All Change, Please
The Austrian electorate knows what it doesn't want, yet what might follow the current ÖVP-Green coalition remains far from clear
Servus!
One might think announcing a plan to subsidize household energy bills might have given the government a much-needed boost in the polls. If anything, however, things are looking worse for the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) than ever before. In a survey conducted between September 7 and 15 and published September 17, the ÖVP slid to third in the polls (21 percent) behind the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ, 29 percent) and far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ, 23 percent).
Things aren’t looking much better for their coalition partners, the Greens, either, whose numbers remain stagnant on 11 percent, down from the 13.9 percent of the vote they captured in 2019. Perhaps voters will need to actually see the subsidy written into their energy bills before giving the government any credit for their expensive initiative—€2.5 billion has been set aside for the electricity price cap, all told—but for now, a government which won more than 50 percent of the vote in 2019 only has the support of 32 percent of the electorate less than three years later.
Such numbers indicate fatigue: fatigue with the ÖVP, its listlessness and its corruption, as well as fatigue with the coalition. The polls thus show in some sense what the electorate doesn’t want, yet right now, it isn’t entirely clear what they do want. Based on this Heute/profil poll, for example, no one possible coalition arrangement looks particularly promising. The FPÖ and ÖVP score 44 percent of the vote between them, making a right-wing pact (with an ÖVP chancellor, presumably) highly unlikely. Neither, however, does a grand SPÖ-ÖVP coalition (50 percent) or a traffic light SPÖ-Green-NEOS troika (49 percent) score particularly well either.
One can see a similar situation brewing in the state of Tyrol, where voters are due to go to the polls on Sunday in order to elect a new state parliament and government. One thing is clear: the Tyrolean VP will not win 44.3 percent of the vote, as they did in 2018. Indeed, if the local VP’s new leader Anton Mattle hits 30 percent, it’ll be, in this most Catholic of states, something of a minor miracle. The most recent poll showed the Tyrolean VP is set to win only 26 percent of the vote, with the rest of the electorate scattered between the SPÖ, FPÖ, Greens, NEOS, and the local Liste Fritz Dinkhauser, a home for discontented right-of-center VP voters.
A party as dominant as the VP in Tyrol should run like a well-oiled political machine during election time, yet Mattle’s party is one divided against itself. Though (or perhaps because) he was hand-selected by the state’s current governor, Günther Platter, all wings of the VP aren’t entirely convinced Mattle is the right man to be party leader. The party is fighting over policy including what to do about child daycare provision, while in September, the Tyrolean VP’s Young Farmers’ Association had to pay back €816,000 in misbegotten COVID-related relief. Amid the chaos, the VP is bleeding urban, bourgeois voters in Innsbruck and other towns and cities to the Liste Fritz Dinkhauser, and to a lesser extent, the NEOS.
If the result matches the polls, after the election, all coalition options are on the table—including ones hitherto inconceivable in Tyrol. Local SPÖ leader Georg Dornauer has indicated his preference for a stable, two-party coalition, arguing times of crisis demand stability and therefore a state government with the VP in spite of its myriad problems. But the Greens, meanwhile, are among those open to two-, three-, or even four-party government were it to mean an end to VP domination in Tyrol. The NEOS and Liste Fritz Dinkhauser seem to be on the same page. A political unmooring is underway; Sunday’s vote in Tyrol and its aftermath may be a foretaste of things to come in Austria nationwide.
Bis bald!
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Hi, where i can find somethigs about Presidential Elections?
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