Babler's Honeymoon Is Over
After six months in office, Andreas Babler is dealing with internal divisions within the Social Democratic Party and questions over his leadership
Servus!
On the occasion of Bruno Kreisky’s birthday last month, I was at an event at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue at which former chancellor Franz Vranitzky was the guest speaker. As part of a wide-ranging conversation about the current state of Austrian politics, the former Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) leader observed that, over the past 20 years, the party has habitually taken out its leaders, most recently Pamela Rendi-Wagner who lost a very public leadership contest last year. The party has to stop making the same mistake, he warned; the SPÖ’s new leader, Andreas Babler, should be left alone and given time.
I couldn’t help but think about Vranitzky’s words in the context of recent developments in the SPÖ. The party is divided against itself on the question whom it should form a coalition with after the next parliamentary elections—if it finds itself in a position to do so, that is. Carinthia governor Peter Kaiser, Vienna mayor Michael Ludwig, and Tyrol deputy governor Georg Dornauer all favor a return to the grand coalition with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP). Burgenland governor Hans Peter Doskozil—the thorn in Rendi-Wagner’s side for her entire leadership—has argued, on the other hand, that the SPÖ shouldn’t rule out working with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
After losing the SPÖ’s leadership contest last year, a bitterly disappointed Doskozil made like Cincinnatus and returned to Burgenland to tend his land, turning his back on federal politics “once and for all,” so he claimed at the time. ‘Once and for all,’ evidently, meant about six months. Last week, Doskozil put down his plough to give interviews to the national press in which he not only warned against a coalition with the ÖVP, as mentioned, but also proposed a cap on asylum applications of 10,000 per year. “It takes a certain chutzpah to think that a governor shouldn’t be allowed to speak out on socio-political issues,” he later told Heute in his defense.
But Doskozil is not the only high-profile Social Democrat to have rediscovered his voice of late. In the lead-up to Ash Wednesday last week, Josef Muchitsch, SPÖ MP and head of the powerful Bau-Holz trade union, critiqued the shift to the left on economic issues the party has undertaken since Babler became leader. He argued that the SPÖ needs to be more amenable to business interests, lest the party be seen as a threat to the economy. Specifically, Muchitsch suggested the SPÖ should drop its demand for a wealth tax. He would not be drawn on the coalition question.
According to Politico’s poll of polls, the SPÖ is currently running in second place nationally, polling at 22 percent. After a brief renaissance in the fall during which they were polling at 24-25 percent, the SPÖ right back to where they started before Babler became leader. The mayor of Traiskirchen in Lower Austria has indeed sought to shift the party to the left while communicating in a more blunt and relatable fashion, but neither seem to have made any discernible difference to the SPÖ’s fortunes one way or the other. That the SPÖ might win the next parliamentary election and form a traffic light coalition with the Greens and liberal NEOS remains a political fantasy.
In an interview with the Austria Presse Agentur, the political scientist Anton Pelinka—known to be close to the SPÖ—said that if the SPÖ fails to finish second in this year’s European and national elections, Babler’s leadership will be called into question. In a column for the tabloid Österreich, Isabelle Daniel reported that the pro-Doskozil wing of the SPÖ is already on maneuvers, ready to try and separate out the roles of party leader and ‘chancellor candidate’ and install their own man as the latter should the SPÖ finish third in the European elections on June 9. Vranitzky’s words, then, have not been heeded. Were Babler’s leadership a Chekhov play, this would be the end of act one, with the loaded gun sitting upon the mantelpiece.
Bis bald!
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