Kurz's Balkan Virus
Why the chancellor said that the coronavirus is coming to Austria by car
Servus!
“In the summer after the [first] lockdown, we had very, very low numbers of new infections,” chancellor Sebastian Kurz hypothesized at a press conference December 2, “and then, because of people returning from their travels and in particular due to those who had spent the summer in their countries of origin, new infections were brought into the country from outside.” A third of the coronavirus cases recorded in Austria over the summer, Kurz later claimed in a television interview, were imported.
The chancellor did not specify which people and countries of origin were responsible, though one need only reflect on earlier public statements to work it out. In August, faced with rising case numbers in Croatia and a generally unstable situation in the western Balkans, the government introduced a travel warning for the region, setting in motion the flight of tourists from Croatia back into Austria. Kurz warned at the time, “The virus is coming to Austria by car.”
By ‘countries of origin,’ then, Kurz was taken to have meant the states of the former Yugoslavia, and by ‘people,’ Austrian residents whose roots and families are to be found there. The assertion that “people with immigrant backgrounds schlepped the virus into Austria is reprehensible and condemnable,” the Social Democratic Party’s Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek said, to give one example of the blowback. Such hostility only serves to “poison the sense of solidarity in our country.”
That the movement of people and the virus’s transmission are connected is obvious, but the veracity of Kurz’s particular theory is doubtful. The deputy general secretary of Kurz’s People Party, Gaby Schwarz, attempted to muster statistics from the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety which purportedly show that 27 percent of Austrian coronavirus cases originated abroad and that one third of that figure can be traced back to the western Balkans.
For Mario Dujaković, spokesperson for Vienna’s health secretary Peter Hacker, these numbers do not withstand scrutiny. From the middle of July until the end of September, holidaymakers returning from abroad constituted 7.53 percent of all positive cases in Vienna. Of that number, 37.8 percent were people with ex-Yugoslav roots. Thus, people with Balkan roots returning from those countries made up only 2.85 percent of all new coronavirus cases recorded over the summer in Vienna. Now, that does not include positive cases emerging from contact with someone returning from vacation, but still, how one gets to 27 percent or even 9 percent is unclear.
As the foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg noted, the chancellor is no enemy of the western Balkans. Kurz is committed to the idea of western Balkan integration into the European Union and is close—perhaps too close, considering the nature of some regimes in the region—to the leaders of states like Serbia. Yet it is also true that since becoming the leader of the People’s Party in 2017, Kurz has chosen for strategic reasons to adopt an anti-immigrant posture, a subject for another time and another briefing. His emphasis on travelers returning from overseas bringing the virus into the country is but one manifestation of that politics.
Consider, too, the following, as Michael Pommer wrote in the Kronen Zeitung. If returning foreigners from the Balkans are to blame for Austria’s second wave, and people standing in line outside of stores in search of a bargain in tough economic times, and young people attending illicit parties, and parents who want their children back in school, and the states with Social Democratic-run governments—if all these people are to blame, that means one person and one institution is not. That would be the chancellor and his government.
Bis bald!
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Unlocked
Austria’s second lockdown came to an end on Monday. Shops, hairdressers, and nail salons re-opened to the public, as did museums and libraries. Elementary schools have resumed in-person classes, though high schools remain closed and distance learning will continue. Hotels, bars, and restaurants will remain shut until the New Year at the earliest.
Locked Up
The former finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on Friday for his part in a scandal related to BUWOG, a formerly-state owned property management firm. Grasser was accused of embezzlement and mismanaging state funds. Finance minister from 2000 to 2007, Grasser was a member of the far-right Freedom Party until he left in 2002. Grasser plans to appeal.
Locked In
The governing right-wing People’s Party continues to hold a healthy lead in polling during Austria’s second wave. The most recent Unique Research/Profil poll has chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s party on 40 percent, up from the 37.5 percent they won in the 2019 general election. Trailing behind Kurz are the Social Democratic Party (20 percent), the Freedom Party (15 percent), and the Greens (13 percent).
