Sideletter
A secret side agreement shows how the People's Party and the Greens plan to divide up appointments to ostensibly independent public institutions between them
Servus!
To the lexicon of Austrian political jargon, we can now add the bastardized Anglicism Sideletter. The term refers to agreements signed in tandem to negotiations to form the current People’s Party (ÖVP)-Green coalition in late 2019 and the former ÖVP-Freedom Party (FPÖ) coalition in the fall of 2017. In contrast to coalition agreements, which are public and detail the incoming government’s legislative and policy agenda, these Sideletters were hitherto hidden from view—hidden even from members of the Greens’ own negotiating team. They were only made public in recent days thanks to a leak—perhaps from someone close to former chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
Both Sideletters detail how, in secret, coalition negotiators sought to carve up important public institutions along party lines. The ÖVP-FPÖ Sideletter, signed by Kurz and former FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache, outlines how the two parties planned to come to an agreement to run a single candidate in the 2022 presidential election. The ÖVP was given the right to nominate the next president of Austria’s constitutional court, and the FPÖ its vice-president. A similar division of power was to occur at the National Bank, where the FPÖ was to be given two or the four seats on its board of directors. The ÖVP was to pick the country’s next representative on the European Commission in 2019. Since the coalition fell apart in May of that year, few of these grand plans were implemented, the Sideletter doomed to irrelevancy.
The ÖVP-Green Sideletter is reportedly a similar affair. Once more, the ÖVP was given a clear path to nominate its choice of European commissioner—this time in 2024. In return, the Greens gained to right to make appointments to the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. In 2023, the ÖVP is to nominate the next president of the National Bank; the Greens, its vice-president. The oversight boards of state-run enterprises like ASFINAG, the highways agency, and Austrian Federal Railways are to be dealt out between the parties. And so, in this unseemly manner, it goes on.
The politicization of ostensibly independent institutions, the way these Sideletters divvy up effective ownership of them between the parties, is a story as old as the Second Republic. Ministries were once known to ‘belong’ to particular parties, and that Austria still has two automobile associations, two emergency services, and two mountaineering organizations is partly a holdover from the days when the ÖVP and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) had a duopoly on power. That system, Proporz, might be dead, but its political patronage and nepotism live on. As I wrote of last August’s election for the public broadcaster ORF’s next director general: “There are many ways in which Austria’s political system operates less like a modern Western democracy and more like a sclerotic Soviet republic.”
What is perhaps disappointing about these Sideletters is that a new party—and an anti-corruption party to boot—has engaged in these rather hoary political tricks: the Greens, a party founded in no small part as an alternative to the established ways of the SPÖ and ÖVP. Following the Sideletter’s publication, vice chancellor Werner Kogler went public to defend its existence. Had they not entered into such an agreement, Kogler argued, the ÖVP would simply have made all these political appointments without the Greens’ assent, which is what the SPÖ did to the Greens in Vienna between 2010 to 2020, so Kogler claimed. The Greens, he said, were in fact preventing an “Orbanization” of the Austrian state by the ÖVP, a move which, of course, necessitated making their own political appointments. “We were indeed new to government,” Kogler said, “but we were not naïve.”
Bis bald!
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