The leitmotifs of these protests have been the financial crisis and the anti-austerity measures of different governments in concert or not with the Troika. Mobilized groups in various countries adopted common repertoires of action like the occupation of public squares and a horizontal direct-democracy style of organization. Although various degrees of sameness and simultaneity seem to characterize this wave of mobilizations and the financial crisis seems to be their main trigger, the differences in intensity, duration and timing cannot be explained in the sole terms of recession. As protests develop their own internal logic and dynamic, the exogenous shock of the crisis cannot account on its own for the outburst and dynamics of mobilizations, at least not entirely.
In accounting for variations across countries in terms of mobilization, I aim to address the impact of the political opportunity structure on the eruption of anti-austerity protests in Europe, in tracing both more stable and volatile structural and institutional boundaries to the their development. The paper analyzes comparatively the political context and the emergence of anti-austerity protests in four countries: Spain, Greece, France and UK.
