English overview of Austrian election campaign in progress

Austria is having a national parliamentary election on September 29. This follows in the wake of the collapse of the previous government through the first removal of a government through a no-confidence vote in the history of Austria's Second Republic (1945-present).

The election will be watched outside Austria for two things in particular: how the far-right party performs, and whether the former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who the Trump Administration held up as a model European conservative, will be able to form a second government.

The results of the European Parliament elections on May 26 produced the following results (Austrian Interior Ministry):

• ÖVP (Östrreichische Volkspartei, Christian Democratic/conservative): 34.6%
• SPÖ (Socialdemokratisch Partei Österreichs, center-left): 23.9%
• FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, far right populist): 17.2%
• Grüne (Greens, center-left): 14.1%
• NEOS (Neue Österreich und Liberales Forum, left-liberal/"pro-business" economics): 8.4%
• KPÖ (Kommunischtische [Communist] Partei Österreichs) 0.8%
• Europa (Europe Party, general pro-EU): 1.0%

The previous Austrian government took office in December 2017 and fell this past May. It was a coalition of the conservative ÖVP and the far-right FPÖ. Sabastian ("Basti") Kurz (ÖVP) and Heinz-Christian ("Bumsti") Strache (FPÖ). The Basti-Bumsti coalition made hostility to immigrants, especially asylum-seekers, their main focus.

As their most important opposing party the SPÖ noted recently (and accurately) on their Kontrast.at website, besides various mean- and petty-minded antiimmigrant measures and the related demagoguery, the Basti-Busmsti government also took care to legalize 12-hour days for many businesses, a reduction of taxes on businesses and wealthier taxpayers, and reduced the role of labor representatives in a very significant and oligarch-friendly reorganization of the public health insurance, and made it easier for companies to cheat their workers on pay. (ÖVP Politik erklärt: Die Hintergründe, die Gewinner, die Verlierer – Zahlen, Daten & Fakten. 03.05.2019)

That short-lived government produced three major scandals so far. The FPÖ Interior Minister Herbert Kickl highly questionable raid on the internal-security agency within his own ministry, the BVT, whose aftermath saw other Western intelligence agencies limited their cooperation with the BVT out of fear of their secrets not being secure and of the closeness of the FPÖ to Vladimir Putin; the FPÖ has a formal friendship-and-cooperation agreement with Putin's United Russia Party.

The scandal that brought down the government was the reporting on the "Ibiza video," which showed Strache and the FPÖ parliamentary caucus leader Johann Gudenus in a villa on the Spanish vacation island Ibiza in 2017 before that year's election proposing corrupt arrangements to an actress they thought was the niece of a Russian oligarch. An extended investigation is under way. No one has yet been charged with a crime in connection with it, but both Strache and Gudenus had to resign their positions.

The third has to do with an investigation of a possibly corrupt involving an appointment to the governing board of Casino Austria, which could be connected to the Ibiza meetings in some way. This one is embarrassing to both the FPÖ and the ÖVP.

A more minor scandal is known as the shredder-scandal. A staff member of Kurz' Chancellory office took five hard drives described as printer hard-drives to be triple-shredded at a private company in an amateur cloak-and-dagger move in which he used a false identity. It's not clear whether this is an act punishable by law, although it does seem to have violated the national archiving law. Kurz insists that nothing on the disks related to the Ibiza scandal. But he could only know that if he knows what was on them, and so far he isn't telling.

Basti, who turns 33 this week, won the 2017 election as a Wunderwuzzi (wonder-boy) mainly by demagogic posturing against immigrants. The lingering public panic over the refugee influx of 2015-17 was still a live issue. In 2019, he is still using anti-foreigner and anti-Muslim themes, but they don't seem to have the salience they did in 2017. He was also known for maintaining strict "Message Control" (the Austrian press uses the English phrase), but that is clearly faltering, as well.

A month out from the election, Basti still wants to make a new coalition with the FPÖ, currently headed by party chief Norbert Hofer and Parliamentary caucus chief and former Interior Minister Kickl. The FPÖ has been a particularly fractious party for decades. And even though Hofer and Kickl have made their careers as hard rightists inside the party, the press is reporting rumors that Kickl may try to force Hofer out at the party convention on September 14.

The voting percentages in the EU election would theoretically allow for an ÖVP-SPÖ coalition. But that is virtually unthinkable given the current differences between the two. An ÖVP-Green coalition might also be possible, or at least an ÖVP-Green-NEOS combination. And all parties have to regard Kurz as an potentially unreliable coalition partner, after he brought down the previous SPÖ-ÖVP coalition and his own government foundered in record time and in a particularly humiliating way. A former Kurier journalist and now a parliamentary candidate on the NEOS list, Hulmut Brandtätter, chronicles in a current book, Kurz und Kickl: Ihr Spiel mit Macht und Angst (2019), how the more experienced and ruthless Kickl gradually increased his own dominance within Kurz' cabinet until the Ibiza scandal broke. Kurz knows he can't manage Kickl in the government. And it doubtful whether Kickl will agree to a coalition that doesn't include him as Vice Chancellor or a minister.

Although programmatically an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition would make sense, there is some intense bad blood between the leaders after the government collapse. The FPÖ is essentially an anti-system party dominated by far rightists who feel more at home in an opposition role than as part of government. Unless they could govern alone. And the Greens have distinguished themselves among the parties by their principled and consistent defense of the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers. So making a coalition with the anti-immigrant Kurz is also not an obvious choice for them.

This past week, there was a video with Kickl and two other FPÖ figures on the FPÖ propaganda channel, FPÖ TV. It provides an impression of the kind of program and campaign the FPÖ is pursuing. Komplettaufzeichnung: Pressekonferenz mit Herbert Kickl, Hans-Jörg Jenewein & Werner Herbert FPÖ TV 08/22/2019:

Kickl himself presents a consistently grim visage. His words usually sound like he intends to incite fear, anger, and paranoia among his listeners. But Kickl doesn't strike me as being driven blindly by emotions himself. If he not a cold fanatic, he does a good impression of one. And he's till p9unding the anti-immigrant theme, which has been a core issue for the FPÖ for the last two decades. In any case, the FPÖ in all its iterations since its founding 1955 has been a nationalist party.

The other participants are Werner Herbert, an FPÖ Member of Parliament and since 2009 head of the FPÖ-oriented police union, Aktionsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger und Freiheitlicher (AUF), and Hans-Jörg Jenwein.

One of the themes in this press conference is that the FPÖ wants to supply Austrian police with hollow-point bullets (Teilmantelgeschösse). USA Today reported in 2015 (Kyle Jahner/Army Times, Army to consider hollow-point bullets for new pistol 07/09/2015):

Most of the Army uses full metal jacket, or ball ammunition, in both handguns and rifles. These rounds are designed to hold together, increasing penetration and narrowing the tunnel of damaged tissue.

Expanding and fragmenting bullets can flatten or break apart and are more likely to remain in the body of a target and transfer all of their energy to it. A wider swath of tissue is typically destroyed.

Modern complaints against the Army's long-standing Beretta M9 standard handgun have included stopping power. The potential shift toward hollow point ammunition could allow manufacturers a tool to change the ballistics equation substantially, without a shift away from the 9mm round.

On the battlefield, the U.S. has generally observed the 1899 Hague Convention rule banning bullets that "expand or flatten easily in the human body," despite the fact that the U.S. never has been signatory to that particular agreement, Russell said. The premise of the convention was that the bullets caused unnecessary and therefore inhumane injury unrelated to stopping a combatant from continuing to fight. [my emphasis]

Kickl and Herbert used the "stopping power" talking point mentioned there and also argued that civilian bystanders would be less likely to be killed because the bullet is more likely to stay in the body of the person shot.

In the real world, it means that using hollow-point bullets make it more likely that a person shot by a cop will die. This kind of thing is appealing to authoritarians, who of course tell themselves that they won't be one of the ones shot.

Taking bogus beer-hall talking points seriously enough to think through them doesn't necessarily convince their fans. But facts do matter.

Screenshot of Hans Jorg Jenewein

Jenewein is quite a piece of work. In the video, he emphasizes the FPÖ talking point that any police investigation that embarrasses the FPÖ is obviously an illegitimate partisan witchhunt. They do this here largely by paranoid insinuations. The partisans supposedly at work in these cases is the ÖVP. This kind of talk is a reminder of how important it is to have independent justice ministries, even when those ministries are headed by members of a particular party. By saying that, I'm intending to restate the obvious. As far as I've heard, there is simply no actual reason to regard the current investigations into the scandals noted above is being driven by partisan considerations or that they are being conducted in a less than professional manner. Hans-Henning Scharsach wrote about Jenwein in his 2012 Strache im braunen Sumpf. The fraternity (Burschenschaft) Silesia to which he refers is part of a group of clubs that promote far-right politics and which are currently dominant in the FPÖ:

... der Burschenschafter Hans Jorg Jenewein (Silesia), Wiener Landesparteisekretar der FPO, Mitbegründer des …Vereins zur "Pflege des Grabes von Walter Nowotny" und Organisator der alljährlichen Kranzniederlegungen, zu der Neonazis aus ganz Osterreich und Deutschland anreisen ..., der an den Neonazis der AFP nichts Anstößiges findet: ... "Ich habe dort durch die Bank normale Menschen kennen gelernt, die mit Messer und Gabel essen."

[... the Burschenschafter Hans Jorg Jenewein (Silesia), the Vienna State Party Secretary of the FPÖ, co-chairman of the "Association for the Care of the Tomb of Walter Nowotny" and organizer of the annual wreath-layings, to which neo-Nazis from all over Austria and Germany come ..., who finds nothing offensive to the neo-Nazis of the AFP: "Every person I've met there are ordinary people who all eat with a knife and fork.”]

(All translations from the German in this post are mine.)

AFP refers to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft fiir demokratische Politik, which Scharsach describes as seeking "to contribute to the networking of the neonazi scene." The header in Scharsach's book on them is, "Meeting point AFP: Anti-Semites, Auschwitz deniers and Nazi nostalgists".

The themes the FPÖ trio raise in the video are pretty characteristic for the FPÖ. Lots of whining about how everybody is picking on the pore FPÖ. Vague references to shadowy conspiracies against them. Complaining about foreigners. This is the party with which Sebastian Kurz wants to build a new Ibiza-coalition government.