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The European sovereign debt crisis is widely perceived by the German public as a dangerous threat and has great potential for domestic political mobilisation. The German Federal Government, therefore, faces particular pressures to explain and justify its crisis policy in the public arena. An important instrument for this purpose is the speeches of government representatives in the German Bundestag, which can be understood as a strategic discourse in order to affect the framing of government policy in the broader public debate. Against this background, this article examines the parliamentary discourse about the Euro zone crisis of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition government between 2009 and 2012. The analysis points to five basic lines of argument, which speak to the attempt of the Federal Government to maintain sufficient domestic leeway to pursue its preferred policy in the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]