Then on Monday, the Nationalrat (lower House of Parliament) voted to make Sebastian Kurz the first Austrian Chancellor in the Austrian Second Republic to be removed from office by a parliamentary no-confidence vote. They will remain in office until the President formally accepts the records of the Nationalrat session and formally removes the government.
When we compare the number of seats the parties won in the EU election to their previous ones, the result is that the ÖVP picked up one seat from the Greens and one from the FPÖ. Given the particular circumstances, I don't see how that's a big loss for the SPÖ. The previous SPÖ Chancellor, Christian Kern, was fairly new in an explicitly political role when he became Chancellor. And he had the misfortune during his Chancellorship of having to deal with the repercussions of the 2015-16 refugee crisis. And was not perceived as handling it well. His Foreign Minister, Sebastian Kurz, took the opportunity to wreck the SPÖ-ÖVP Grand Coalition government and catapult himself to the Chancelorship at age 31 on an anti-immigrant theme and with the FPÖ as his coalition partner.
The last year and a half has shown how poorly prepared Chancellor Babyface was for the Chancellorship, and proved once again what a miserable disaster the FPÖ is.
In 2018, Christian Kern seemed to be growing into his role as opposition leader as the head of the SPÖ. But he unexpectedly decided to resign in 2018 and Pamela Rendi-Wagner took over as party chief, the first female chair of the party in the SPÖ's history. She was also relatively inexperienced in holding political office. She certainly seems to have done a good job during the last week and a half during the government crisis brought on by Kurz' stunning failure as Chancellor in keeping the focus on Kurz' responsibility and not allowing his attempt to present himself as blessed with a second political Immaculate Conception. Because he's really an extremely opportunistic xenophobic politician with limited commitment to democracy and a shaky commitment to the European Union.
The Austrian quality press in print and on the air isn't nearly as fawning to oligarchic interests in politics as their American counterparts. But their iwnitial response to the EU election in Austria did seem to be too dependent on a narrative of SPÖ failure and Rendi-Wagner's weakness.
This Standard report on the Austrian EU election (Kurz lässt sich feiern, Rote zweifeln an sich und ihrer Chefin 26.05.2019) includes this (all translations form the German in this post are mine:
The SPÖ is stagnating, could not win any additional votes. In addition, they weren’t able to sufficiently mobilize their own voters, the Burgenland Bundeshauptmann (Governor) Hans Peter Doskozil, fretted. He spoke of a "clear election defeat" as early as the early evening. People are also unnerved in Carinthia. Governor Peter Kaiser saw a "painful and difficult to comprehend election result." That he does not answer with a resounding no to the question of whether party leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner is up for discussion could raise alarms. Kaiser declared only that he was "against shooting from the hip." ...Doskozil is the current Landeshauptmann (Governor) of the state of Burgenland and is basically a rightwinger inside the SPÖ. He took a more draconian position on refugees than the FPÖ's now-former Defence Minister Herbert Kickl. He was in a coalition with the FPÖ in Burgenland that he decided to end after the Ibiza-Video was published. But in this interview from late last week, he makes it pretty clear that he wasn't happy about having to end the coalition. He also is very critical of Kurz for not wanted to leave the repulsive Kickl as Interior Minister until after the elections in the fall! “From the point of view of the ÖVP, why should the Interior Minister have to go? That was completely incomprehensible to me.” And he essentially opposes the SPÖ's support for a no-confidence vote to remove Kurz from the Chancellorship, using a version of the Nancy Pelosi argument against impeaching Trump, "I even think the ÖVP is very happy with that. Kurz is in the dynamic of the martyr, the statesman, he can take on the role of victim." It's a ridiculous argument. And clearly one that the SPÖ members in the Nationalrat rejected in their vote Monday.
The debate about a personnel shake-up is already going on within the party and in the media. Rendi-Wagner is being massively doubted [as leader] ... The only question is: Decision now, or have a weeks-long, grueling debate.
If Doskozil is critical of Rendi-Wagner's leadership of the party, it's most likely because he worries that she's actuall doing a good job as the leader of a center-left party. It's one of the challenges of the SPÖ in trying to craft and deliver a message that could build a larger vote for them is that they so far haven't told Doskozil to go campaign for the FPÖ where he belongs.
The excellent ORF public TV journalist Armin Wolf, who is currently a sort of Austrian Walter Cronkite figure, in his election-night reporting stressed what he viewed as a defeat for the SPÖ. The publisher of the also excellent, left-leaning wekkly Falter, which is one of the main bogeymen for the FPÖ and not seen as any special friend of the ÖVP, tweeted:
Ich finde Michael Häupl sollte SPÖ-Spitzenkandidat werden. So alt ist er noch nicht.— Florian Klenk (@florianklenk) May 26, 2019
Es wird jetzt noch ein paar Tage dauern ehe das ganz Land glaubt, dass in den letzten eineinhalb Jahren bei uns eine national-sozialistische Skandal-Regierung am Werk war, die nur von Sebastian Kurz gestürzt werden kann. https://t.co/EOuQA6i7Pj— Florian Klenk (@florianklenk) May 26, 2019
But he also calls attention to a key factor in the EU election results:
Hat eigentlich der kurz gewonnen oder der karas?— Florian Klenk (@florianklenk) May 26, 2019
("Was it actually Kurz who won or Karas?")
Natascha Strobl, a political analyst who is a specialist on far-right politics, notes of Kurz' self-psoitioning the last week or so, "The ÖVP here is playing the tune of the far right and is trying to position Kurz outside the political system and make him untouchable."
Kurz' faction of the ÖVP is called "turquoise" to distinguish it from the traditional ÖVP, whose party color is black. The turquoise Kurz faction, including Babyface himself, distinguished iself by adopting a milder-worded more politely presented version of the FPÖ hardline xenophobic policies, including posturing against the EU. The ÖVP was historically the party most identified with advocacy for the EU. During this EU election, the head of the ÖVP list was Othmar Karas, and longtime member of the European Parliament and a more traditional pro-European message. Kurz tried to step on his message by calling for a renegotiation of the EU treaties and making a silly complaint about an EU regulation for food companies requiring them to cook potato chips in a way that won't produced the carcinogenic chemical Acrylamide.
This stunt ran the risk of harming the ÖVP ticket's chances. But in the weird conditions produced by the Ibiza-Video scandal, it meant that the it gave unhappy FPÖ voters a "turquoise" ÖVP option and unhappy Kurz supporters a "black" pro-European ÖVP option. This election analyis from Standard indicates that the ÖVP was more successful at turning out its votors in this EU election than in the last (Wählerströme: ÖVP mobilisiert Nichtwähler und gewinnt von FPÖ dazu 27.05.2019):
The ÖVP was able to hold the largest share of its electorate in this election, according to analysis of voter party switching: About 90 percent of ÖVP voters (about 686,000) from 2014 marked their ballots for the ÖVP again. The ÖVP won, mainly from non-voters at the time or not yet eligible to vote – about 387,000 votes, or 11 percent of this group. Furthermore, about 19 percent (105,000) of the then-FPÖ voters switched to the ÖVP.Going into today's parliamentary no-confidence vote, the SPÖ Sunday evening decided to propose removing the entire government, the Chancellor and all the ministers, and not just Chancellor Kurz, as the small Jetzt party had proposed. This allowed the SPÖ to define the issue and showed their willingness to put up a fight against the failed Chancellor.
The SPÖ held the allegiance of 85 percent of its voters, or about 579,000 votes. There are no significant switches to or from other parties from a SPÖ perspective, but it receives around 225,000 votes from people who did not vote in 2014. In return, the SPÖ loses a few former voters (around 46,000) to the group of non-voters. The fact that the SPÖ is probably still performing slightly worse than in the last election is due to the higher voter turnout. [my emphasis in italics]
Although I'm arguing here that the coverage of the SPÖ's performance in the EU election was a bit sloppy, I don't see the SPÖ's effort to grow as an easy one. Many of the social-democratic parties in Europe are in danger of becoming minor parties. That was the case in Greece and France in this EU election. The SPÖ embraced the same kind of neoliberal, budget-balancing, privatizing, Hebert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics that make oligarchs happy, just as others in Europe did. But the oligarchs are the natural constituency of the conservative, center-right, and, increasingly, far right parties. The center-left parties were for decades the largest parties of the working class. Their traditional constituents are harmed by such policies. This is not a good picture for the Social Democrats in Europe as a whole, though some Social Democratic parties like the one in Spain are still showing strength.
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