In response to the recent economic crisis in Europe, governments across Europe implemented austerity. An influential view claims that austerity does not entail significant political risk. But this research , solely focusing on elections, misses an equally important form of resistance, i.e. protest in the streets. I test the impact of austerity announcements by studying the protest level during the Great Recession. I assemble a novel time series cross-sectional data-set for monthly public economic protest and policy decisions from fiften European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying monthly protest series. Applying advanced time series methods, my main empirical contributions are twofold: first, I show that austerity do drive people to the street; second, I demonstrate that the magnitude of this impact and its temporal dynamics are contingent on the political and economic context. Under certain conditions, the short term and long-term impact of austerity is dramatic: in instances of rising magnitude of both objective and subjective economic grievances, lower political capital of the government, the proximity of elections, and the involvement of external creditors, the impact of austerity is much larger.