negócios. 2016. “Catarina Martins admite divergências com PS e PCP mas admite ‘compromisso comum.’” October 14. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/ financas-publicas/orcamento-do-estado/detalhe/catarina-martins-admitedivergencias-com-ps-e-pcp-mas-destaca-compromisso-comum. ———. 2017. “PCP receia que ‘chantagem e pressão da UE’ sobre Portugal vá continuar.” May 22. http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/financas-publicas/detalhe/ pcp-receia-que-chantagem-e-pressao-da-ue-sobre-portugal-va-continuar. Observador. 2016a. “Portugal estava no bom caminho até entrar o novo Governo.” October 26. http://observador.pt/2016/10/26/schauble-portugal-estava-no-bomcaminho-ate-entrar-o-novo-governo/. ———. 2016b. “BE junta-se à direita e obriga gestores da Caixa a declarar rendimentos ao Tribunal Constitucional.” November 24. http://observador.pt/2016/11/24/bejunta-se-a-direita-e-obriga-gestores-da-caixa-a-entregar-declaracoes/. Oliveira, João. 2016. “A nova fase da vida Política Nacional. Intervenção no XX Congresso do PCP.” December 3. http://www.pcp.pt/xx-congresso-pcp/nova-fase-davida-politica-nacional-possibilidades-limites-perspectivas-de-luta. Patomäki, Heikki. 2013. The Great Eurozone Disaster: From Crisis to Global New Deal. London: Zed Books. PCP. 2015. “Programa eleitoral do PCP—Legislativas 2015: política patriótica e de esquerda soluções para um Portugal com futuro.” http://www.pcp.pt/sites/default/ files/documentos/programa_eleitoral_pcp_legislativas_2015.pdf. PS and BE. 2015. “Posição Conjunta do Partido Socialista e do Bloco de Esquerda sobre Solução Política.” http://cdn.impresa.pt/284/9c2/9700333/BE.pdf. PS and PCP. 2015. “Posição Conjunta do PS e do PCP sobre Solução Política.” https:// economiafinancas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Posicao-Conjunta-PCP-PS.pdf. PS. 2015. “Programa eleitoral do Partido Socialista: eleições legislativas 2015.” http:// www.ps.pt/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/programa_eleitoral-PS-legislativas2015. pdf. Público. 2016a. “Catarina Martins: Todos os dias me arrependo da geringonça.” August 21. https://www.publico.pt/2016/08/21/politica/noticia/todos-os-dias-mearrependo-da-geringonca-1741714. ———. 2016b. “BE: 2017 é um desafio para o nosso relacionamento com o Governo.” December 13. https://www.publico.pt/2016/12/13/politica/noticia/be-2017-e-umdesafio-para-o-nosso-relacionamento-com-o-governo-1754487. Rádio Renascença. 2017. “Aliança PSD-BE-PCP-PEV chumba baixa da TSU.” January 25. http://rr.sapo.pt/noticia/74348/alianca_psd_be_pcp_pev_chumba_baixa_da_tsu. Reuters. 2016. “Eurogroup’s Dijsselbloem disappointed Spain, Portugal not penalized.” July 27. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-deficits-dijsselbloem-idUSK CN1072CJ.

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Rommerskirchen, Charlotte. 2015. “Debt and Punishment: Market Discipline in the Eurozone.” New Political Economy 20 (5): 752–82. Sapo24. 2016. “João Ferreira: O Estado Português não tem que pedir a ninguém para capitalizar um banco.” December 3. http://24.sapo.pt/atualidade/artigos/joaoferreira-o-estado-portugues-nao-tem-que-pedir-a-ninguem-para-capitalizar-umbanco-que-e-seu. Snow, David, R. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden and Robert D. Benford. 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51: 464–81. Sousa, Jerónimo. 2016. “Intervenção de Jerónimo de Sousa na Abertura do XX Congresso do PCP.” December 3. http://www.pcp.pt/xx-congresso-pcp/intervencaoabertura. Tavares, Rui. 2015. “Something New on the Western Front: The Political Meaning of Political Change in Portugal.” Reshaping Europe, December 2. http:// reshapingeurope.boellblog.org/2015/12/02/something-new-on-the-western-frontthe-european-meaning-of-political-change-in-portugal/. The Economist. 2015a. “Falling off their stools: Portugal’s anti-austerity left seems to be taking power after all.” November 13. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/ 21678494-austerians-saw-centre-rights-electoral-win-proof-they-can-survivesouthern-europe. ———. 2015b. “Portugal’s doomed government. Short-Termism.” October 31. http:// www.economist.com/news/europe/21677242-after-some-messy-manoeuvres-therelikely-be-left-wing-coalition-short-termism. ———. 2016. “Anti-austerity politics. Fudging the Revolution.” February 20. http:// www.economist.com/news/europe/21693250-italy-and-portugal-are-leading-revoltagainst-eu-austerity-sort-fudging-revolution?zid=309&ah= 80dcf288b8561b012f603b9fd9577f0e.

EIGHT When Citizen Participation Unexpectedly Grows in Quality and Quantity A Side Effect or an Inherent Consequence of “Austeritarian” Approaches? Giovanni Allegretti

This chapter analyzes those practices defined by Blas and Ibarra (2006) as participatory processes “by invitation,” that is, experiences centered on arenas of social dialogue established as “conceded spaces” and institutionalized as specific policies by administrative entities like regions, municipalities, infra-municipal districts or parishes (freguesias in Portuguese). I am mainly interested in photographing a dynamic movement that is trying to renew a highly stagnating political culture, starting from the lower levels of the state. This movement, whose protagonists were often local authorities and their consultants coming from NGOs and academic institutions, obviously dialogued with (and was partially fed by) practices of “participation by irruption” (Blas and Ibarra 2006) through which citizens try to conquer spaces of protagonism and autonomy in the reshaping of public policies and legal frameworks. In my view, however, the movement represents a different and peculiar phenomenon that needs to be separately analyzed with specific categories and indicators. In the Portuguese case, the surprising rise of a large panorama of participatory practices at the local level was not only located in areas ruled by opposition parties to the different governments that ruled between 2007–2015. Rather, it is the convergence of several factors, includ157

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ing a decade-long crisis of political legitimacy, but mostly the so-called “austeritarian” approach to government, regardless of the party taking office. 1 This “austeritarian” approach consists of a mix of authoritarian approaches to territorial government, reinforcing Portugal’s long-existing centralism (Santos 2012; Dias and Allegretti 2009), and a progressive abandonment of the subsidiarity principle that was enshrined in the Portuguese post-revolutionary 1976 Constitution (articles 6 and 7). Between 2007–2015, the Portuguese case—especially if read in the light of the fast transformations during 2016—is particularly interesting, posing several questions related to the unexpected growth in quality and quantity of political-administrative experiments that reserved increasingly important spaces for citizens’ direct involvement in shaping public policies and projects. One of these questions is related to a pivotal reflection raised by Archon Fung (2011), when imagining two differentiated macro-categories of participatory processes based on how the implementers might “interpret” their mission: the deontological and the consequentialist. The deontological refers to experiences that value innovations because “they help create right relationships among citizens and between citizens and the state,” hence that “democracy worth having simply requires greater citizen participation (participatory innovation), deliberation (deliberative experiments), and rights to information and knowledge (transparency) quite apart from any other effects that these innovations have” (Fung 2011). The consequentialist perspective, instead, considers innovations as valuable based on the extent to which they secure additional values including “policies that are responsive to citizens’ interests, social justice, state accountability, wiser policies, and so on” (Ibid.). In this context, three research questions guide this chapter. First, did the “austeritarian” turn (which dominated the political approach to government, at least on a national level, between 2011–15) contribute to modifying the quality and quantity of experiments of citizens’ direct involvement in public affairs? If yes, at what scale, and was it related—or not—to an increase of the consequentialist approach? The second question interrogates the relation between the structural changes occurring in the restructuring of state organization and the mushrooming of participatory practices in Portugal. Hence, which synergies emerge in fields which could link the modernization of the state to the increase of its democratic practices? The third question is: are participatory democracy experiments an “enabling environment” which can stimulate a new structural transformation of the state and the opening of a solid “virtuous circle” (Ganuza and Frances 2012) of interaction between the reform of political culture and counter-cyclic actions which can retro-feed an increase in mutual trust between citizens and their representative institutions (with a possible consequent expansion of tight pro-active collaborations among the two)?

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I am aware of the incommensurable difficulty of proving cause-effect relations in the mutual incidence of such complex and articulated phenomena. Nevertheless, it could be a meaningful exercise that of reflecting on the Portuguese explosion of participatory practices from a still-notexplored perspective of the interactions between such a visible phenomenon and the “austeritarian” mainstream which dominated, well beyond the party-thinking barriers, several years of political vision, but never conquered allies especially at the local level of state administration (not to consider the large part of public opinion). In order to facilitate the anchoring of such reflections in solid and concrete examples and narratives taken from the Portuguese experience, the chapter will narrow down the focus to a specific topic of participatory processes which are largely known as “participatory budgets” (henceforth “PB”), in relation to which Portugal is today the European country with the highest density of experiments out of the total number of existing local authorities (308). The article is organized as follows. Section one defines participatory budgeting. Sections two and three provide an overview of the fast-changing Portuguese panorama of PBs and their relations with other transformations of political praxis. Section four focuses on PBs’ developments and attempts to clarify ambiguities and future challenges. The chapter concludes by relating the transformations of the intensity of democratic practices and the modification of some components of the structural panorama of the rule of law in Portugal. WHAT IS PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING? A COMPLEX DEFINITION WITH MANY PROMISES In the last three decades, participatory budgeting has spread rapidly globally, creating hybrids with other consolidated participatory devices. Within this timeframe, it reached more than 3,000 local institutions and some supra-municipalities, which are presently experimenting with it (Sintomer et al. 2014). Moving from the huge variety of local declinations of PB produced by this expansion could be misleading, as far as consequentialist approaches do not appear to characterize the majority of existing practices, and—thus many “decaffeinated” concrete examples exist (Fung 2015), which could harm the understanding of broader PB potentials. In the last three decades, participatory budgeting has spread rapidly around the planet, creating hybrids with other consolidated participatory devices. According to literature, PB has greater potential to address challenges to sustainability than other participatory devices (Pateman 2012; Fung and Wright 2003). One of the reasons is that PB is explicitly articulated around debates on the distribution of public resources that can be often remarked on in radical political thinking (Baiocchi and Ganuza

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2017; Santos 2007; Marquetti 2002). Another is that different social players imagine PB mainly as a pedagogic space where, through learning by doing, inhabitants can adhere to the principles of policies aimed to improve the sustainability of territorial management, and to actively help forge and support these principles (Allegretti and Hartz-Karp 2016). Today, PB has primarily become a pivotal instrument in challenging the crisis of legitimacy affecting representative institutions, as well as a tool for reverting a widespread loss of communitarian values, a consequence of “liquid modernity” and individualism (Bauman 1998; Beck 2003). PB can be best described as an “ideoscape” (Appadurai 1991): a model that travels around the world, becoming real only through local experimentation. Its diversity contributes to continuous change and models adapted through local implementations that apply different “meanings” to the original idea of PB, using instruments and procedures that shape its organizational architecture. This does not preclude PB experiments from having minimum common denominators that make them “recognizable” among other participatory innovations that dialogue with it, nor from having pivotal principles. PB can be defined as a typology of democratic innovations that modify the procedures of one of the most important aspects of urban politics—the formulation of institutional budgets—through repeated negotiations between the local government (or some local administrative agencies) and participants. The latter may include all citizens (e.g., commuters, migrants, children and other inhabitants of a specific territory, not necessarily holding formal titles of citizenship), and, in rarer cases, only members of civic associations, taxpayers, or an even more reduced group of persons chosen through random selection. PB designs vary, combining in different ways elements of deliberative, participatory, and representative democracy. In major urban areas, for example, citizens’ delegates are elected by participants in order to follow more intense phases of detailed planning, and often to monitor projects’ implementation. The majority of PB designs focuses on discussing expenditures, although a few also deal with revenues. Most existing PBs concentrate on capital expenditures (i.e., investments, and usually just a limited part of them) due primarily to the following two reasons: (1) investments are more visible in the public space, so they are more attractive for citizens and easier to explain; (2) investments are the most flexible part of an institutional budget, so the cost/benefit relation is maximized between the time needed for discussion and the possible results (in terms of variation of the original budget draft, which is based on the political program of ruling parties). Usually, the cyclic criterion of a PB converges into a very diffuse standard-PB model that is structured by two interlinking sub-cycles. The first sub-cycle focuses on sharing the decision-making process with citizens (by collecting proposals that address specific problems and present pos-

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sible solutions, verifying their feasibility, ranking them and integrating them into drafts of official budget documents, which will then be formally approved by elected officials). The second sub-cycle involves the implementation of joint decisions. In particular, it addresses the institution’s ability to respond to participant satisfaction and prevent frustration politically backfiring on the experimenting institution. If it is generally understood that PB “entrusts to a given community the right to decide” on “budgets of their interest” (PB Unit, UK), the key criterion of deliberation does not necessarily lead to shared decision-making by non-elected participants. With increasing frequency, however, many PBs reject a consultative formula based on “selective listening” (Sintomer and Allegretti 2009) or political authorities’ “cherry-picking” of proposals presented by citizens. Today, there is wide-spread awareness that only PBs that share decision-making power with their participants can challenge the traditional political culture, which over-emphasizes the role of representative institutions in public policy development. Moreover, PB can barely be a useful “learning by doing environment” if it is only consultative. In fact, PBs prove to be capable of creating feelings of “coresponsibility” and “ownership” among citizens, balancing duties and rights, especially when they open co-decisional spaces that reward participants for the time and the energy they have voluntarily invested discussing public matters (Allegretti 2014). Undoubtedly, the broader success of participatory budgeting was catalyzed by the 2007 global financial crisis, when the provision and distribution of resources became paramount concerns, bringing into focus the need to find innovative strategies among local administrative institutions that were affected by diminishing state transfers and in need of new selffunding opportunities. The origins of participatory budgeting in the early post-dictatorship period of Brazil (in the late 1980s) tells, however, a story that still carries the promise of social justice by opening spaces for the voices and democratic participation of previously neglected, socially vulnerable groups. PB experiments became the most visible flagship projects of new left-wing parties during the 1990s (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012; Cabannes 2014; Avritzer 2009). Eventually, they would become a tool for the struggle against inequalities and socio-spatial polarization in cities throughout Latin America, and, later, Africa, and Europe (Marquetti et al. 2008; Abers 2000). The kinds of tools that are employed in PB interrelate narratives and numbers, making the latter more accessible to citizens. Thus, PB has a great potential for the understanding of the economy and also in the struggles against the neoliberal mainstream, because it “restores the idea that . . . the economy is a space for elaborating, comparing and choosing between alternative options and diverse scenarios, which are not necessarily aligned with neoliberal visions of service provision, the welfare state and local development” (Allegretti and Hartz-Karp 2016).

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THE LOCAL AS CINDERELLA? TENSIONS IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE In the last decade, citizens’ participation in decision-making processes has been widely considered as a fundamental component of the construction of the Right-to-the-City (Harvey 2008). In practice, the Local Authorities (and namely municipalities) have been the main institutional player in a process of extensive intensification of urban democratic regimes, opening their decision-making processes to the active engagement of non-elected citizens and social groups, well beyond the traditional negotiation space with organized stakeholders. In several cases, the decision of doing so was fostered by clever representatives of elected officials, who were aware of the need to renew governing methods in the “era of mistrust” (Rosanvallon and Goldhammer 2008), while—in other cases—it was the pressure of organized society which managed, from the bottom up, to convince institutions to open new solid spaces of social dialogue. In Portugal, both trends find their examples. Since the first experiment of participatory budgeting held in the city of Palmela in 2002 (Granado 2010), a growing class of smart politicians emerged, who started feeling and affirming the need of establishing a new tight dialogue with their citizens in order to address the visible “slowdown of enthusiasm for democracy” (Dias 2017). The approval of Law 46/2005 (which interdicted mayors and presidents of parishes to run for a fourth consecutive political mandate in the same role 2) accelerated the change, bringing to light a new generation of politicians, often younger than the traditional average age of forty-three years (Almeida 2016), but whose socio-demographic profile is still essentially characterized by the “three M” principle (male, middle aged and middle class, [see Steyvers et al. 2006]). The constitutional reform of 1997, which modified article 239 of the Constitution, allowing groups of registered electors independent from a party to run for elections, 3 became part of a trend which accelerated the multiplication of participatory experiences in Portugal. Other ways than the direct confrontation against the natural barriers posed by the strongly consolidated party system proved effective. An example comes from the new variable geometry of political alliances at the local level, which revealed (especially after the 2013 elections) a strong defense of experiments of participatory democracy on the part of neo-elected councilors of “citizens groups,” whose vote was so necessary to form governing majorities that it was capable to bargain the start of important experiences of participatory budgeting. Furthermore, in other cities today, a large number of the recurring pressures on elected mayors for implementing a PB come from citizen groups in the opposition, whose discourse and practices are centered on the need of opening new spaces of direct involvement of citizens.

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Many of the above-mentioned reforms, beside the slowness of their effects, are limited by the fact that they have been conceived and applied for the local administrative levels, explicitly setting for them a standard of “locomotive of innovation,” where it is possible to experiment new geometries of power and piloting transformations of the political and administrative culture that one day could be eventually scaled up at other wider institutional levels. A lot of proposals centered on spaces of participatory democracy that took shape in Portugal were also advanced by newly born “liquid” social movements such as ‘Geração à Rasca’ or ‘Que se lixe a Troika!’ (Baumgarten 2013), and other more consolidated groups, such as “Precários Inflexíveis,” “Habita” or the group of researchers from the Observatory of Crises and Alternatives. 4 Article 2 of the Constitution became an indispensable reference for all these struggles, as it identifies citizen participation as a main goal (and not just as an accessory means) of state action. THE FAST-CHANGING PANORAMA OF PORTUGUESE PB PBs tend to monopolize the experiments related to citizen participation in local policies. The 118 experiences of participatory budgeting registered at the end of 2016 5 (which devoted more than 19 million euros to codecision with their citizens) represent a clear and somehow astonishing paradigmatic change from a vision centered on public aid to an approach based on co-responsibility for the management of public matters. An overview of active PB experiences—in terms of typologies (which often overlap in the same city)—shows that sixty-eight happen at the municipal level (where a PB operates on part of the municipal budget), twenty occur at the parish level (affecting part of the small budget of reformed freguesias), and thirty are actor-based (confined to specific social groups). From 2002 to 2016, participants of Portuguese PBs decided on around 91 million Euros of local investments, 98 percent of which was devoted by municipalities and 2 percent by parishes (Dias 2017). No comparative data exist to give figures on how many citizens took part in these fifteen years to Portuguese PBs, but it is known that the 1,250 projects which in 2016 went to final voting gathered more than 300,000 votes (Dias 2017). Since the 2002 “consultative” experience of Palmela took place, 219 self-defined PBs took place in the country, many of which failed and were soon abandoned. Out of those, 125 occurred in administrative entities led by the Socialist Party, seventy-six in areas ruled by the Social Democrat Party (PSD) in coalition with other parties, ten in local authorities ruled by the CDU (coalition between the Portuguese Communist Party and the Greens), six in areas led by independent mayors and one by the CDS-PP.

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Very few studies have addressed why some PBs failed or were shortlived (Alves and Allegretti 2012), but the reason seems to be mainly linked to the decisional model that chosen. Until 2008, the Portuguese PBs were mostly “advisory” (or consultative), being citizens entitled to present proposals but not to vote on which projects should be considered a priority for municipal investment and inserted in the local budget. The model was too “light” and did not match the needs of a country where abstention rates are incredibly high in the election of representative bodies, 6 a reflection of a “culture of mistrust” (Torcal 2014; Eurobarometer 2014). New Generations of PBs in Portugal The first co-decision-making PB model in the CDU-ruled municipality of Sesimbra coincided with the start of the 2007 financial crisis. After much initial resistance from Portuguese mayors to importing PB, the NGO “In Loco” and the research Center for Social Studies of Coimbra University played an unblocking role (Allegretti et al. 2016). Strengthening training on PB and developing a role of “cultural translation,” organizing events which could bring to Portugal experiences of PB from other European countries, which were emulating and adapting the Brazilian device to different socio-institutional contexts. Assuming that the best way to convince Portuguese mayors of the potentials of PB was to help them to build a specific model for their city without initial costs, the two institutions built a project called “Orçamento Participativo Portugal: Mais Participação, Melhor Democracia” 7 which toured the country for two years, training a hundred cities

Figure 8.1. The rhythm of birth and death of PBs in Portugal (2002–2017). Source: Associação In Loco, Observatório dos Orçamentos Participativos em Portugal, 2017.

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Figure 8.2. Models of PB decision-making (2002–2017). Source: Associação In Loco, Observatório dos Orçamentos Participativos em Portugal, 2017.

and parishes. The project was awarded as one of the best practices of the Equal Community Initiative and joined forces with other national programs, such as “Escolhas,” especially for what concerned PB for children and schools. Later on, the legacy of the project was taken over by other complementary initiatives (the “OPtar” research project between 2010 and 2013 and the “Portugal Participa” from 2014 to 2016) with the same two core partners, in collaboration with the National Center for Training of Municipal Employees (CEFA) and local authorities that had had successful experiments with PB. These initiatives aimed at strengthening networks and opportunities of mutual exchange among local authorities in Portugal, progressively giving growing autonomy and responsibility. This experiment proved the existence of a concrete political will of shaping effective democratic innovations. The organizations which founded such initiatives undertook a pivotal task of networking with other organizations of civil society and local administration, seeing in PB an opportunity to strengthen relational capital and social organized fabric in a country where associativism is often weak. The “turning point” was the decision of the Lisbon Mayor, António Costa, in 2008, to dedicate 5 million euros to the start-up of the first large experience of participatory budgeting in a European capital (see Allegretti and Antunes 2014). The experience inaugurated the “second generation” of PBs (Dias 2014), which was reinforced by the financial crisis. One of the main elements of this new generation was related to the new role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the aftermath of the explosion of Web 2.0 technologies and the diffusion of social networks, as a means to reduce unitary cost per participant, while enlarging the scope of budget consultations to new actors.

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The case of Lisbon is paradigmatic as to the excess of trust in the salvific role of ICTs (originally chosen as the main vehicle of all the different phases of the PB cycle). The PB, which was initially only on-line, soon required the introduction of face-to-face meetings. This happened because “monitoring underlined that a lot of citizens (especially the most vulnerable, the elderly and the not-alphabetized in ICTs) had been excluded from the first edition of the PB due to its internet-driven mechanisms” (Allegretti et al. 2016). The third generation of Portuguese PBs emerged in 2011, coinciding with the “austeritarian” mainstream and the bailout by the Troika, and faced several ambiguities linked to the use of technologies. These ambiguities included the complexity of the laws on privacy protection (which—in some cases—could jeopardize the construction of secure platforms to avoid online cheating) and the complexification of login procedures (summed to the need of valuing the potentials of monitoring and data analysis allowed by technologies), which could discourage “lazier” citizens from participating. A Third Generation of PBs The critical reflection on the Lisbon PB produced high-level solutions to increase the quality of deliberation and the creativity of proposals, usually based on the interdiction to present proposals online, for the sake of collective discussions held in face-to-face spaces of interaction between citizens, civil servants and elected officials. Two problematic issues emerged during the period 2011–2015: (1) the oligopoly in the ICT commercial solutions for PB of two Portuguese enterprises (Libertrium and Wiremaze), whose technology-driven solutions could eventually not customize to the local needs of cities; (2) the reduced emphasis of Portuguese PB on transparency of budget and financial choices, limiting the disclosure of public accounts to the small volumes of resources discussed in PB, when not just to the hardly understandable official budgetary documents whose publication is mandatory by law. The transparency issue is similar to that of other countries, but in Portugal it was made more explicit by the pioneer experiment done by the local branch of Transparency International with the construction of the Municipal Transparency Index or ITM (Tavares et al. 2015). Very few Portuguese cities with ongoing PB got high scores in the national ranking in the first edition of the Index, showing that, per se, participatory budgeting does not foster a mechanic commitment of local authorities to transparency. Only in 2016, during the third edition of the ITM, did the ranking of cities with PB scale up, mainly because the ITM created strong controversy in the media. A specific process to discuss the relation between ITM and PB was promoted by the program Portugal Participa together with the Portuguese branch of Transparency International, in the

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explicit attempt to give to PB the value of an “enabling environment” pushing other reforms for improving local authorities’ performance. The first three generations of Portuguese experiences of participatory budgeting were marked by the need to build and consolidate a peculiar model suitable to face, at the same time, some of the main problems that marked the several experiments: 1. the fast decrease of trust in representative institutions; 2. the shrinking resources of local authorities; 3. the need to find new spaces for institutional communication in the face of the decadence of traditional mass media and the uncontrollable excess of (mis)information of social media; 4. the need to respond to the growing demand for more transparency and responsiveness of public institutions; 5. the need to contribute to community building in a country where the multiple effects of the crisis could risk increasing the self-referenciality of individuals and small interest groups, damaging solidarity dynamics; 6. growing inequality and new social exclusions fed by a financial crisis which affected the different social groups unequally; 7. the need to consolidate new institutes and rules of living together which could be helpful to overcome the limitations of the “affective maps” (i.e., ways of living in the territory which do not provide incentives for citizens to know it beyond the places and networks that they naturally attend and frequent in their daily experience). The progressive clarification of these issues during the transition from the “first” (2002–2007) to the “third generation” (started in 2011, with the birth of the Cascais PB experience) of Portuguese PBs was not only useful for providing incentives to experiments that are more aware of their complexity and with a more consequentialist approach, but also allowed for the production of a large range of toolkits useful to face (singularly or together) the said issues (Dias 2014). Among these tools, the most successful was undoubtedly the “proposal meetings,” where the traditional frontal assemblies were substituted by a series of small roundtables, where all participants (helped by trained facilitators) could feel more at ease while proposing and “filtering” together the main ideas for their city. Such an innovation (for Portuguese and Latin American PBs) required an increase in commitment for training of civil servants, although it did not generate (unlike in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany or Italy) a new class of professionals and experts who could live off such experiments. Other measures included the so-called “caravanas” (sort of neighborhood walks and collective site inspections where citizens better get to know city spaces where some transformation has been proposed during PB) and “monitoring commissions.” The latter (which al-

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ways involve citizens, and sometimes members of political parties, including the opposition ones) represent an important support in all cases where frauds and contestation of rules occur. They also represent a way of strengthening the feeling of citizens that they are the real center of the participatory space and an important part of social accountability mechanisms, both in the decision-making as well as in the implementation phase of PB. Under this perspective, a very important innovation which became a habit, especially from 2011 on, is the need of reducing the “gatekeepers” which potentially can be imagined as “insiders” of the public administrations in limiting the power of citizens during the process (Allegretti 2014). This explains why today—during the phase of technical evaluations of peoples’ proposals feasibility—the technicians and civil servants of local authorities in charge of the process frequently tend to establish direct dialogue with proponents, in order to value that pedagogic space of interaction for reshaping the proposals and making them presentable to the public voting phase. In some cases, real “spin-off” processes are created, in order to proceed to a participatory planning of projects that can detail the most voted proposals, especially when they present some problematic aspect. Summarizing, in the transition between the different PB generations, the original emphasis on cost reduction and a certain paternalistic vision of inhabitants as childish and ignorant actors that deserve to be constantly controlled and guided through a space of social dialogue dominated by the techno-political actors, tended to decline. This happened exactly between 2011 and 2015, when the country was experiencing a “technocratic drift” linked to “austeritarian measures.” OUT OF THE BOTTLENECK: NEW TRENDS FOR SCALING UP AND HYBRIDIZING PBS These dynamics open new opportunities for the “fourth generation” of PBs which is inherently different because its first goal seems to be that of overcoming the “self-referenciality” of the tool, hybridizing and complementing it with other more or less consolidated participatory dynamics. Networks are considered strategic in such a framework. Since 2007, an annual National Meeting of Portuguese PBs has been organized. In 2010, it became a biennial pan-Iberian event, in order to facilitate dialogue between Spanish and Portuguese experiences of participatory democracy. Although PBs represented the strongest “core group” in the events, the network is opened to other typologies of democratic innovations. Between 2011 and 2014, other dynamics (like the fight of local authorities against the new legislation on decentralization and austerity measures) reinforced the cohesion of local authorities and their intervention as

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a central actor “beside the citizens” and in “their defense.” In fact, the PSD-CDS government enacted legislation that significantly reduced the number of parishes and prohibited further indebtedness of municipalities as a response to the demands of the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika. As a response, some local authorities, including Lisbon, opted for the introduction of participatory processes in order to ensure a better process of self-reform (Schmidt et al. 2014). This happened while participation became a more important and determinant topic in the national debate on politics, especially when PB became the symbolic center for supporting new political imaginaries, as the dialogue between the Socialist Party and other formations of the radical left. 8 The project “Portugal Participa,” funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, emerged in 2014 with three aims: (1) create dialogue between PBs and more invisible and less diffuse democratic innovations; (2) create spaces for reflection and mutual learning among local authorities interested in experimenting with participatory processes; (3) strengthen the legal framework for citizen participation, scaling up from the local to larger levels of administrative ties. The project shaped a solid network of “Participatory Local Authorities” (RAP, Rede de Autarquias Participativas), with its specific annual best-practice award, partially decided by citizens. Furthermore, it acted as a space for collectively elaborating on a Workbook of Recommendations to the national parliament. The Workbook is a guide of ideas given by the mayors’ network and its collaborators to members of parliament and national government, suggesting legislative measures to reinforce citizen participation in local, regional and national policies. The Workbook was also conceived as a funding charter of values for starting a large consultation to Portuguese citizens, which could end in a process of co-writing a bottom-up Proposal of Law to be presented to the Parliament as an autonomous Citizens’ Initiative of Law. Another important act of the RAP network was that of promoting a self-reflection on the limits and unevenness of Portuguese PBs, which finally took the shape of a document of intentions called “The Charter of Quality of Participatory Budgets in Portugal,” 9 whose main goal is to suggest key principles to scale up the average quality level of PB experiments. The project “Portugal Participa” also influenced the 2015 national election campaign. The many innovative local experiences that emerged in the previous two years convinced the Socialist Party to insert in its political platform the idea of a first world experiment of PB at the national level, accompanied by another PB actor-based process coordinated in all the schools of the country by the Ministry of Education, and specifically dedicated to young generations. 10 The new PS government, upon taking office in 2015, started molding the structure for conceiving and shaping the first pilot national PB. The “task force” (located within the Ministry of Administrative Modernization) created to implement this experiment aims at producing a national PB that does not replicate local partici-

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patory budgets at a larger scale, while taking into account the need to integrate and complement local PBs (and foster their multiplication). The project of the national PB focuses on three main elements lacking in local Portuguese PBs: the promotion of social justice; the promotion of transparency in all state-related budgets (at all administrative levels) and their release in open data; the construction of a space of deliberation which can interrelate the discussion on public expenditures with the debate on revenues (taxation, mortgage rates on debt, etc.). At the moment of this writing (July 2017), the National PB (called OPP—or Orçamento Participativo Portugal 11 ) has just started. What can be said at this moment is that OPP is pursuing two goals, on the basis of local experiences: (1) not allowing people to cast proposals on the Internet, on the grounds that the “couch democracy” can only be fought through spaces where citizens can learn to listen to each other and discuss together 12; (2) limiting acceptable proposals to those that relate to inter-municipal areas, thus complementing and combating the tendency of local PBs to be focused on very belly-button spaces. There is, however, excessive “centralization” in the proposals’ evaluation and implementation phases, which will happen in the ministries, instead of involving the CCDRs, their centralized branches on regional territories. This seems to suggest that not much was learned from the failure of centralistic policies of the austeritarian period, contradicting a central assumption of the national OPP: the fact that top-down participation cannot function, and—consequently—the process must be organized in partnership with local authorities, research institutes, associations and social groups in local territories. Another interesting development, which emerged in 2016, is the “trans-border” PB between the city of Vila Nova da Cerveira and the Galician municipality of Tomiño. 13 This is the second trans-border PB in the world, after the one between the Swedish town of Uddevalla and the Norwegian city of Friedrickstadt, in 2008–2010. Both are supported by the EU Interreg project. 14 The scaling up of PB to supra-municipal levels is good news not just for the transformations and the management of territories. More coherent solutions can be found to a series of problems identified and analyzed in depth with the collaboration of the respective inhabitants. It is also a tool for overcoming decisionism and democratic authoritarianism, which are not only “styles of management” but, above all, a “cognitive routine” of a state which cannot even imagine different ways of making decisions, in which it is called to govern with citizens and not just for them. An indicator that such a transformation is more ambitious that just the simple act of opening another bureaucratic channel of social dialogue can be seen in the fact that the scaling up of PBs is taking place in a new framework of relations among subsidiary actors. The “change of style” of the Socialist government supported in parliament by the PCP, the

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Greens, and the Left Bloc can be seen in the negotiations with workers’ representatives on the changes in the job market, or with the respectful collaboration with local authorities for the new Decentralization Act and the new Law on Local Finances. Two other factors account for the scaling up and the extension of participatory approaches beyond the narrow limits of participatory budgeting. One is linked to the criticism that several radical movements that emerged during the bailout years (for example, collective Habita— Associação pelo Direito à Habitação e à Cidade, and its newly created network of movements for the right to housing) made to some PB experiments. The criticisms were four-fold: PBs were not used as a tool for conquering social injustice; there were not enough studies to assess who the participants in PB are and how many actors need new forms of outreach to be involved; PBs are not specifically oriented to measures of social inclusion and positive discrimination for the sake of vulnerable actors; the incapacity of creating vision and scenarios of the desired city before engaging in prioritizing the funding to be given to single interventions, which is often inspired by immediacy needs and competition for resources among local lobbies (Allegretti et al. 2016). A second issue relates to the results of many PBs since 2011, marked by many winning projects whose requests either contradict or compensate effects of austerity policies, especially those related to cuts to the welfare state. An example comes from Condeixa-a-Nova, a municipality where the Youth PB in 2013 rewarded a project for distributing 50 scholarships to impoverished families for accessing the university. The measure alleviated the cuts to scholarships approved by the national PSD-CDS government. 15 Conversely, many PBs produced ideas related to the removal of architectural barriers (for the sake of disabled and elderly people), or to the creation of common gardens and promotion of urban agriculture (aimed at favoring social inclusion of immigrants and the elderly, while contributing to models of development based on food sovereignty). In the last five years, the majority of proposals emerging from PBs are mainly concentrated in funding the reclaiming of spaces and services related to voluntary associations. For example, in the last two years, the most voted project in Cascais’ PB (the most participated in Portugal) were equipment or transportation means for voluntary firefighters, public schools, sports clubs or ambulances. Is this an “NGOization” of participatory budgeting or is it just the consequence of the cuts to the third sector, which are choking and suffocating many grassroots activities? And why is the same happening in the cultural and the educational systems, whose resources are shrinking? Both tendencies fit inside the transformation of a tool which is strictly related to a holistic vision of citizens and their quality of life, their wellbeing and the use of their free time. Initially, faced with such proposals, many civil servants who evaluated project feasibility were reluctant to accept, and used in a rigorous manner the rules of

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the game set for PB to reject the proposals. But in the last biennium, many PB Ruling Documents were amended to allow those types of investments. It was perceived that such investments were needed in order to protect the most vulnerable. In this case, austerity contributed to changing both rules and outcomes of PBs. Those implicit “tensions” between local projects aimed at increasing the quality of life and the “austeritarian” management of public affairs created a new role for PBs. If (in the last decade) PBs were often conceived as small spaces for social dialogue forged and controlled by institutions, their growing success in the last years (and the visibility given to them by ICTs) made PBs more autonomous in the confrontation with elected powers and techno-bureaucracies. An example is the 2016 Lisbon PB, whose main winner was the proposal for a neighborhood garden to be opened in an area where the municipal government had previewed the construction of a car-park. 16 Such a story represents well how PBs can become a space for discussing development models and urban strategic visions. Reflecting on similar projects also requires taking into account how a project presented in PB is often regarded by proponents as a sort of “test” for the institutions, being that they consciously reproduce ideas shut down in the past. This serves to verify how honest the pact proposed by elected officials to inhabitants is, when declaring the centrality of citizens in the final decisions regarding PB. That is why some municipalities (e.g., Cascais) have been enlarging the opportunity of funding for citizen projects which are not awarded in the final voting phase of PB. For example, creating a “Bank of Ideas” which can be co-funded by the local government 17 provided that proponents engage in crowd-funding to cover a part of the costs of implementation. In this framework, macro- and micro-stories seem to converge in profiling a new solid role of PBs in public policies, which cannot only be confined inside the original borders, but can be imagined as an “engine” for extending participation to a large series of policies and projects of different scope. Such transformations require new tools of management, as well as more refined spaces for permanent interaction, where the traditional opposition between the number of participants and the quality of deliberation could be softened. Hence, infra-societal interactions and pedagogic spaces of training and social capital creation are being forged. AN OPEN CONCLUSION In this essay, I imagined participatory budgets as a metonymy, a prism to read the transformation of state policies and the framework of decentralization in Portugal, with special reference to the period which followed

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the Troika bailout. Participatory Budgets have advantages over other participatory devices not only because of their capillary and intense diffusion in Portugal, but also because they explicitly deal with economicfinancial issues and they are conceived as spaces of “learning by doing,” from which it is possible to reinterpret and reimagine both the present management as well as the future development of the country and its local territories. What started as shy sectorial “policies” of participation ended up becoming a catalyzer for aggregating and coordinating different thematic channels of social dialogue. The quality of each of the 118 experiments of Portuguese PBs (as well as that of the further 101 cases which were suspended meanwhile) is very different. But a huge “core group” of experiences, which both guide and constantly interpret new virtuous dynamics of evolution, can be found. Such practices try to maintain a convergence between the growth of the participatory “devices” and their rules, on one hand, and the maturation of their different actors involved in PB, on the other. Thus, in 2017, PBs are no longer “mere curiosity or political fashion” but rather “the main sensor of the local authorities to understand the perceptions and positions of society on governance issues” and “catalysts” (Dias 2017) for writing strategic documents and changing other processes of wider planning and management of local territories. PBs were often imagined as a counter-cyclic contribution to shape new institutions and departments devoted to design and management of participation processes, which seem to play a central role in receiving the new tasks that the ongoing reform of local governments’ competences is imagining especially on health promotion, urban mobility and education. Somehow, they influenced the scaling up of participation to national state level, and even the way in which the political programs for the next local elections (on 1 October 2017) are being written, through more participatory methodologies. In such a framework of transformations, the target actors also changed, and participation in Portugal has today ceased to be restricted to the representatives of organized groups (as in the “stakeholder-centered” approach that was prevailing until the mid of last decade), being open to the whole population. Answering the question in the title of the chapter, the partially unexpected growth of citizen participation in quality and quantity in the last decade in Portugal (and especially its acceleration in the last five years) is, at the same time, both a “side effect” and an “inherent consequence” of “austeritarian” approaches. It is a “side effect” because it was not calculated or pursued by the state (it was not a planned activity). It is also a structural consequence of “austeritarian” decisions that contributed to strongly break the confidence of citizens in the state, hence playing as a sort of suicide system. In fact, austerity measures reinforced a “vicious circle of mistrust” in political institutions

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and, thus, required—from those that still proved interested in safeguarding the relation among inhabitants and representative institutions—a series of measures capable of gradually “reconquering” the attention and the confidence of citizens toward the state. In the face of critical decisions intended to recentralize power, and showing decentralization more as a “cost” than as an ally in the construction of the daily quality of life for all citizens, the central government’s behavior was hit by answers from local powers which strengthened the positive perception of their role, through fostering new levels of accountability and democratization. Sensitive institutions from civil society supported such a twist, although maintaining a critical-constructive approach, and searched for external funds that could provide an incentive to its expansion and the kick-off of new experiments, in a way that could “conquer” more attention in political areas previously skeptical of the “participatory turn.” Hence, the limits posed by “austeritarian” measures in managing freely local resources had a positive (and partially unexpected) outcome: providing incentives to local powers to increase transparency and citizens’ dialogue to pursue more efficiency and effectiveness of public policies. Confronted with the mythology of the minimum state intrinsically pursued by “austeritarian policies,” Portuguese local authorities seem to have chosen a more “resistant” approach, and the increase in participation was a central part of their struggle, often capable of bringing citizens to their side to confront the decisions of the national state. However, the sustainability of participatory experiments required resilience to avoid the repetition of empty rituals and to perform an incrementally transformative role, capable of adapting each participatory device to the changes in external conditions, and to accept the fast-evolving criteria of prioritization annually chosen by citizens. In this framework, PBs changed their object in time, trying to reinvent the state while reinventing the territory. As already happened in Brazil years before, the transformations of local territories (read through the PB lens) appear less as an output and more as means to affirm a different dimension of the “state that citizens want,” forged at the local level as a way to contrast the idea of state globally diffused by the central government. Undoubtedly, 2016 represented a turning point in the way in which citizen participation is being anchored to the reshaping of country development. But the “scaling up” has still the dimension of a fragile policy and it does not seem likely that it can, for now, hook to the legal system and the decentralization framework, which is going through a new fast transformation, although this time tightly negotiated by the central government with local authorities. However, the different policies of participation (which are still not a legal obligation for the state and its local expressions, despite the clear indications provided by the Constitution) seem to avoid the risk of being “externalized,” as many public policies are. As for now, they appear to be conceived in a way which could affect

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the memory of state structure, reduce its paternalistic approach to the dialogue with citizens and—first of all—modify a “cognitive routine” of administrative institutions, which (until ten years ago) seemed totally incapable of imagining symmetric and respectful collaborations and synergies with their inhabitants. The integration between channels and levels of participation is still weak, and the construction of “participatory eco-systems” that break out the fragmentation of political streams and sectors are distant. But the promising fact is that the transformation of PBs enrooted a large, daring and bold political commitment to a thicker evolution which not only started at the local level, but partially was originated bottom up within a milieu of civil society organizations which devoted to participation their interest for action-research. If it is true that Portugal has become a widely recognized “laboratory of democratic innovation, almost without realizing it” (Dias 2017), the most important challenge of such a path for the near future is that of gradually rebalancing the asymmetry still existing between a political society (which growingly showed interest in imagining elements of self-reform), and a civil society which until now proved less active than in its discourse in accepting the challenges offered by this transformation of political culture. Only then can civil society increase the social control on public policies and projects, and its pivotal contribution in moving to polities more oriented to social equity, to redistributive justice and to the protection and the co-governing of the commons. FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was supported by a project funded by EU Horizon 2020 Research&Innovation program under grant agreement “Enabling Multichannel Participation Through ICT Adaptations—EMPATIA” (687920). The author is affiliated to the Institute for Democracy and Democratization of Communication funded by the Brazilian CNPQ and coordinated by Leonardo Avritzer. NOTES 1. The political period marked by the centrality of “pro-austerity” measures started during the XVIII Constitutional government (2009–2011), led by the socialist José Sócrates, and continued with the government led by social-democrat Pedro Passos Coelho (2011–2015). 2. The Law was initially conceived to ban long-term politicians from certain positions of power, but jurisprudence reduced it to a sort of sabbatical mandate in the same institution, leaving top politicians free to be elected elsewhere in the same role. See http://www.cne.pt/faq2/98/5. 3. Since 2001 the number of mayors elected with the support of independent citizens rose to 13, which represents 4.2 percent of Portuguese municipalities (Almeida 2016).

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4. See: http://www.habita.info, http://www.precarios.net and http://ces.uc.pt/observatorios/crisalt/. 5. See the database of the “Portugal Participa” Observatory at: http://www. portugalparticipa.pt/Monitoring. 6. In Portugal, abstention rates in local elections grew from 39.95 percent in 2001 to 47.4 percent in 2013, while at the presidential level these rates reached 51.3 percent in 2016 (after a peak of 53.5 percent in 2011). See: http://www.pordata.pt/en/Theme/ Portugal/Electoral+Participation-44. 7. See https://rccs.revues.org/4453. 8. In the 2013 municipal elections, the city of Funchal acted as the first experiment of a possible coalition between Socialists, Communists and the Left Bloc under the guidance of an independent mayor. The coalition united against the invasive figure of the President of the Regional Government of Madeira, Alberto João Jardim (who ruled Madeira from 1978 to 2015) and was the general rehearsal of the national coalition that emerged after the 2015 legislative elections amply discussed in this volume. 9. See http://portugalparticipa.pt/upload_folder/table_data/97196eb8-fb0b-425f-ab b6-0f98debf9bdb/files/2017_CARTA_QUALIDADE_PT.PDF. 10. http://www.opescolas.pt. 11. https://opp.gov.pt/. 12. See presentation of OPP by the Secretary of State Graça Fonseca in the CCDR of Central Region (14 December 2016). 13. http://participacerveiratomino.eu. 14. https://www.interregeurope.eu/projects/. 15. http://www.noticiasdecoimbra.pt/condeixa-atribuiu-50-mil-euros-bolsasestudantes-universitarios/. 16. https://www.caracoldapenha.info/. See the interviews conducted within the scope of EMPATIA project with the two main proponents on January 19-20, 2017. 17. http://www.cm-cascais.pt/projeto/banco-de-ideias-de-cascais.

REFERENCES Abers, Rebecca Neaera. 2000. Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Allegretti, Giovanni. 2014. “Paying attention to the participants’ perceptions in order to trigger a virtuous circle.” In Hope for Democracy. 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide, edited by Nelson Dias, 47–64. S. Brás de Alportel: In Loco. Allegretti, Giovanni, Nelson Dias and Sofia Antunes. 2016. “Transformar o território promovendo a cidadania. Metodologias em evolução nos orçamentos participativos de Lisboa e Cascais.” Boletim regional, urbano e ambiental 14: 143–75. http://repos itorio.ipea.gov.br/bitstream/11058/6858/1/BRU_n14_Transformar.pdf. Allegretti, Giovanni and Sofia Antunes. 2014. “The Lisbon participatory budget: results and perspectives on an experience in slow but continuous transformation.” Field Actions Science Reports 11. http://goo.gl/9UkBDC. Allegretti, Giovanni and Janette Hartz-Karp. 2016. “Participatory Budgeting: a methodological approach to address sustainability challenges.” In Leading edge methods to resolve sustainability challenges: more sustainable settlements, economies, resource use, communities and governance, edited by Janette Hartz-Karp and Dora Marinova, 203–16. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. Allegretti, Giovanni, Michelangelo Secchi and Audrey Tang. 2016. “Hybrid Scales of Citizen Engagement: how technological integration can scale-up participatory processes?” In The Geopolitics of Cities: Old Challenges, New Issues, edited by Renato Balbim, 211–42. Brasilia: IPEA. Almeida, Maria Antónia Pires de. 2016. Grupos de cidadãos nas autarquias portuguesas: contributo para a prática da cidadania e para a qualidade da democracia? Leya: Lisboa.

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Alves, Mariana Lopes and Giovanni Allegretti. 2012. “(In)stability, a key element to understand participatory budgeting: Discussing Portuguese cases.” Journal of Public Deliberation 8 (2). http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol8/iss2/art3. Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Gabriel Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Avritzer, Leonardo. 2009. Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil. Washington: John Hopkins University Press. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo and Ernesto Ganuza. 2017. Popular Democracy. The Paradox of Participation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Baumgarten, Britta. 2013. “Anti-Austerity Protests in Portugal.” CritCom (Online). http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/anti-austerity-protests. Beck, Ulrich. 2003. La société du risque. Paris: Flammarion. Blas, Asier and Pedro Ibarra. 2006. “La participación: estado de la cuestión.” Cuadernos de Trabajo de Hegoa, no. 39. http://goo.gl/SEhEjW. Cabannes, Yves. 2014. “Contribution of Participatory Budgeting to provision and management of basic services. Municipal practices and evidence from the field.” Working Paper, September, IIED. Dias, Nelson. 2017. “Orçamentos Participativos em Portugal—Da escolha de projectos à definição de políticas públicas.” Le Monde Diplomatique, Portuguese Edition, August. Dias, Nelson (Ed.). 2014. Hope for Democracy: 25 years of participatory budgeting worldwide. São Brás de Alportel: In Loco. Dias, Nelson and Giovanni Allegretti. 2009. “Orçamentos Participativos em Portugal: Em busca de uma democracia de maior proximidade ou de uma racionalidade funcional?” Cidades—Comunidades e Territórios 18: 59–78. http://revistas.rcaap.pt/cct/ article/view/9289/6736. Eurobarometer. 2014. “Public Opinion in the European Union.” European Commission, Spring. Fung, Archon. 2011. “A Preface to Pragmatic Democracy: Toward Continuous Innovation in Governance.” Paper presented at the “Participatory Governance and Decentralization” conference, Washington DC, May 9–10. Fung, Archon. 2015. “Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future.” Public Administration Review 75 (4): 513–22. Fung, Archon and Erik Olin Wright (Eds.). 2003. Deepening Democracy. Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. London and New York: Verso. Ganuza, Ernesto and Gianpaolo Baiocchi. 2012. “The Power of Ambiguity: How Participatory Budgeting Travels the Globe.” Journal of Public Deliberation 8 (2). http:// www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol8/iss2/art8. Ganuza, Ernesto and Francisco Francés. 2012. El círculo virtuoso de la democracia: los presupuestos participativos a debate. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Granado, Cristina. 2010. “Democracia e participação ao nível local: o poder político e o orçamento participativo, o caso de Belo Horizonte e Palmela.” PhD diss. ISCTEIUL. Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53: 23–40. Marquetti, Adalmir. 2002. “O orçamento participativo como uma política redistributiva em Porto Alegre.” Departamento de Economia, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, 2002/5. http://cdn.fee.tche.br/eeg/1/mesa_9_marquetti.pdf. Marquetti, Adalmir, Geraldo Ariano de Campos and Roberto Pires (Eds.). 2008. Democracia participativa e redistribuição: análise de experiências de orçamento participativo. São Paulo: Xamã. Pateman, Carole. 2012. “Participatory Democracy Revisited.” Perspectives on Politics 10 (1): 7–19.

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Rosanvallon, Pierre and Arthur Goldhammer. 2008. Counter-Democracy: politics in an age of distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2007. Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the liberal democratic canon. London: Verso. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2012. Portugal: ensaio contra a autoflagelação. Rio de Janeiro: Cortez. Schmidt, Luísa, João Seixas and Alexandra Baixinho. 2014. Governação de proximidade: as juntas de freguesia de Lisboa. Lisboa: INCM. Sintomer, Yves, Carsten Herzberg and Giovanni Allegretti. 2014. “Les budgets participatifs dans le monde. Une étude transnationale.” Dialog Global, no. 25, Bonn. Sintomer, Yves and Giovanni Allegretti. 2009. I bilanci partecipativi in Europa. Nuove esperienze democratiche nel vecchio continente. Roma: Ediesse. Steyvers, Kristof, Herwig Reynaert, Koenraad de Ceuninck and Tony Valcke. 2006. “Mayors in Governance: Heading for Efficiency and Democracy. The Belgian Case.” Local Government Studies 32(4): 1–18. Tavares, António F., Luís de Sousa, Nuno Ferreira da Cruz and Susana Jorge. 2015. A reforma do poder local em debate. Lisboa: ICS. Torcal, Mariano. 2014. “The Decline of Political Trust in Spain and Portugal: Economic Performance or Political Responsiveness?” American Behavioral Scientist 58 (12): 1542–67.

Conclusion What Can We Learn from the Crisis? Isabel David

The Portuguese case study provides a number of conclusions about the nature of “disciplinary neoliberalism” and its impact on the economic, political and social spheres. While the wording contained in the Memorandum of Understanding was carefully selected to present technical solutions for problems of high budget deficit and growing debt, the reality is that it did not take into account the specific traits of the Portuguese economy, which is characterized by the existence of micro enterprises, lower levels of productivity and education, and higher social inequalities. Instead, the neoliberal policies that were applied in Portugal are the same that are being imposed in other countries of the Eurozone periphery. As in all cases, the prefabricated, standardized model has left a legacy of poverty and rising inequalities. In Portugal (as in Greece), the original goals of the adjustment policies were never met, while the redistribution of income from the poor to the rich resulted in unsustainable levels of unemployment, brain drain as a consequence of massive emigration, and a generalized lack of hope and disbelief in the political and economic system. The dire results raise the question as to why such policies, which are disconnected from the realities to which they are applied, have become prevalent. In this context, it becomes increasingly difficult to account for a persistent failure of many economists in devising alternative solutions to disciplinary neoliberalism, namely restructuring debts in the Southern European periphery or finding supervisory mechanisms that are capable of preventing the destructive effects of market agents and disciplinary neoliberal apparatuses such as rating agencies, hedge funds and speculators, who profit from the current state of affairs and are thus incapable of acting as efficient allocators of goods (as opposed to what neoliberal orthodoxy sustains). The insistence of EU leaders on fiscal consolidation seems even more incoherent when the IMF had already publicly acknowledged back in 2013 that austerity had caused more damage than benefits, particularly in the case of Greece (Guardian 2013). 179

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One of the effects of the MoU in Portugal was that democratically elected institutions were circumvented by the terms dictated by the “new constitutionalism” imbedded in the Memorandum. The global emergence of social movements is precisely a reaction against the substitution of democracy by the economy. In Portugal too, social movements tried to fill the democratic vacuum left by technocracy and depoliticization engendered by austerity politics and reclaimed the public space, that is, the space where freedom can be exercised. In a country characterized by a traditionally apathetic civil society, the massive increase in popular mobilization cannot be neglected and can only be explained by a collective framing of austerity as unjust and punitive, triggered by a process of “moral shock” (Jasper 1997) as a result of the perception of the uneven distribution of sacrifices. In this respect, it comes as no surprise that younger people, in particular, were among the most mobilized, given the massive increase in youth unemployment. In Portugal, social movements assumed a role of anti-systemic players in a country where the far right and populism have almost no visible public expression. The growingly difficult voicing of demands and grievances through traditional representation forms has also propelled dissenters to increasingly rely on social networks and digital technologies, given that these are fully accessible to most citizens, namely the youths. These digital platforms were fundamental in mobilizing citizens and fostering political activism during the crisis. Social networks and digital platforms were at the origin of the main mobilizations and protests in Portugal. This was the case namely of the 12 March, 2011, demonstration organized by the Desperate Generation and of the 15 September, 2012, and 2 March, 2013, demonstrations organized by Screw the Troika. Preference for social media and digital activism also involves a reaction to a disciplinary neoliberalism trait: the control of traditional media by big corporations. Re-politicization of Portuguese civil society can also be attested to by the resurgence of political muralism, whereby popular art regains its political role and becomes a locus of contention. That political muralism had disappeared from the city following the agitated days after the 1974 Carnation Revolution is certainly connected with the gentrification processes described in chapter 2, whereby the neoliberal city was purified for commercial and touristic purposes. In this sense, the return of political muralism marks a return of politics to the “neoliberal city.” It is no coincidence that this form of dissent has popped up in all countries subjected to disciplinary neoliberalism. The People’s Assembly of Algés constituted a further step in reclaiming democracy in the face of the democratic deficit and a reaction to depoliticization and to the perceived failure of political parties in representing citizens, traits that are inherent in neoliberal austerity. In this sense, the practice of grassroots discussion of issues of common interest constitutes an ontology that stands in contradistinction with the discipli-

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nary neoliberal ontology. The experiment, by its very nature— equal participation, sharing, horizontalism, solidarity—rejects hierarchy and domination inherent in disciplinary neoliberalism. Here too, a new epistemology is in the making, when individuals perceive the transformative power of citizen’s assemblies for the self and society as a tool of emancipation. While it may be said that citizen mobilization as a response to austerity had limited possibilities in the Portuguese case, social movement activism, the People’s Assembly of Algés, participatory budgeting and solidarity economy experiments constitute moments in which citizens create a different grammar of political participation and reinvention of the democratic space, which is not limited solely to the institutions of representative democracy. These processes are also taking place in Spain and in Greece, for example, in the wake of the catastrophic effects of austerity. That these processes can create change is beyond doubt, but how to make change permanent is a different matter and the crux of the problem. The Portuguese case reveals precisely how established political and social actors like trade unions, political parties and, in particular, the Constitutional Court, after a period of energetic social movement activism, took over the visible lead in the fight against austerity. The same can be applied to participatory budgeting. While participatory budgets represent a new pedagogy and ontology that allows citizens to develop emancipation practices, it can easily be taken over by the state apparatus. The Portuguese case is also very instructive from the analysis of the otherwise impossible alliance of the left-wing parties. In a historical move, the Portuguese left put aside mutual hostilities and united against austerity. It can be said that convergences created by social movement activism in its later stages, involving activists and members of political parties and trade unions, as demonstrated by chapter 3, were one of the sources of the current coalition of the left-wing parties. Portugal presents an example of how joint mobilization of social movements and institutional actors such as political parties and trade unions can form a coalition against disciplinary neoliberalism and fight austerity. The Portuguese case provides testimony to an almost unique case in Europe: the persistence of the communists (with a vote share of around 7 percent since 1991) and an equally significant far-left Left Bloc anchored on social movements/civil society. The context is also important: the Socialist Party accepted the pragmatic solution and an apparent return to its socialdemocratic roots because it wanted to govern. It remains to be seen if a stronger PS will persist in the social-democratic vein. As it stands today, a pragmatic approach as to how to fight disciplinary neoliberalism seems to be stronger than the mutual hostilities and the need to constantly assert their historical identity and commitments. This environment—the existence of strong parties in the left-wing spectrum—that exists in Portugal is not easy replicable elsewhere. Eurocommunism has effectively destroyed Marxist parties, while only Greece

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(with Syriza) and Spain (with Podemos) have strong far-left parties. The essentially national scenario of democratic politics prevents a larger, global political response to the essentially transnational nature of neoliberalism. Yet, this does not mean that there cannot exist global processes of learning. That the left-wing parties in Spain talked of adopting the current Portuguese political model is one such window of opportunity. Very recently, the winner of the 2017 French Socialists’ primary elections (to decide on the candidate for the presidential elections), Benoît Hamon, stated that he wanted to reproduce the Portuguese left-wing alliance in France. Also in early 2017, a delegation of the Dutch Labour Party came to Portugal to study the alliance of the left and possible scenarios of implementation in the Netherlands. The global rise of social movements against austerity is also one more element in this process of global/transnational learning. For example, the launching of the Desperate Generation protest in Portugal influenced the emergence of Indignados in Spain (Jornal de Notícias 2011). This learning can also be replicated by the solidarity economy experiments taking place all over the globe. Graffiti and participatory budgeting (originated in Brazil) have also multiplied globally. These processes of learning are greatly aided by digital technologies and social media. While these digital devices and social media are being used by disciplinary neoliberalism to promote consumerist behavior, they are relied upon increasingly by those contesting the system. This can be clearly attested to not only by the Portuguese case but also elsewhere. Yet, despite its global spread, neoliberalism still relies mainly on national political power to open up spaces of penetration for capitalism. That is why neoliberalism is as much about politics as it is about economy. Thus, the solution lies in creating national loci of resistance, in the absence of participatory/democratic instruments at the transnational level. In fact, there is no international citizenship or processes for making it effective, except for some loose mechanisms in the EU, like the Court of Justice or the European Citizens’ Initiative. Under this context, and as the Portuguese case has demonstrated, as the massive changes unleashed as a consequence of disciplinary neoliberalism expand their geographical scope, democracy and social and economic mechanisms of inclusion that are an integral part of it are receding. It remains to be seen what type of resistance mechanisms can reverse this path. The main argument developed in this volume is that answers are to be sought in the national contexts where struggles are taking place. As nations seek their answers anchored on national histories of struggle and contestation, there are, however, traits and strategies that can be appropriated and replicated on a global level. By focusing on the Portuguese case, this volume intends to contribute to such processes of transnational learning.

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REFERENCES Guardian. 2013. “IMF admits: we failed to realise the damage austerity would do to Greece.” June 5. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jun/05/imf-under estimated-damage-austerity-would-do-to-greece. Jasper, James M. 1997. The Art of Moral Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jornal de Notícias. 2011. “‘Geração à Rasca’ é referência para Espanha.” May 20. http:// www.jn.pt/mundo/interior/geracao-a-rasca-e-referencia-para-espanha-1857358. html?id=1857358.

Index

15-M movement. See Indignados 15 October (movement), xxiii, 50, 63–64, 77, 81, 85 aesthetics, 103–104, 112, 127 Africa, 115, 161 Arab Spring, xxiv, 71, 72, 74, 76, 128n13 Armed Forces Movement (MFA), 75 austerity, ix, x, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 28, 32, 42, 50, 54, 55, 56, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 72, 75, 78, 92, 94, 102, 109, 111, 119, 120, 122, 123, 133, 135, 136, 140, 141, 143, 150, 171, 175n1, 179, 180; anti-austerity, x, xvi, xviii, xix, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvin3, 20, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 75, 77, 78, 94, 106, 107, 110, 120, 128n9, 134, 136, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151, 168, 181, 182; austerity urbanism, 25, 27, 28, 31 bailout, ix, xiv, xv, 17, 23, 140; to Greece, xvii, xix, xxvin3, 11; to Portugal, xv, xvi, xvii, xx, 54, 71, 75, 92, 112, 126, 166, 171, 173; to Spain, 12 BE. See Left Bloc Berlin Wall, 96, 111, 134 Bordalo Pinheiro, Rafael, 128n11 brain drain, xxii, 4, 179 Brazil: protests in, 71, 74; participatory budgets in, 161, 164, 174, 182 budget : national, xii, xix, xx, 12, 13, 16, 28, 65, 77, 140, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 169; local, 163, 164, 169; deficit, xvii, xx, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 25

capital: foreign, 3, 5, 15, 22; human, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 18, 19, 20; social, 33, 172 capitalism, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xxii, 30, 31, 33, 36, 40, 41, 42, 61, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 106, 107, 140, 144, 147, 150, 151, 182; crisis of, 26, 31, 91; post-capitalism, xxiv, 91, 92 Carnation Revolution (1974), xvii, xviii, xxiv, 56, 75, 78, 79, 93, 106, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 125, 128n4, 134, 144, 180 carnivalesque, 125 CDS-PP. See Democratic Social CenterPeople’s Party CDU. See Unitary Democratic Coalition CGTP. See General Confederation of Portuguese Workers citizens’ assembly, xxiv, 92, 93, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 180, 181 civil society, xvii, xxiii, 16, 56, 57, 58, 62, 67n4, 164, 173, 175, 180, 181 collective action, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 62, 65, 67, 67n1, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 87 commodification, xxii, 28, 29 Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses. See General Confederation of Portuguese Workers Constitutional Court, xvi, 149, 181 contentious politics, 50, 54, 58, 75, 110, 111 contraption, 135 Costa, António, xix, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 165 Council of the European Union, xiii, xix

185

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culture : political, 56, 157, 158, 161, 163, 175; popular, 80, 113 debt: crisis of sovereign debt, ix, xv, xix, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 22, 23, 140, 150, 179; Portuguese debt, xix, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 18; restructuring of the Portuguese debt, xxi, xxv, 16, 134, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 179 decentralization, 168, 173, 174; Decentralization Act, 170 decision-making, xx, 54, 57, 101, 107, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167, 170 Democracía Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!), 77 democracy : agonistic, 92, 93, 97, 99, 101, 105, 107; deliberative, 92, 93, 97, 99, 158, 160; participatory, xx, 56, 158, 160, 162, 163, 168, 182; representative, 54, 56, 61, 63, 64, 160, 167, 173, 181 Democratic Social Center-People’s Party (CDS-PP), xvi, 14, 140, 149, 164 demonstrations, x, xx, xxiii, 54, 55, 61, 63, 64, 65, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 86, 88n2, 88n4, 88n5, 89n10, 109, 110, 115, 118, 119, 125, 126, 127, 180 depoliticization, xiv, xv, xvii, xxiv, 112, 180 Desperate Generation (Geração à Rasca), x, xxiii, xxiv, 50, 61, 62, 63, 64, 77, 79, 80, 163, 180, 182 EC. See European Commission ECB. See European Central Bank Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), xii, xxii, xxv, 3, 4, 5, 10, 22, 134, 140 EEC. See European Economic Community Egypt : protests in, 38, 57, 111, 112 emancipation, xxiv, 96, 97, 101, 104, 180, 181 emigration : of the Portuguese, ix, xvii, 19, 179 EMU. See Economic and Monetary Union EPP. See European People’s Party

Estado Novo, 74, 115 EU Interreg, 170 European Central Bank (ECB), xv, 14, 16, 54, 75, 77, 119, 133 European Commission (EC), xii, xv, xvi, xix, xx, 14, 54, 75, 77, 119, 133, 142, 143 European Economic Community (EEC), xvi, 4, 11 European Fiscal Compact, 140, 142 European People’s Party (EPP), xix Eurozone, xii, xiii, xviii, xxi, xxv, 3, 9, 11, 12, 20, 22, 134, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 179 Fábrica das Alternativas. See Factory of Alternatives Facebook, xiii, xxiii, 61, 63, 64, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89n10 Factory of Alternatives (Fábrica das Alternativas; the factory), 93, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107 Ferve (social movement), xxiii, 50, 59, 60 Foucault, Michel, x, xi, 104 freguesia. See local government, parish Freud, Sigmund, 96 Friedman, Milton, xi General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses; CGTP), 50, 60, 65 gentrification : in Lisbon, xx, xxii, 26, 27, 30–33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 180 Geração à Rasca. See Desperate Generation geringonça. See contraption Gezi Park, 110, 111 Gill, Stephen, x, xi–xii, xiii–xiv, xv, xix, 54, 135, 140, 150 Global Justice Movement, 75 Golden Visa, xxii, 39, 40, 42 graffiti, xxiv, 109–110, 110–111, 112–115, 116, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 127n1, 127n2, 128n8, 128n9, 182 Greece : bailout to. See bailout: economy, xiii, xix, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 20,

Index 179; Grexit, xix; protests in, 57, 71, 111, 112, 119, 125, 181 the Greens (political party) (Partido Ecologista Os Verdes; PEV), x, xviii, xxv, xxvin4, 88n8, 134, 141 Habermas, Jürgen, xii, xxiv, 97, 98, 100, 101 Habita (collective), 163, 171, 176n4 Harvey, David, 27, 28, 96, 97, 99, 105, 106, 162 Hayek, Friedrich von, xi Hesse, Hermann, 96 heterotopia, 93, 103, 104, 105, 107 humor (as protest), 113, 123, 124, 128n12 Husserl, Edmund, 104 ICTs. See Information and Communication Technologies ideoscape (in Appadurai), 160 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Indignados (15-M movement), x, 63, 92, 119, 182 inequality (in Portugal), xi, xvii, xxi, 19 Inflexible Precarious. See Precários Inflexíveis Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), 57, 72, 73, 165, 166, 172, 175 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xii, xv, 4, 5, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 54, 75, 77, 92, 119, 133, 134, 142, 179 Ireland : bailout to, ix, 10; economy, 9, 11 Istanbul (protests in). See Gezi Park Italy: economy, 10, 11, 12; participatory budgets in, 167; protests in, 63, 125 Joint Positions (Posições Conjuntas), 134, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151 Keynes, John Maynard, xi, xvii, 136, 150 labor, xii, xiii; market, xvi, xxi, 3, 5, 6, 12, 15, 18, 20, 26, 133, 140; movement, 52, 53; precarity, xi,

187

xviii, 25, 59, 60, 61, 63, 67n6, 67n7, 76, 140; rights, xii, xvi, xviii, 61, 147, 149 Lacan, Jacques, 97, 103, 105 Law on Local Finances, 170 Left Bloc (BE), x, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiii, xxv, 20, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 78, 116, 128n15, 134, 136–139, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148–149, 150, 170, 176n8, 181 legitimacy : crisis of, xxv, 157, 159 Lenin, 116 liquid modernity (in Bauman), 159 local government, x, 18, 27, 28, 29, 38, 43, 139, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 173–175; municipality, xvi, 95, 100, 157, 162, 163, 164, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175n3, 176n8; parish, 157, 162, 163, 164, 168 local lodging, xxii, 33–34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42 M12M (movement). See Geração à Rasca Mao Zedong, 116 Martins, Catarina, 65, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148 Marx, Karl, 96, 97, 116, 136 May Day, 59, 75 May 1968, 111 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), ix, xv, xv–xvi, xix, xxii, 4, 6, 14, 20, 25, 39, 54, 59, 63, 133, 140, 168, 179, 180 Merkel, Angela, 120, 122, 123 MFA. See Armed Forces Movement MoU. See Memorandum of Understanding Mouffe, Chantal, 64, 98, 100 mural, xxiv, 109, 110, 112, 114–115, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 126–127, 128n6, 128n7, 128n9, 128n15, 180 NATO. See North-Atlantic Treaty Organization neoliberalism, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 16, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42,

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Index

43, 60, 92, 95, 96, 99, 107, 136, 140, 141, 145, 161, 179, 180; disciplinary neoliberalism, ix, x, xi, xi–xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xx–xxi, 4, 12, 54, 94, 95, 107, 112, 125, 135, 139, 140–141, 142, 143, 144, 150, 179, 180, 181, 182 New Left, 51, 53, 63, 66, 150, 161 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), 164 North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xviii Occupy movement, 71, 74, 76, 111, 119 Orçamento Participativo Portugal (OPP), 164, 170 participatory budget, x, xx, xxv, 157–161, 162, 163, 164, 164–167, 165, 167–170, 170–172, 172–174, 175, 181, 182; in Latin America, 161, 167 Partido Ecologista Os Verdes (PEV). See the Greens Passos Coelho, Pedro, xvii, xviii, 16, 122, 123, 175n1 PCP. See Portuguese Communist Party PEV. See the Greens PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain), xv, xvi, 10, 11 Podemos (political party), ix, 136, 182 political opportunity structure, xxiii, 50, 51, 66, 67n1, 75 populism, 96, 135, 180 Portas, Paulo, 122 Portugal Participa (program), 164, 167, 169, 176n5 Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), x, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxiii, xxv, 20, 50, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 88n8, 116, 128n6, 128n15, 134, 136–139, 139, 140, 141–142, 143, 144, 145, 146–147, 147, 148–149, 150, 151 Portuguese Social Forum, 57, 58 Posições Conjuntas. See Joint Positions Precários Inflexíveis (Inflexible Precarious), xxiii, 50, 59, 60, 78, 81, 82, 88n4, 163 Programa de Estabilidade e Crescimento. See Stability and

Growth Program PS. See Socialist Party PSD. See Social Democrat Party PSD-CDS coalition, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, 16, 62, 63, 66, 92, 133, 139, 140, 141, 168, 171 public opinion, 55, 58, 159 public-private partnerships, xvi, xxii, 15, 17, 25, 27, 29, 147 public resources, 25, 27, 28, 159, 161, 167, 171, 173 public space, xxiv, 92, 93, 100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 111, 112–113, 114, 116, 126, 160, 180, 181 public spending, xv, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxii, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 28, 102, 143 Que se Lixe a Troika. See Screw the Troika rating agency, xiii, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, 10, 13, 14, 20, 179; DBRS, xix; Moody’s, xix; Fitch, xix, xx, 10 real estate, 5, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 40–42 Rede de Autarquias Participativas (RAP), 169 right to the city (in David Harvey), 102, 162 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 115 satire, 123, 127, 128n12 Sartre, Jean Paul, 103 Schäuble, Wolfgang, ix, 16 Screw the Troika (Que se Lixe a Troika), xxiii, 50, 64, 65, 67n10, 77, 78, 83, 85, 119, 163, 180 Seguro, António José, 141 Single Social Tax (Taxa Social Única; TSU), xviii, 64, 149 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), xxi, 5, 12, 179 SMEs. See small and medium sized enterprises social democracy, xiv, 145 Social Democrat Party (PSD), xv–xvi, xvii, xviii–xix, 14, 16, 60, 62, 63, 66, 92, 127, 133, 136–139, 139, 140, 141, 149, 168, 171

Index social movement, x, xiv, xviii, xx, xxiii, 49, 50, 50–52, 53, 55, 56–57, 58, 60–61, 62–63, 64, 66, 67, 72–73, 73, 76, 88n1, 88n3, 91, 118, 119, 123, 124, 135, 148, 163, 180, 181, 182; social movement organization (SMOs), 49, 57, 58, 59, 66, 79 social justice, 158, 161, 169, 171 Socialist Party (PS), x, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiii, xxv, 16, 20, 50, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 78, 127, 133, 133–134, 136–139, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146–147, 148–149, 150–151, 163, 168, 169, 170, 175n1, 181 Sócrates, José, xvi, 12, 14, 175n1 Sousa, Jerónimo de, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148 Southern Europe, xv, xxii, 10, 22, 27, 28, 32, 50, 54, 55, 71, 76, 179 Spain : economy, ix, xxi, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17; participatory budgets in, 167; protests in, x, 57, 63, 66, 71, 74, 88n3, 89n10, 110, 125, 181, 182 Stability and Growth Pact, xxv, 142 Stability and Growth Program (Programa de Estabilidade e Crescimento; PEC), xv, xvi, 13, 14, 61 state-owned enterprises, xvi, 13, 15, 17 stencil, 109, 120, 122, 128n9 Syriza, ix, xvi, xvii, xix, xxvin3, 50, 134, 136, 181 Taxa Social Única. See Single Social Tax time bank, xxiv, 95, 102, 106 touristification, xxii, 25, 26, 27, 31, 33, 37, 38, 43

189

trade union, 16, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 75, 79, 118, 119, 120, 181 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 100 Transparency International, 166 Troika, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii–xxiv, 4, 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 50, 54, 59, 63, 64–65, 67n10, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 83, 85, 87, 92, 95, 106, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 125, 140, 163, 166, 168, 172, 180 TSU. See Single Social Tax Turkey (protests in). See Gezi Park Twitter, xxiv, 74, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89n10 unemployment, xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xx, xxii, 5, 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 28, 54, 55, 67n7, 76, 119, 120, 179, 180 Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU), 78, 163, 164, 170 urban policy, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43 urban space, 25, 27, 29, 32, 41, 92, 102, 110, 112, 114, 167 utopia, 96, 97, 99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107 Weber, Max, 98 welfare state, xvi, xix, 15, 25, 27, 29, 55, 76, 92, 106, 133, 136, 140, 143, 144, 150, 161, 171 World Bank, xii World Social Forum, 58 World Trade Organization, xii, 16 Žižek, Slavoj, 91, 96–97, 103, 104, 106

About the Contributors

Giovanni Allegretti is senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal. He received his PhD in Town, Territorial and Environmental Planning from the University of Florence, Italy, where he is also Assistant Professor in Town Management. He is an expert of the European Commission for the URBACT Program. He has published extensively on participatory budgets and interactive planning. Presently, he is the global coordinator of the international project “EMPATIA” (2015-2017), funded by Horizon 2020, and co-chair of the Independent Authority for Promoting Participation (APP) of the Tuscany Region (Italy). He co-organized a network of municipal authorities within CPLP (Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries), formally created in March 2009. He is also a consultant and trainer about participatory processes of local authorities in several countries (Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Vietnam), NGOs (Morocco, Indonesia, India) and international institutions (UN World Urban Forum, Africities Forum, World Bank, EU). Ricardo Campos is a researcher at CICS.Nova – Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, Portugal. His publications include Porque pintamos a cidade? Uma abordagem etnográfica ao graffiti urbano [Why do we paint the city? An ethnographic approach to urban graffiti] (Fim de Século, 2010) and Introdução à Cultura Visual. Abordagens e metodologias [Introduction to Visual Culture. Approaches and Methodologies] (Mundos Sociais, 2013). He is coeditor of Uma cidade de Imagens [A city of images] (Mundos Sociais, 2011), Popular & Visual Culture: Design, Circulation and Consumption (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) and Transglobal Sounds. Music, identity and migrant descendants (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2016). Carla Guapo Costa is an Associate Professor, with tenure, at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences (ISCSP), Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon). She is also a researcher at the Centre for Administration and Public Policies, a research unit accredited with Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Carla Costa has a PhD in Economics from the Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG), of the same University. Her main research areas are international political economy, specifically European Economy, and financial relations between Portugal and its former colonies, namely Brazil and Portuguese Speaking 191

192

About the Contributors

African countries. She has authored several books and papers, in national and international journals and publishers. She is a visiting Professor at the Universities of Brasilia and Santa Catarina, in Brazil, and she also supervises master students at Portuguese Air Force Academy. She is currently working on consultancy and training missions to African countries and East Asian former Portuguese colony, East Timor, in the field of economic development. Isabel David is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Portugal. She is Associate Editor of Sociology of Islam and member of the editorial board of Research and Policy on Turkey. Selected publications include: “‘Organic Intellectuals’? The Role of Protest Singers in the Overthrow of the Portuguese Dictatorship (1926–1974),” in Songs of Social Protest, Rowman & Littlefield (forthcoming); “Portuguese Democracy under Austerity: Politics in exceptional times,” in Crisis in the Eurozone Periphery: The Political Economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, edited by Owen Parker and Dimitris Tsarouhas. London: Palgrave McMillan (forthcoming); “Strategic Democratisation? A Guide to Understanding AKP in Power,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2016); “The retornados: trauma and displacement in post-revolution Portugal,” Ethnicity Studies 2, pp. 114–130 (2015); Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamis (Eds.). ‘Everywhere Taksim’: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press (2015); “Covenant,” Encyclopedia of Political Science, George T. Kurian (Editor in Chief), CQ Press (2011). Mafalda Esteves holds an MA in Psychosocial Intervention at the University of Barcelona. She was a research fellow at the Social Psychology Department of the University of Barcelona in the Group of Studies in Cultural, Community and Political Psychology where she participated in research projects on Community Action, Empowerment and civic participation and citizenship building. Presently, she is the research manager of the project “INTIMATE — Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe” at the Centre of Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Marcos Farias Ferreira holds a BA, an MA and a PhD in International Relations from the Institute of Social and Political Sciences (ISCSP), Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), and an MScEcon in International Politics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is currently Assistant Professor at ISCSP where he gained his Habilitation in International Relations and Methodology in 2014. He is also Invited Professor at ORT University, Uruguay, since 2009. In 2010, he obtained a grant by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for studying Human Security discursive practices, whereupon he founded the Obser-

About the Contributors

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vatory for Human Security. He then started using audiovisual methodologies to track and make sense of human (in)securities and resilience in different parts of the world. While working in community development projects with different NGOs, Marcos filmed several stories in Nicaragua (2010), Fiji (2012) and Rwanda (2014). Between 2013 and 2014, he documented on film the activities of the Popular Assembly of Algés, outside Lisbon, from which a documentary film should come out in 2017. Maria João Ferreira is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Portugal. Selected publications include: “Liminality and Migrant DecisionMaking in the Aftermath of the Political and Refugee Crises in the Mediterranean, 2010-2013,” in Understanding Migrant Decisions: From Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean Region. Routledge, 2016; “Trauma as a Technology of Power: Memory, Aid and Rule in Contemporary Haiti,” in Memory and Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates. Routledge, 2013. She has published articles in several refereed journals, namely: Análise Social (2016), Discourse & Society (2015); Ciências e Políticas Públicas (2015), Stasis (2014); Global Business & Economics Anthology (2012); Ethics and Global Politics (2011); International Social Science Journal (2011), Journal of Global Analysis (2010). Dora Fonseca has a PhD in Sociology, with a thesis entitled “Social movements and trade unionism in times of crisis. The Portuguese case: alliances or latent tensions?” from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). She is a Junior Researcher at the Center for Social Studies, in the research project entitled “Rebuilding trade union power in the age of austerity: a review of three sectors.” Her main publications include “Olas de Indignación y su Lógica Política: movimientos sociales y nuevas expresiones de radicalismo de clase media” (with Elísio Estanque, 2014) and “A mobilização de 12 de Março em Portugal: movimento social ou ‘explosão’? Atores, processos e consequências” (2012). Her research interests include trade unionism and collective action, especially in contexts of crisis. Pedro Fonseca is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Portugal. He is a researcher at the Centre for Public Administration and Public Policies (ISCSP-UL). Selected publications include: Fonseca, Pedro and Ferreira, Maria. 2015. “Through ‘seas never before sailed’: Portuguese government discursive legitimation strategies in a context of financial crisis.” Discourse & Society 26, 6: 682-711; Fonseca, Pedro, and Ferreira, Maria. 2016. “Paulo Portas e a legitimação discursiva das políticas de austeridade em Portugal.” Análise Social LI (4, 221): 886-921; Fonseca, Pedro (2013) Memory and the Politics of Climate Change: between climate justice and cli-

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About the Contributors

mate security. In Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte, Memory and Trauma in International Relations Theories, Cases and Debates, London: Routledge, pp. 215-230. Luís Mendes is a Geographer. He has a Degree in Geography (2003) and Master’s in Urban Studies (2008), from the Department of Geography, Faculty of Letters, Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon). He was a Lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon (2005/2006), at the Lisbon School of Education (2010–) and the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Lisbon (IGOT-UL) (2012–). Since 2003, he is Permanent Researcher at the Centre for Geographical Studies of the University of Lisbon (CEG-UL), IGOTUL, where he has been conducting research in the fields of Urban Studies (notably gentrification and urban regeneration), Geography Education and Teaching of Geography. He is author of more than one hundred titles: papers, presentations, book chapters and other publications in the aforementioned areas. He is the recipient of the 2005 Amílcar Patrício Award by the Portuguese Association of Geographers. Jordi Nofre holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Barcelona. Since January 2010, Nofre is enrolled as Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences at the New University of Lisbon. His main research areas include social geographies of youth in EuroMediterranean countries, and nightlife and urban transformations in southern European cities. To date, Nofre has published a total of 39 scientific works. He has participated in several projects funded by FP7 and H2020 programs as well as by both Portuguese and Spanish research agencies, and is currently leading an international scientific network on youth and nightlife studies, LXNIGHTS. Inês Pereira studied Sociology at ISCTE-IUL and has a Master’s Degree on Culture, Communication and Information Technologies from ISCTEIUL. She has a PhD in Urban Anthropology (ISCTE-IUL, URV). She is now an adjunct assistant professor at FCSH-UNL and ISCTE-IUL. Her main research interests include social movements, the Internet and new technologies, social networks, youth, and social research methodology. José Alberto Simões holds a PhD in Sociology from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at New University of Lisbon (FCSH-UNL), where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He is also a researcher at CICS.NOVA (Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences). He has participated in several research projects (both national and international) in the areas of youth cultures, children and digital media, and activism and participation. He has published many articles and book

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chapters on the above-mentioned subjects and also four books, including A produção das mobilidades: redes, espacialidades e trajectos (The Production of Mobilities: Networks, Spacialities, Trajectories) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2009, co-edited) and Entre a rua e a internet. Um estudo sobre o hiphop português (Between the street and the Internet. A study about Portuguese hip-hop) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2010). João Terrenas is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics, University of York. He holds an MA in Security Studies from the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University and a BA in International Relations from the Institute of Social and Political Sciences, Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon). His research interests lie at the intersection of critical security studies, post-positivist International Relations and global health and human security. Inspired by the framework of “security as emancipation” (also known as the “Welsh” or “Aberystwyth School”), his dissertation project delves into the critical debates about security as a privileged entry point to explore the possibilities for transforming current political configurations of health security in more inclusive and equity-oriented ways. Between 2013 and 2014, Terrenas collaborated with the Observatory for Human Security, for which he documented the activities of the People’s Assembly of Algés. He is currently a member of the British International Studies Association.