Chained To The Stove
The far-right Freedom Party wants to provide financial support to parents who care for their children at home rather than send them to kindergarten
Servus!
Coalition negotiations between the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) have hit their first stumbling blocks. The FPÖ was greatly offended by comments made by ÖVP interim leader Christian Stocker last week to the effect that the FPÖ needed to move from the far-right to the political center and sign up to common European values. The ÖVP, meanwhile, was sideswiped by the FPÖ’s demand for a new levy on bank’s profits. This proposal, first put forward by the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), contributed to the demise of their negotiations with the ÖVP and liberal NEOS in early January.
It cannot be excluded that both sides—ÖVP and FPÖ—are using the media to engineer an end to coalition negotiations. That would benefit the FPÖ a great deal more than the ÖVP, of course, if the outcome were fresh elections. Were an election held on Sunday, the FPÖ is forecast to win some 37 percent of the vote, the ÖVP 18 percent. The more likely scenario, therefore, remains the FPÖ and ÖVP finalizing a coalition agreement sometime around the beginning of February, with a new government led by FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl sworn in in the middle of the month.
On the agenda last week in the two parties’ working group on “women, family, and youth” was the FPÖ’s proposal to institute a stay-at-home parenting credit, oft referred to in shorthand as the Herdprämie. This bonus has been FPÖ party policy at both the federal and state level for some time now, and envisions the state gifting parents who choose to care for their young children at home rather than send them to the local kindergarten a monthly financial credit. In Upper Austria, where the FPÖ governs in coalition with the ÖVP, the Herdprämie amounts to €80 a month.
For the FPÖ, the Herdprämie fits in with their conservative vision of the centrality of the heterosexual nuclear family to Austrian society. Their 2024 manifesto reads: “The family forms the foundation of our society. It provides support, security, and safety. The trend of fewer and fewer children being born must be reversed.” Therefore, the party argues, parents need to be given a choice “when it comes to caring for their children: not only external childcare, but also childcare within the family and across generations should be financially supported,” i.e. via the Herdprämie. In addition, “those who look after their children at home until they reach compulsory school age will have this time counted towards their pension.”
The problems with the Herdprämie are manifest and multitudinous. Keeping children at home and out of the kindergarten system could potentially hinder their early childhood development, creating problems the school system will struggle to correct later on. It reinforces a patriarchal familial structure whereby the father goes to work and the mother stays at-home. It is a Band-Aid that does nothing to fix the underlying problem that, in many states, childcare options outside the home simply aren’t there for parents who want them. Indeed, it makes building out Austria’s childcare infrastructure harder by redirecting funding away from that effort.
Mothers in Austria already face tremendous barriers to the labor market including the absence of all-day schooling; the Herdprämie would be another. ÖVP party policy during the election campaign had focused on encouraging more women into full-time work to ease problems in Austria’s tight labor market; the Herdprämie would be a backward step in that regard. Work and the workplace are also motors that speed up the integration process for immigrants. If the result of the Herdprämie would be more migrant women staying at home to raise their children, thus also keeping migrant children out of the Austrian kindergarten system, it would only worsen the very problems of social and linguistic isolation about which the FPÖ claims it cares.
Bis bald!
Thank you for reading The Vienna Briefing. Nothing beats a personal recommendation; if you know someone who would be interested in reading this newsletter, consider sharing it with them today.
The Vienna Briefing is a reader-supported publication. Your one-time or monthly tips make my work on this newsletter possible and help keep The Vienna Briefing free for everyone.
Old Bill Gets Benko
Disgraced property developer René Benko was arrested at his villa in Innsbruck last week. Anti-corruption investigators suspected Benko of committing criminal acts while investigations and bankruptcy proceedings against him related to the collapse of his Signa property empire were ongoing.
Local Elections
The ÖVP emerged the largest party in local elections in Lower Austria on Sunday even as their vote share declined from 52.83 percent in 2020 to 46.97 percent this time around. The SPÖ, meanwhile, retained the mayoralty of Linz, Upper Austria in a landslide.
City Supports Synagogue
The City of Vienna is to meet a third of the €10 million cost of renovating the Stadttempel, Vienna’s main synagogue. Opened in 1826, the Stadttempel survived the November pogroms of 1938 and will celebrate its 200th anniversary next year.
It's somehow funny to see how the comrades completely forgot their roots and sacrifices their beliefs in the wellfare state on the altar of a progressive Kulturkampf. Pre-hating such a typical Kreiskyan initiative is just another example to me how SPÖ is just keeping to forget about their original voting base again and again, and hands them over to FPÖ on a silver plate (an observation backed by numbers apparently).
Meanwhile Austria is just about to lose its industry for good and SPÖ doesn't have a single clue how it would affect the blue-collar middle class. The "proletariat" simply became to smelly to them.
“FPÖ needed to move from the far-right to the political center and sign up to common European values.” - these “common values” are not the values held by Europeans for two millennia and are not held by most outside the the ruling class. The nuclear family with the mother at home with children produces the highest results by every metric available. It’s only in the minds of the progressives that this is a detriment. We are returning to tradition. Deo gratias!