Southern Europe has been hit hard by the Eurozone crisis.  With credit hard to come by and domestic demand down sharply, businesses have closed and unemployment has shot up.  Successive fiscal tightening at a time of rapidly rising need has placed extraordinary pressures on Southern European welfare states.  This panel examines the debates and politics of social protection in very hard times, compares the content of reforms across a number of policy areas, and assesses the consequences of these reforms on the well-being of the populations of Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy.  Rather than single-country case studies, all the papers on this panel adopt an explicitly comparative approach.  The first three papers each address a distinct policy field: health care, pensions, and labor market reform. They focus not only on budgetary cuts and their severity, but also on whether the restructuring and reforms accelerate processes of change underway before the crisis and whether they might lead, at least in some respects and once growth returns, to improved outcomes and fairer distributional results. Thus, health reforms may lead to enhanced value and efficiency; pensions may be placed on a surer footing; labor market inequities between insiders and outsiders may be reduced. The fourth paper focuses on the distinct political trajectories of reforms in Portugal and Greece, two countries subject to comprehensive bailout conditions from the troika. The fifth paper uses microsimulations with the EUROMOD tax-benefit model to estimate the distributional impact of the crisis across income groups.