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.

Shortly after his reelection in 2014, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán proposed a new bill that would charge private internet users and enterprises alike for each gigabyte of data usage. Trusting that he enjoyed broad support among the Hungarian public, he may have not expected that this proposal would unleash a massive wave of protests across the country. Starting to organize their collective action in social media outlets on the very day of the government proposal, the protesters quickly spread in masses on to Hungarian streets, sparking broad international media coverage, and even attracting the support of an EU commissioner. While the ruling Fidesz party initially tried to tame the protesters by slightly modifying the proposal in response to the vivid and vocal opposition all across the country, the various challenger actors kept protesting relentlessly against the introduction of the so-called internet tax. Only ten days after having proposed the bill, Prime Minister Orban, in a widely transmitted radio interview, decided to back off. The government proposal was withdrawn, and the internet tax never became part of Hungarian legislation. In a very short period of time and in a country where a political tradition of mass mobilization is largely absent, the Hungarian citizens managed to be heard. The government took their demands seriously and fully responded to their opposition.

Since the 1970s, the focus of contentious protest, as well as of the corresponding research, has increasingly moved from economic issues to the cultural issues associated with the new social movements. With Europe experiencing the most severe economic crisis in decades, we ask if the return of hard times has changed the distribution of contention over the different policy domains. Drawing on a dataset covering more than 30.000 protest events in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015 and the issues and actors involved in each event, we analyse how the salience of cultural, political, and economic issues in the protest arena changes over time across countries and regions. We find evidence for a reinvigoration of economic protest particularly in southern Europe, a region that was strongly affected by the economic crisis. However, the varying crisis experiences also served to channel economic grievances into other issues: Governments deflected blame for austerity packages onto international institutions and right-wing challengers mobilized economic fears by promising more exclusive welfare benefits. Hence, the economic crisis was also addressed in political and cultural terms. Finally, we show that when the Euro-crisis ended, the migration crisis began to affect the protest arena.