New Year, New Elections?
Parliamentary elections are coming in 2021, according to the head of Austria's far-right Freedom Party
Servus!
Is Austria heading towards fresh elections in the New Year? Freedom Party leader Norbert Hofer believes so. The far-right party boss said last week that the internal disputes within the current coalition government—made up of the conservative People’s Party and the Greens—remind him of the dog days of the last grand coalition between left and right in 2016 and 2017, during which the government was largely paralyzed.
Scurrilously, Hofer said he had been informed that the People’s Party have already made an order for new posters and billboards that will go up in the spring. Whether or not they would constitute part an election campaign, he could not say, but for its part the Freedom Party, Hofer concluded, has put itself on an election footing, ready to fight a new campaign in 2021.
The idea that Austria will go to new elections for the third time in five years next year was flatly rejected by the People’s Party. Their general secretary Axel Melchior said Hofer’s words were “pulled out of thin air” and his theories “fanciful.”
One must consider Hofer’s motives. The ‘third camp,’ as the far-right is also known in Austria, is in a state of schism, split between those aligned with Hofer—who wants to take the party in a different direction, re-casting it as a right-wing conservative party free from its ‘far-right lunatic fringe,’ to quote one Hofer ally—and those loyal to the former interior minister Herbert Kickl, who is the far-right lunatic fringe: anti-Islam, anti-immigration, and anti-EU.
The Freedom Party is floundering in opposition, a denuded political force quite unable to decide if it wants to be the party of the coronavirus-skeptic wing of Austrian society or not. In disunity and disarray, it is in Hofer’s interest that the government fall. Were the coalition to break up, his party would be the People’s Party natural governing partner, and a new alliance could be formed without the country going to the polls. Were there to be new elections in 2021, however, a campaign would be a fine way to paper over the party’s cracks and unite it around a common goal: a return to power.
If one of either Melchior or Hofer is right, it is Melchior. Holding parliamentary elections every other year—in 2017, 2019, and then 2021—is no way to run a country, for frequent calls to the polls lead to democracy fatigue. In spite of its mishandling of the second wave, the government remains popular, and thus, legitimate and secure. The coalition parties hold a majority in public polling. Health minister Rudolf Anschober, chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and interior minister Karl Nehammer—the public faces of the government’s coronavirus fightback—remain the most popular politicians in the country.
And though there are splits within the coalition, including and especially over the topic of migration, those splits existed and were known before the coalition was formed at the end of 2019. Indeed, as I wrote in a piece published in Foreign Policy, the People’s Party and the Greens have a lot more in common that people often realize, for it can be argued that when it comes to economic policy, the Greens do not really dispute the liberal consensus to which the People’s Party holds. In that sense, it is easier for the People’s Party to govern with the Greens than the Social Democrats.
Were we to look out for anything in 2021, it would not be new elections, as Hofer speculates, but rather some sort of reset over the summer once the mass vaccination of the population begins in earnest. The first year of the coalition’s life has been consumed by the coronavirus. In the second, both parties will seek to return to core themes while presenting themselves as a functioning partnership getting the country back to normal and on a secure economic footing.
Bis bald!
Contraction
Austria’s National Bank forecasts the country’s economy will contract by 7.1 percent in 2020 as a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak. The budget deficit in 2020 is predicted to hit 9.2 percent of GDP, consumption will fall 8.8 percent, and unemployment will stand at 10.2 percent. The Bank expects the economy to grow 3.6 percent in 2021 and 4 percent in 2022.
Retraction
A ban on headscarves in elementary schools was ruled unconstitutional by Austria’s Constitutional Court on Friday. By having singled out observers of Islam, the state violated its neutrality on matters of religion, the court determined. The Constitutional Court also ruled Friday that a ban on assisted suicide violates a person’s right to bodily autonomy.
Transaction
Police in Vienna uncovered an arsenal of weapons containing more than 70 automatic and semi-automatic weapons, 100,000 bullets, hand grenades, and explosives destined for neo-Nazi militias in Germany. The weapons’ purchase was financed by the selling of drugs as part of a network tying together the far-right with organized crime.