Do You Believe In Austria? 'Cause Karl's Got Something To Say About It
With the launch of his new initiative “Glaub an Österreich,” chancellor Karl Nehammer has fired the starting gun for Austria's 2024 election campaign
Servus!
In December 1945, seven months after the end of the Second World War, Austria was in dire straits, impoverished and reduced to rubble by a war of destruction and annihilation for which it was jointly responsible. The chancellor at the time was Leopold Figl, one of the founders of the postwar center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) whom the Nazis had imprisoned in Dachau, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen. “I can't give you anything for Christmas. I can't give you any candles for the Christmas tree, if you have one at all, no piece of bread, no coal for heating,” Figl said in his Christmas radio address that year. “We have nothing. I can only ask you to believe in this Austria!”
Glaubt an dieses Österreich: Believe in this Austria. It takes a certain chutzpah to lay claim to these famous words and the legacy of a man who survived the horrors of the concentration camps and, as foreign minister in the 1950s, successfully negotiated Austria’s independence from Allied occupation. But that is what the current ÖVP chancellor, Karl Nehammer, has done with his new political campaign “Glaub an Österreich,” Believe in Austria, which he formally launched Tuesday morning in the grounds of the ÖVP’s political academy in Vienna’s twelfth district. The rollout came with a slickly-produced video published across social media.
Nehammer’s campaign is an attempt to spin a negative into a positive. His party’s coalition with the Greens has been defined by a series of crises outside of its control: the COVID-19 pandemic, the international supply side crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the related energy and inflationary crises. The fallout from these world-historic episodes and the way they were handled in Austria have negatively affected the government’s popularity. Nehammer’s pitch to voters is that, even if they don’t feel this way, Austria has overcome these crises rather well and the country and its people are a lot stronger than Austrians give themselves credit for.
With this, election season has begun. Not formally, of course, for that would require a dissolution of the coalition that neither party wants—or should want—at this exact moment. Austria may slip into a recession in the third quarter of 2023, inflation remains stubbornly high, and COVID-19 cases are just beginning to tick up again. But after the winter comes the spring and the promise of more favorable economic and political conditions for the governing parties. Moreover, the ÖVP-Green coalition still has unfinished business including formalizing its rent price cap and finalizing its comprehensive climate change bill and a freedom of information bill.
In practice, however, with European elections taking place in June 2024, and parliamentary elections due by the end of September 2024, with “Glaub an Österreich,” Nehammer has fired the starting gun for the 2024 election campaign. His pitch is a broad appeal to the political center where elections are usually won and lost, and the ÖVP will hope, to be sure, that the campaign will play to one of their few advantages: that as the incumbent, Austrians see Nehammer as the most credible candidate for the chancellorship above far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Herbert Kickl and Andreas Babler of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ).
Yet with the economy teetering on the brink of recession and the Euro in people’s pockets not going as far as it used to, Nehammer faces an uphill struggle to polish the proverbial and turn around voters’ perceptions of his government and his party, which has been beset by crises entirely of their own making: a series of corruption scandals dating back to the time Sebastian Kurz was foreign minister with one eye on the top job. The most recent Market/Der Standard poll published at the weekend showed the FPÖ ahead on 29 percent, the SPÖ on 24 percent, and the ÖVP on 21 percent. As such, there would be no majority in the next parliament for either a grand coalition or an ÖVP-Greens-NEOS arrangement. Austrians may see Nehammer as chancellor, but they’re not planning on voting as if they want him to stay in the job.
Bis bald!
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