Who Would Believe In This Austria?
Leaked footage and a party political document that ended up in opposition hands have damaged the chancellor's standing and further worsened coalition relations
Servus!
Tip: If you’re going to fire the starting gun on an election campaign, don’t shoot yourself in the foot. I wrote to you last week about chancellor Karl Nehammer’s new initiative “Glaub an Österreich,” Believe in Austria. He launched that campaign on the morning of September 26 and by the evening of September 27, it was effectively over. On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, video footage leaked of Nehammer talking freely at a gathering of ÖVP party supporters in Hallein, Salzburg, in which the chancellor spoke boorishly and insensitively about the plight of the working poor in the country he governs.
“So what does it mean that a child doesn't get a hot meal in Austria? Do you know what the cheapest hot meal in Austria is? It's not healthy, but it's cheap: a hamburger at McDonald's—€1.40, if I buy fries with it, €3.50,” Nehammer said (as translated by Politico). “Now someone is seriously claiming that we live in a country where parents can't afford this meal for their child.” Nehammer speaks briskly and agitatedly, freely using dialect in a setting in which he doesn’t think he’s being recorded. “If I have too little money,” the man who earns more than €23,000 a month concludes, “I go to work more.”
The merits of feeding children McDonald’s aside1, the video makes for a fascinating window into the contemporary ÖVP. It reveals a detachment on the part of the chancellor, for as Caritas Austria president Michael Landau has said, “anyone who says that no one in Austria goes hungry or freezes has no idea about the reality of the people.” It reveals the extent to which the ÖVP’s traditional center-right ‘Christian-social’ values have been superseded by the language of performance, reward, and personal responsibility. And, it takes a certain political amateurism to have gotten caught on camera in the first place, a fate that would not have befallen Nehammer’s control freak predecessor, Sebastian Kurz.
Two days later, that amateurism showed up again after an ÖVP employee sent an internal party document to the wrong address. It ended up in the mailbox of NEOS MP Helmut Brandstätter and laid out the ÖVP’s plans to set up a parliamentary investigative committee that would look into how other parties spent public money on advertising and public service announcements during their times in government. The plan is a clear attempt to relativize the scandals that brought down Sebastian Kurz and continue to plague the ÖVP. The kicker, as NEOS leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger told the country October 2, is that the ÖVP not only wanted to investigate the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ)—already a tendentious use of parliamentary time and resources—but also their own coalition partner, the Greens.
Both the McDonald’s outburst and the potential political instrumentalization of a parliamentary investigation are no way for a party of state to behave. The NEOS have called for new elections. For the SPÖ, Nehammer’s video plays to the dichotomy they are trying to fashion between the good Andreas Babler and the bad Herbert Kickl—or in this case, the bad Karl Nehammer. The FPÖ called on Nehammer to resign, and for its supporters, the video will reinforce their perception of a political system that is corrupted, removed, and incapable of working ‘for them.’ All of these parties’ hands may have been strengthened by the ÖVP’s mistakes.
The ones in a real bind here are the Greens. While Nehammer’s gaff and the investigative committee proposal will only worsened relations further between the two parties, economic and political circumstances mean it would be a tremendous risk for the Greens to call time on the coalition right now. First, the government needs to pass a budget in November. Second, economic conditions aren’t going to get better until the ground thaws in the spring. Third, as long as they stay together, the ÖVP and Greens are, as mirror images of one another, useful to political foils. The Greens can continue to play themselves off against the ÖVP—and the other way around.
Bis bald!
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