How did Portuguese domestic politics and institutions matter in shaping employment and social protection statuses – crucial bases for the solidarity towards the vulnerable – in the decade spanning the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic? This chapter examines how the cooperation between government, opposition parties and social partners, and the Constitutional Court, worked to moderate external pressures to liberalize labor market regulation and social protection regimes during the Great Recession, to expand the protection of the most vulnerable after the crisis and to devise a concerted response during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that ideological orientation also matters. After the crisis, the Geringonça Socialist government and left partisan and trade union allies enacted inclusive and solidaristic policies that de-segmented atypical and independent work, bettered work–family balance, the working poor, and unemployed youth and elderly. Lastly, we probe how changing patterns of societal solidarities and cleavages generated by crisis-era reforms influenced the 2015 election. The crisis losing ‘distributive coalition’ (unemployed, young atypical workers, standard workers, civil servants, and pensioners) punished the incumbent conservative coalition, voting for left-of-center parties. The Geringonça social policy agenda, enacted through a renewal of social concertation and collective bargaining, was responsive to these emerging bonds of solidarity, though not devoid of tensions and contradictions.