Austrian state (provincial) elections

Austrian Social Democratic Business Director Laura Rudas: says her party held its own in Salzburg but is in real trouble in Carinthia

There were elections in the Austrian states of Kärnten (Carinthia) and Salzburg on Sunday. The results were surprising.

Sources from Der Standard (Vienna)01.03.2009:

Erdrutschsieg für BZÖ, Debakel für SPÖ, FPÖ nicht im Landtag

Landtagwahl Kärnten 2009

SPÖ trotz Verlusten vor ÖVP, starker Zugewinn für FPÖ

Landtagwahl Salzburg

A bit of background. The two main parties in Austria since the Second World War have been the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and the People's Party (ÖVP), the latter being the Christian Democratic Party. The leading third party has been the Freedom Party (FPÖ), which was once considered a liberal party in the European sense of "liberal", as represented by the Liberal International (LI). The FPÖ got kicked out of the LI after the leadership was assumed by Jörg Haider in 1986, who took the party in a much more rightwing direction.

Haider gained international notoriety as the most successful practitioner of what was often called "yuppie fascism". Although I think Haider would have liked to have been a new Mussolini or Engelbert Dollfuss or Kurt Schuschnigg, it's not that all the party base understood the party in that sense.

And Haider himself seems to have been less of an aspiring Mussolini than a rightwing narcissist who especially enjoyed seeing himself on TV. He split from his FPÖ in 2005 and founded a new political vehicle for himself the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ), the Austrian Alliance for the Future.

Haider died last fall in an auto crash after getting drunk at a gay bar in Klagenfurt, the capital city of Carinthia. Haider had not been openly gay and was married to a woman and had children. As controversial as Haider was, it's surprising that his gay or bisexual practices hadn't become a topic of public polemics. Because he didn't seem to have worked terribly hard at keeping it a secret.

The BZÖ and the FPÖ have competed for far-right, xenophobic vote since then. Haider, who continued as governor (Landeshauptmann) for Carinthia, gave the BZÖ more of a middle-brow, yuppie-fascist imprint, while FPÖ used more down-and-dirty demagoguery.

What was very surprising in Sunday's election was how strongly the BZÖ performed. Given how Americans are tempted to process political events in Austria and Germany, I should emphasize that this does not mean that a new Nazi movement is in full swing. Austria would have a long way to go before it even reached the levels of anti-democratic practice that were standard under Dick Cheney and George Bush.

As of this writing, Der Standard is reporting the following results for the Carinthian election, with 4.0% required to get representation in the Landtag (state parliament): BZÖ, 46%; SPÖ, 29%; ÖVP, 17%; Greens, 5%; and, FPÖ, just under 4%. This is a huge increase in the vote for the BZÖ and a huge defeat for the FPÖ. The Social Democrats lost nearly 10% of their voters compared to the 2004 elections; the Christian Democrats gained almost 5% over 2004 but still came in third. The only likely coalitions that I could see coming out of those numbers would be an "orange-black" (BZÖ/ÖVP) government, or a "red-black-green" (SPÖ/ÖVP/Green) version.

In Salzburg, also according to Der Standard as of this writing, the SPÖ remains the largest party at 40% though with a 6% decline from 2004; ÖVP, 36%; FPÖ, 13%; Greens, 7%; and, BZÖ, under 4%. Probably only a Grand Coalition (SPÖ/ÖVP) could be formed from those results. The most notable thing about the voting trends is the movement of some voters from the SPÖ and ÖVP to FPÖ and BZÖ. I haven't seen the detailed breakdowns, but that can also mean that voters shifted from the Greens to the SPÖ and from the SPÖ to the ÖVP, and others from the ÖVP to the FPÖ and BZÖ. But the two rightwing parties, FPÖ and BZÖ, do sometimes directly pull previous Social Democratic voters.

Tags: austrian politics