Boomtown
The Social Democratic Party and NEOS will govern Vienna together for a second term, branding themselves the Aufschwungskoalition
Servus!
Yesterday, the old-new Vienna city government—a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the liberal NEOS—presented their next program for government. At the beginning of their first term, which began in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pair called their amalgamation of liberalism and social democracy the Fortschrittskoalition, the progress coalition. This time, progress having evidently been achieved, they’ve gone for the Aufschwungskoalition, Aufschwung meaning upswing, upturn, boom. “Upswing,” their coalition agreement begins, “is the feeling that comes from progress becoming tangible.”
“In the future, Vienna should still be an affordable, livable, and socially conscious city in the heart of Europe as well as a driver of progress in Austria,” the coalition states: “socially just, fit for the fight against climate change, and economically strong.” Quite so, but to get there, the coalition will have to grapple with a number of challenges, the first of which will be dictated by what happens at the federal level, namely the coming course of budget consolidation that will almost certainly impact the revenue passed down from central government to states and localities.
Vienna will have to get its own financial house in order, managing its €1.6 billion budget deficit, the largest of any state in Austria, though being “socially conscious” means not doing so on the backs of the poor. Another major and ongoing challenge concerns integration, from helping schoolchildren whose German isn’t good enough to follow their classes to getting more post-2015 asylum seekers into the job market, especially women. The city’s youth gangs—a world of petty criminality and internecine rivalries populated by young people often from refugee or immigrant backgrounds—are a security challenge, but more so, they are manifestations of feelings of discontent, alienation, and marginalization.
A “livable” city means taking measures to combat the climate crisis and negate its effects, for the moment at which Vienna becomes a city in which it is almost impossible to live in during the summer months is quickly approaching. Ditto whether business’ drive to bring evermore tourists into the city is impacting residents’ quality of life. “Affordable,” meanwhile, implies building, building, building: affordable housing on the one hand and bringing new apartments onto the market all the time to meet the needs of a growing population on the other. New housing, especially in Vienna’s fast-growing outer districts like Floridsdorf and Donaustadt, will necessitate building out the city’s public transport network. There are enough cars in Vienna as it is.
To that end, while the coalition agreement is a bit vague on what promised structural reforms of city government will look like, particular policies do leap out:
Reforms to rules governing who is entitled to social housing to make them more flexible
1,500 council apartments and 22,000 new subsidized apartments
New subway and tram lines including a possible branch line extension of the U1
Reconfiguring the Ringstrasse to make it more amenable to foot and bicycle traffic
400,000 square meters of new parkland and at least 20,000 new trees
Developing a ‘Vienna Integration Codex’ which will bring together “the principles for how people should live together in Vienna and what rules they should follow”
Building out the existing AI Life Sciences Center and making Vienna a hub for the AI, cyber security, and cyber defense industries.
One foreseeable stumbling block for the SPÖ is going to be entitlement reform. The recently publicized case of a Syrian refugee family with 11 children in receipt of €9,000 a month in benefits is an obvious outlier and fodder for the tabloid press, though that doesn’t negate how such cases appear to the general public. At the same time, benefits like income support (Sozialhilfe or Mindestsicherung) are a safety net that prevent people from falling into poverty, and if the SPÖ isn’t the guarantor of such benefits, then who is? Vienna’s SPÖ has been posed a question with no good answers. They would be most grateful, to be sure, if the matter were taken out of their hands by the federal government via national entitlement reform.
Bis bald!
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