Back to the Stone Age
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has sided with his party over his environment minister in a row over a temporary halt to highway construction
Servus!
In the summer, chancellor Sebastian Kurz likes to get out of Vienna and spend some time in the provinces, where there are voters to be glad-handed and state governors and local parties to be kept happy. Before his tour was cut short by illness1, last week Kurz was among friends in the westernmost state of Vorarlberg, a stronghold of the Catholic right and Kurz’s People’s Party (ÖVP) since time immemorial. Here, in what should have been an un-noteworthy interview with the local newspaper, the Vorarlberger Nachrichten, he decided to ignite a new political controversy, lighting another fire under his coalition with the Greens.
Climate change, Kurz told the VN, had to be fought, yes, but without personal sacrifice or self-denial: “I am absolutely not of the view that our way out should be to return to the stone age. I approve neither of the politics of constant admonishment nor any fantasy that we can somehow live as we did in previous centuries.” The only right and proper approach to countering climate change, Kurz said—a week after the center of Hallein was turned into a raging river by torrential rain—was to “bank on innovation and technology.” His Green coalition colleagues were unimpressed. “Whoever believes the climate crisis can be overcome without changing anything lives in the stone age,” the Greens’ parliamentary party leader Sigi Maurer said.
The background to Kurz’s intervention was the decision by his government’s environment minister, the Greens’ Leonore Gewessler, to review a series of highway construction projects due to be undertaken by the state-owned road building and maintenance firm ASFINAG to see if they conform to certain environmental standards. Many of these projects have been in the works for a while—decades in some cases—and Gewessler’s review constitutes an effective temporary halt to major road construction. The transport sector accounts for one third of all greenhouse gas emissions produced in Austria; thanks to the construction industry, 13 hectares of green field land are built over every day.
One of the projects now on ice is a section of the S1, a highway which, once completed, will circumnavigate eastern Vienna, tunneling beneath the Danube and a section of the Danube-Auen National Park in the process. The Viennese Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) sees the project as essential to the development of north-eastern Vienna and in particular Seestadt, a new neighborhood under construction at the end of the U2 underground line that will one day be home to more than 20,000 people. The local ÖVP supports the SPÖ in this endeavor as does the Freedom Party (FPÖ), while the Greens and NEOS are opposed.
Another ÖVP-backed highway project is the S18, a planned highway that would connect Vorarlberg’s existing north-south axis, the E60, with the Swiss A1/A13, running in an east-westerly direction from Dornbirn around Lustenau over the border to St. Margrethen. The Bodensee Schnellstraße has been stuck in the planning phase since around 1980, principally because possible routes for the S18 would damage the local natural landscape and the habitats of several species of rare bird such as the corn crake. Gewessler’s review means another delay to an already-beleaguered project.
Vorarlberg’s governor, Markus Wallner, is furious with Gewessler, having called her review a “slap in the face” for every Vorarlberger. There is unrest in the provinces, and as party leader, it is Kurz’s job to placate his governors, prince-lings and centers of power within the ÖVP. “I stand on the side of the people and at the side of the governor,” he told the VN. “We are as one on this, that such an important infrastructure project, one which was decided upon a long time ago, should be implemented.” Unity within the party trumps unity within the government.
Bis bald!
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