On 24 May 2011, in the middle of the parliamentary debate on the so-called mid-term adjustment plan, yet another round of austerity imposed by Greece’s international creditors, a call for a demonstration at Syntagma Square in Athens and at the White Tower in Thessaloniki appeared on Facebook. By the next day at least 20,000 people assembled in the two squares, mostly chanting “thieves, thieves” at parliamentarians and cursing the Parliament. The movement of the Greek Indignados or Aganaktismenoi was born. It would prove to be massive, expansive, and innovative. Immediately after the initial demonstrations, the main squares in the two cities were occupied, and simultaneous protests began in almost all major urban centers of the country. Interest would focus on Syntagma Square, however, where the occupation was symbolically confronting Parliament, juxtaposing the public assembly and the symbolic seat of political power. In the following days, the occupation grew exponentially, eventually reaching almost 400,000 participants on June 5th. In our dataset, there is an event associated with the Aganaktismenoi on almost every single day until the end of the episode on June 30th.

As the reader may have noted, in the previous two chapters we have treated contentious actions largely in isolation from each other. Our contentiousness indicators, for instance, relied on the relative frequency count of disruptive or repressive action types by the contending adversaries without any explicit consideration of how these actions relate to each other beyond their clustering in time. Likewise, we studied the coalition patterns of contentious episodes by considering the institutional characteristics and action forms of each actor and derived the episode-specific actor configurations from the relative numerical frequencies of these actions.

This chapter departs slightly from the previous chapters and attempts to treat the contentious episodes of one country not only as separate units of analysis but as parts of an evolving chain of contention of a larger campaign that unrolled during the years Greece was under the bailout. In doing so, this chapter delves deeper not into the quantitative aspects of contentious episodes but proceeds in a qualitative fashion and utilizes the contentious episodes as a structured backbone upon which to build a narrative of Greek contention.

In the Great Recession, sovereign bailouts were deemed necessary to alleviate the stress of indebted countries. These bailouts contained some of the most contentious policies, including austerity, structural reforms, and privatizations that triggered sharp bursts of protest during the Great Recession. In this chapter, we examine the impact of those particular political events on protest within this period, aiming to assess their impact and explore the mechanisms through which they operate on protest behavior. We observe that bailouts had a strong effect on protest, but in a mostly regional pattern, as they were accompanied by massive and frequent demonstrations only in southern Europe but not in eastern Europe. We also try to see whether the effect of bailouts can be explained by a deterioration of economic sentiment, but we find that their effect on protest remains even when accounting for such a decline in prospects. The chapter then shows that bailouts, ceteris paribus, were also much more contested than non-supranational austerity packages. Overall, bailouts have a strong effect on protest, but the regional pattern suggests that this is stronger where possibilities of alternative institutional political representation were available, as in the case of Greece which is examined more closely.