Mediating the German Ideology: Ordoliberal Framing in European Press Coverage of the Eurozone Crisis

Abstract

The German government has played a leading role in the Eurozone crisis management, largely characterised by a commitment to fiscal austerity and supply-side structural reforms. The legitimation of these measures in the European policy arenas as well as in the public domain has partly rested on an ordoliberal economic policy framing, which has presented the Eurozone crisis as one of public indebtedness and loss of competitiveness. To study the public legitimation of the crisis management, we analyse the press coverage of the crisis in eight Eurozone member states, with a total of 7,986 newspaper articles included in the sample. Focusing on 'problem definitions' and 'treatment recommendations' as two key elements of issue framing, we find that an ordoliberal framing of the crisis prevails in all the studied countries, while a competing Keynesian policy frame is mostly undermined. Significant variation between the countries emerges, however, on the question of EU federalisation and on the framing of the sovereign bailout loans. We discuss the implications of these findings for the success of the German government to maintain the austerity orthodoxy across the Eurozone and crowd out economic policy alternatives.

Established ideas from established institutions: austerity and structural reforms in the Finnish economic policy debate

“…The theme of structural reforms as the primary solution to the crisis informed economic policy discussions in HS throughout the years 2011-2014. This is in line with findings that have seen calls for structural reforms being the dominant reasoning in European-wide coverage of the euro crisis (Ojala and Harjuniemi 2016). The call for structural reforms highlighted an explicit attempt to forge a political consensus in Finland that identified excessive regulation and market rigidity as the main obstacles to overcoming economic problems and encourage politicians to see themselves first and foremost as business-friendly reformists.…”

Reason Over Politics

“…Kay and Salter (2014, 763) have analysed how the BBC framed the UK government's austerity measures as a technical response to a "debt crisis", thus "excluding the possibility of addressing the system of deregulated financial markets and neoliberal governance". Ojala and Harjuniemi (2016) argue that the European media favoured a German-led "ordoliberal framing" of the euro crisis, favouring political elites as the primary news sources, pinpointing the crisis countries' lack of competitiveness as the root of the predicament and representing austerity and structural reforms as the necessary treatments.…”

“…It is not surprising that critical scholars have analysed journalism's role in legitimising austerity as a rational response to economic difficulties. Between 2010 and 2012, European newspapers addressed austerity within a framework that justified austerity and competitivenessenhancing "structural reforms" as the primary solutions to the euro crisis (Ojala and Harjuniemi 2016). Between the years 2008 and 2015, the UK news media framed austerity as "painful but necessary" (Basu 2017, 2).…”

Rattling Europe’s ordoliberal ‘iron cage’: the contestation of austerity in Southern Europe

“…The Troika was formed to enforce and evaluate the implementation of market-enhancing policies and austerity measures imposed as conditionalities for monetary assistance. The narrative that legitimised the unprecedented surrender of national fiscal and financial sovereignty was that such reforms were the only alternative for indebted Eurozone countries to ‘balance their books’, recover their economic stability and prepare to return to the global financial markets (see also Ojala and Harjuniemi, 2016). The other innovation involved member states agreeing to a set of official transnational macro-economic surveillance mechanisms that monitor ‘competitiveness alert thresholds’ – involving factors like wage remuneration and labour productivity – as well as the creation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a supra-state institution meant to deal with indebted member states, with enormous fiscal powers but very unclear line of accountability (see Roumpakis and Papadopoulos, 2017).…”