Austria's political jihad against the hijab

The current Austrian government of babyfaced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) and rightwing anti-immigrant HC Strache (FPÖ) is currently proposing a ban on the hijab, the traditional Muslim female head covering, for kids in kindergarten and the early years of grade school.

Carla Amina Baghajati writes that this is a solution for a non-problem (Kopftuchverbot: Symbolpolitik ist billig Standard 09.04.2018) because the number of young children affected is "close to zero." Even traditional Muslim families who promote the hijab for Muslim women don't typically require their young children to wear it.

Diese Symbolpolitik auf dem Rücken der Muslime können auch die bei solchen Gelegenheiten eifrig hervorgekramten Phrasen wie "Verhinderung einer Parallelgesellschaft" (Kurz) oder "Gegen den politischen Islam" (Strache) nicht kaschieren. Da es ohnehin einen gesellschaftlichen Konsens gibt, entlarvt dies den Versuch, selbstkonstruierte Narrative über Muslime als "die anderen" und als Feinde der "eigenen" Wertegemeinschaft einmal mehr zu bedienen. Ist eigentlich noch niemandem aufgefallen, dass man Menschen so ja geradezu in eine "Parallelgesellschaft" drängt?

[This symbolic politics on the backs of Muslims can also not airbrush away the eagerly trotted-out phrases like "Preventing a parallel society" (Kurz) or "Against political Islam" (Strache). Because there is a social consensus anyway, these {slogans} expose the attempt to once again serve up self-constructed narratives about Muslims as "the others" and as enemies of our "own" community of values.]

Stirring up controversies about the hijab is a popular tactic of European xenophobes. It lets them nominally claim to be working for the good of innocent children while stigmatizing them, their parents, and their families' religion as foreign, scary, and threatening.

Hypocrisy is a common companion to politics. But this use of Muslim children for hate slogans is callously cynical. It's an inversion of the normal human understand of what a child symbolizes, which one would hope would be the image of the "Christian" civilization that European Islamophobes claim to be defending. A child, like the very Christian image of the Baby Jesus, is normally a symbol of innocence that needs to be protected and defended. The image of Muslim kindergarten girls as something to be afraid of, as symbols of a series of anti-Muslim bogeymen - "Islamization," "Sharia," "parallel society," "Salafi," "political Islam," "Islamic terrorism" - makes the symbol of a child something to be feared and hated, excluded and rejected.

Another aspect here is that "Kopftuch" in German is used for both the hijab and headscarf. Which means that the Islamophobes are telling us that we should be terrified of girls in headscarfs, including kindergarten children. "Hijab" at least has a more exotic sound in Western countries.

We see the same approach with American xenophobes hyperventilating about "anchor babies."

I attended part of a conference this past weekend at UC-Berkeley on "Reconciling Islamic and European Civil Laws." Mathias Rohe, Director of the Erlangen Centre for Islam & Law in Europe (EZIRE), spoke on the real-life issues involved in "The Informal Application of Islamic Legal Norms in Germany - Scope and Limits." Islamophobes like to claim that certain sections of [fill in far-away city of your choice] are completely controlled by Sharia (Islamic law). One of the things he made clear is that in the Western European countries, including Austria and Germany, that civil law (he used the term "mandatory law" also) supersedes religious law. Questions of conflicts between sharia and secular/mandatory law mostly arise in questions of family law. That obviously includes questions of what marriages are recognized by civil law and issues relating to divorce. It also comes up in such issues as refugees obtaining proper documentation for marriages performed in their home countries.

In Austria and Germany, the civil law does not recognize religious marriages and vice versa. The Catholic Church doesn't recognize civil marriages as valid under Catholic canon law, and the Austrian state does not consider a Church marriage valid under civil law. And married couple in both Austria and Germany can conclude prenuptial agreements or other contractual arrangements that may incorporate elements of religious law, including Muslim religious law. Secular/mandatory law will recognize those contracts as valid insofar as they do not contradict mandatory law. Any contractual provision that contradicts civil law is unenforceable in the courts.

Citizen and non-citizen residents in Austria and Germany have access to the legal system and can seek protection against any kind of coercion that violates mandatory law. Rohe talked about how one significant problem among Muslim immigrants is that many of them simply do not know that they can go to the law for redress against things like attempts to force them to do something under religious law that is not sanctioned by secular law. Of course, religious or other kinds of cults, as well as criminal gangs, may create a situation in which their members are fearful or otherwise reluctant to seek help from the law. But it's simply not the case that the government and legal systems in Austria and Germany allow "parallel societies" in which religious law overrides secular law. It's just not so.

Rohe mentioned that the only significant Muslim attempt to build "parallel structures" in Germany occurs among Salafists, of whom he estimates that there are 10-15,000 in Germany among a total 4.5 million Muslims. The "parallel society" slogan int he EU context is deeply dishonest and used in very bad faith.

This summary at EZIRE of an interview with Mattias Rohe describes a recent interest in which the German courts result against a local attempt to promote Sharia: Mathias Rohe comments on “Sharia Police”-Verdict.

The Bertelsmann Foundation provides these facts about the Muslim population of Austria in Muslims in Europe: Integrated but not accepted? (2017):

Approximately 500,000 Muslims live in Austria. At 6.2 to 6.8 percent of the population, their representation is higher there than in Germany. As in Germany, the immigration landscape is largely characterized by Turkish guest workers and migrant workers. There is also a relatively large group of refugees from the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. According to the current Religion Monitor data, 74 percent of the Muslims in Austria come from Turkey and 24 percent from Southeastern Europe. Also, 64 percent are Sunnis and only 4 percent Shiites, of whom more than 18 percent are Alevites. More Muslims in Austria (67 percent) belong to the first generation of immigrants than in Germany; only 32 percent represent the second generation. Of all the countries studied, Austria is home to the youngest Muslim population, on average. At just 35 years old, they also exhibit the greatest difference from the average age of the non-Muslim population (49 years old). ...

In Austria, Islam has been legally recognized as a religious community for more than 100 years. According to the ICRI index, this results in a relatively good legal situation for Muslim religious communities. For example, Austria was the first European country to introduce Islamic religious instruction in schools. Nevertheless, the social climate toward Muslims is particularly tense in Austria. Rejection of Muslims as neighbors reaches its highest level in the five-country comparison [in that particular study], with a share of 28 percent.

88 percent of Muslims feel closely connected with Austria. While this value is high, it is the lowest among the four countries studied. Routine leisure time contact with people of other religions, at 62 percent, is also less common than in the other countries. Also, 68 percent of Muslims report having experienced discrimination, the highest level among Muslims in the five-country comparison. [my emphasis]

Veränderung mit Verantwortung: Neoliberalism and the center-left, Austrian edition

Austrian parliamentary elections are coming up in October. Among the three most important parties are the social-democratic/center-left SPÖ (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs), the Christian Democratic/conservative ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei), and the rightwing/populist FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs).

The SPÖ and ÖVP have been coalition partners in the national government for so long it's a wonder anyone can tell the difference between them anyway. But why let that stop the SPÖ from blurring that difference even more?

The SPÖ had earlier in the campaign adopted the slogan, "Holen Sie sich, was Ihnen zusteht" ("Take what you deserve"), as we see in this poster featuring Kern as a kinda-sorta man of the people. As a slogan, it has a little bite, vaguely promising to the a defender of the unfairly deprived. The opposition parties criticized it. An opposition party criticizing your slogan, imagine that! Who could have known? They said it sounded like the SPÖ was encouraging street thieves.

And Heaven forbid that one of the legendary parties of the European left would use a slogan that might mildly irritate people who would never consider voting for them anyway. So, of course, they changed it to "Veränderung mit Verantwortung" ("Responsible change").

It just doesn't get more boring than this.

Responsible Change is right up there with Stronger Together and A Better Deal. As forgettable as they are uninspiring. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the SPÖ hired establishment Democratic consultants from America that told them that of course the smartest approach for a center-left party that has held the Chancellorship for years was to use a slogan as bland and inoffensive as possible.

This is why the social democratic parties in Europe are in real danger of shrinking to minor centrist parties. Since the basic social and economic assumptions of the neoliberal ideology are conservative ones, the conservative parties have generally been less damaged by militant centrism than the center-left parties.

Maybe Bernie or Elizabeth Warren can swipe the Take What You Deserve slogan, since the SPÖ decided they don't want it any more.

But Responsible Change? Good grief! And consultants get paid good money to come up with loser slogans like that.

Frank Stronach, Canadian-Austrian billionaire and political clown (Updated 10/05/2012)

I just saw an interview from Austrian ORF TV with Frank Stronach, an 80-year-old Austrian-Canadian businessman who's running for Parliament for 2013 as a non-politician politician as head of a party of his own that he prefers to call a "movement."

The guy is so clownish that he makes the American Republican Herman Cain look like a bit of a policy wonk. His idea for solving the euro crisis is to have every eurozone country have its own euro with market-driven exchange rates. Which anyone with even the slightest understanding of what, you know, a currency is, means simply abolishing the euro and going back to national currencies, even if they each call their new national currency a "euro."

But he either didn't know or pretended not to know that's what it meant. And he promised to appoint a commission to examine the idea if he were elected Chancellor. But when one of the journalists interviewing him pressed him on who he would appoint to his council of wise men (which is what he called it), he couldn't come up with a single name.

The guy is a bad joke as a politician. Which he claims not to be, although he ran for office unsuccessfully in Canada back in the 1980s and has been active behind the scenes cultivating the Austrian political elite in the two main political parties. He ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1988 on the Canadian Liberal Party ticket. His daughter Belinda Stronach was elected to the Canadian Parliament for the Conservative Party in 2004 but later switched to the Liberals and served in the national Cabinet. She left Parliament in 2008 and is now CEO of the Stronach Group.

TV journalism is still alive, though, even though in the United States it's desperately gasping for breath. The four journalists interviewing Stronach pressed him pretty hard and challenged his answers when they were unresponsive or didn't make sense.

He's showing up in opinion polls with as much as 17% of the vote, but it's hard to believe he's going anywhere with his latest political kick. Surely a large part of those saying they favor him are really saying "none of the above." Remember when Herman Cain led the Republican Presidential race in opinion polls?

((Update 10/05/2012: The 17% figure was based on the dodgy presentation of a poll result in the Kronen Zeitung that did include none-of-the-above responses and other tiny parties like the Communist Party and the Pirate Party: Stronach als Senkrecht-Starter vor NR-Wahl 27,09,2012. See also the Lacker/Schwaiger article cited just below on the Kronen Zeitung's presentation.)

See Herbert Lackner und Rosemarie Schwaiger, Der Messias aus Ebreichsdorf Profil 29.09.2012; Georgina Prodhan, Frank Stronach launches election campaign: 'Austria is my homeland' Reuters 09/27/2012; Sebastian Pumberger, Stronach: "Ich bin die Person, die die Werte vorgibt" Der Standard 27.09.2012; Markus Huber und Elke Windisch, Opel-Übernahme. Wer ist Frank Stronach? Die Zeit 01.06.2009; Frank Stronach – der Turf-Tycoon aus Österreich Der Standard 04.04.2012 (a profile from 10 years ago); Here's a ZIB 2 interview with Stronach (in German), ORF Interview mit Frank Stronach YouTube date 27.09.2012 about his current campaign:

This is a campaign biography from the TeamStronach YouTube channel, Frank Stronach: Biographie 27.09.2012:

That video includes a tribute from, gulp, Bill Clinton. (?!?)

Tags: austria, austrian politics, frank stronach, österreich, österreichische politik

Austrian Socialist Chancellor proposes Herbert Hooverish idea for the country's Constitution

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann is head of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and head of government in a Grand Coalition with the conservative, Christian Democratic People's Party (ÖVP).

Now that Austria is coming under pressure from the bond speculators as part of the collapse of the euro currency, Faymann is proposing a foolish, Herbert Hooverish idea of writing a maximum debt limit into the Austrian Constitution. This is one more symptom of the kind of corruption of policy and economic thinking that the dominance of neoliberal economic thinking has produced. Writing a particular economic doctrine of this specificity into the national constitution is just a bad idea, like the concept of a balanced budget to the US Constitution. It could lock Austria into overly rigid policies in a future (or even not-so-future) economic crisis. It could be an powerful temptation to the kind of disguising the actual level of debt that both Greece and Italy did, both with significant help from Goldman Sachs.

So far, Faymann isn't proposing ruinous cuts to the budget. Austria's current employment rate is high. And, fortunately, some in both the SPÖ and the ÖVP are dubious about this proposal. Hopefully dubious enough that it fails.

This is a video in German of him defending his proposal, Bundeskanzler Werner Faymann zur Schuldenbremse YouTube date 22.11.2011.



I commented on his YouTube and Facebook message, "Es wäre einfach töricht, solche eine spezifische ökonomische Doktrin in die Verfassung zu verankern!" (It would be simply foolish to anchor such a specific economic doctrine in the Constitution!)

Tags: austria, austrian politics, österreich, österreichische politik, werner faymann

Simon Wiesenthal and Kurt Waldheim

Deborah Lipstadt summarizes a point I recently heard Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev make in a live appearance. It's from her review of Segev's biography, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (2010), Simon Wiesenthal and the Ethics of History Jewish Review of Books Winter 2011:

If there was anything in particular that prevented Simon Wiesenthal from becoming, after S.Y. Agnon, the second Jew from Buczacz to win a Nobel Prize, it was probably his relationship with Kurt Waldheim. Back in the 1960s, when he was Austria's foreign minister, Waldheim had helped Wiesenthal to defend himself against rumors spread by Communist bloc countries that he had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II.

Two decades later, after he had served as Secretary-General of the UN and was running for the presidency of Austria, Waldheim's actual Nazi past finally came to light. Grateful for his earlier support, Wiesenthal, who should have known better (and probably did), dismissed the case against Waldheim as mere "gossip" spread by his political adversaries. This landed him in a nasty public battle with the World Jewish Congress, which lobbied to have Waldheim labeled a war criminal, placed on the United States' Watch List, and banned from entering the country. In 1986, at the height of this scandal, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to fellow survivor Elie Wiesel. "It is reasonable to assume," writes Tom Segev in his new biography, "that Wiesenthal didn't get the prize" at the same time "because he was at the center of a raging controversy."

Lipstadt's wording seems to be a bit sloppy. Waldheim was never shown to have been a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) himself, although his wife was. She had to get a special Party waiver to have a Catholic wedding with Waldheim. It was convincingly shown that Waldheim had lied about his wartime service in the Wehrmacht. The direct and circumstantial evidence that he was involved is war crimes is persuasive.

But so far as I've ever seen demonstrated, he wasn't an actual NSDAP member. He was a member of an NSDAP-affiliated riding club. Which prompted his critics, including then-Chancellor Fred Sinowatz (1929–2008) of the Socialist Party (SPÖ), to say that Waldheim wasn't a Nazi, only his horse was.

Tags: first subject, second subject, third subject, fourth subject

Israeli historian Tom Segev on Simon Wiesenthal

Tags: austria, österreich, tom segev, simon wiesenthal

EU elections in Germany and Austria

European Union Parliamentary elections were held Sunday throughout the EU. Based on the early results I've seen, here is status of the results in Germany and Austria.

Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) together with its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) won the most votes with 38%. But that was a significant decline from the previous one in 2004. The Green Party and the Left Party together effectively matched the vote for the junior governing party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with a combined 21%. In local elections that also took place the same day, the Greens for the first time came out as the leading party in Stuttgart. The Greens also won 22% in Mainz, a record for them in that city, which put them just behind the votes for the CDU and the SPD.

This election continues a weakening of the SPD's support. It's still has the second largest representation in Parliament after the CDU/CSU. But it's not unthinkable that the Greens could overtake them soon, though they would have to double their vote to achieve that. It's hard to say how some kind of Green/Left Party merger would fare, because the "postcommunist" Left Party still leaves doubts about how far they've come from orthodox Communist ideas of 20 years ago.

Austria: The Christian Democratic ÖVP pulled 30% with the Social Democrats (SPÖ) winning a disappointing 24%, down from their 33% in 2004; the ÖVP was also at 33% in 2004. The far-right FPÖ won 13%, which they considered a disappointment, and the Greens won just under 10%. An electoral headed by a former journalist, Hans Peter Martin, was the biggest surprise, pulling almost 18%, higher than the established parties the Greens and the FPÖ.

As usual, the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) won under 1%. The KPÖ's main historical distinction was their business acumen at laundering money from the East German Communist Party back in the day.

Tags: austria, austrian politics, deutschland, german politics, germany, österreich

Helmut Zilk's dark side?

The Austrian weekly Profil is reporting that Helmut Zilk, the popular Social Democratic mayor of Vienna 1984-1994 who passed away in 2008, worked as a paid informant for the Czechoslovakian spy agency from 1965 to 1968: Helmut Zilk, Spion: Zilk war jahrelang Informant des CSSR-Geheimdienstes von Herbert Lackner 21.03.09. See also "Helmut Zilk war ein Ostspion": Eine Prager Zeitung besudelt den verstorbenen Wiener Bürgermeister Oe24.at 15.03.09.

Tags: austrian politics, helmut zilk, österreich

Austria's recent election and the implications

Werner Faymann, leader of Austria's Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ), which led in the election results on Sunday

As promised - or as threatened, depending on your perspective - I'm posting more on the Austrian election of this past Sunday, which resulted in the previous five parties in Parliament all returning, with the two far-right parties gaining while the conservative party and the two left parties lost votes compared to their previous experience.

I won't try in this post to go into detail on the particular methods of parliamentary government. But normally in parliamentary systems, either one party has to get a majority - like the Spanish Socialists in their last two elections - or they have to form a coalition, like the current Grand Coalition in Germany of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). A party in Austria has to get 4% of the votes nationwide to win any seats in parliament (with a technical exception I won't go into here). Parliamentary seats are allocated to parties based on the proportion of the votes of the parties who met the 4% hurdle.

To form a government, a party or coalition needs a majority of votes in the lower house of parliament, the upper house being elected by state (provincial) legislatures similar to the way US Senators were elected before the 20th century.

The parliamentary parties are as follows. The SPÖ (Socialdemokratische Partei Österreichs) is the social-democratic party, dating back to the 19th century when it was founded by Viktor Adler (who, for trivia fans, lived in the same house in Vienna's 9th district where Sigmund Frued later lived). The social-democrats were the leading advocates of democracy in the Habsburg Empire, and led the democratic revolution of 1918. Parties have long been identified by colors in Europe, a habit the US only picked up after the 2000 election. The SPÖ are the "reds", though they aren't advocating anything like the massive nationalizations currently being pursued by the American "red" Republicans.

The ÖVP (People's Party, Österreichische Volkspartei) is the Christian Democratic Party. In European terms, they are the conservative party. It's better to not even try to compare them with American Republicans. The ÖVP is still thought of as the Catholic party, but the degree of religiosity now required even of Democrats and the level of church-party collaboration seen with the Republicans and the backroom barons of the Christian Right is unheard-of in the ÖVP. Not even close. Party color: black.

Viktor Adler: his soul goes marching on, too, fortunately for Austria

The FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) is what in European terms would be called a rightwing-liberal party. That concept just doesn't compute at all in American politics. To describe them in a more general way, we could say they are xenophobic and populist-demagogic. Party color: blue. (Definitely not like the American "blues"!) The BZÖ (Bündnis Zukunft Österreichs, Alliance for Austria's Future) is also a rightwing-liberal party. It's a split-off from the FPÖ, and is essentially the personal vehicle for Jörg Haider, governor (Landeshauptmann) of the state of Carinthia. Haider achieve international notoriety in the 1990s as a Mussolini-wannabe with a "yuppie-fascist" style. But basically he's a narcissistic clown who mainly likes to see himself on TV. Party color: orange. Both the FPÖ and BZÖ could be compared to George Wallace's movement of 1968.
Then there's the Green Party, which has become a real force in Austrian politics in the last 10 years. The state of Upper Austria has been ruled since 2003 by a black-green coalition (ÖVP and Greens). Arnold Schwaryenegger's home city of Graz just got a black-green coalition this year, with Green vice-mayor who's openly lesbian. The ÖVP mayor had campaigned against the decadence of homosexuality. He's says he's learning a lot in the new coalition.

The basic problem in Austrian national politics is that the two biggest parties, SPÖ and ÖVP, have been in a Grand Coalition (red-black or black-red) for most of the last 20 years. AS Germany is now experiencing, having the two biggest opposing parties in a coalition together is tough to manage, even though it would seem to be the embodiment of the "bipartisanship" that the American practitioners or High Broderism seem to think is the be-all and end-all of political virtue.

Aside from administrative difficulties, though, it means that neither of the two largest parties can play the role of loyal opposition. What's been happening in Austria is that the FPÖ and BZÖ have been able to be the opposition against the SPÖ-led Grand Coalition that just fell apart, prompting last Sunday's election. If the SPÖ or the ÖVP could form a coaltion with one or more of the other parties, then the other large party could act as the opposition, which would reduce the protest votes going to the FPÖ and BZÖ.

The Greens should have been able to also benefit from protest votes. But their vote percentage actually went down slightly. I think a lot in this case has to do with their current leader Alexander Van der Bellen. He's an obviously intelligent man, but he's scarcely a rabble-rouser. He comes across on TV like a tired old professor.

The breakdown of seats in the new Austrian Nationalrat (lower house of parliament) should break down close to the popular vote results as of this writing, which might change slightly if absentee votes still remain to be counted: SPÖ, 30%; ÖVP, 26%; FPÖ, 18%; BZÖ, 11%; Greens, 10%. Those results were historic lows for the SPÖ and ÖVP.

Since the SPÖ has the largest percentage, President Heinz Fischer (SPÖ) will ask the SPÖ to form a new government. Party leader Werner Feymann initially indicated after the election that he would attempt to make a new Grand Coalition with the ÖVP, which I think is a terrible idea. They just had a Grand Coalition fall apart, albeit with different leaders at the head of the parties than now, and the two coalition parties were hammered in the election results.

The immediate problem is that the SPÖ and ÖVP consider the FPÖ and BZÖ to be such stinkers that neither wants to be in a coalition with them. The SPÖ would need the Greens and the FPÖ to form a majority coalition without the ÖVP. But FPÖ leader H. C. Strache is kind of a thuggish guy. During the election campaign, some photos were published of him participating in military training with weapons with a militia-tzype rightwing group in the woods. As a result, federal prosecutors are currently reviewing whether he should be charged with "NS-Wiederbetätigung", which roughly means "attempting to revive the Nazi Party". That is illegal in Austria. Austria's independence treaty with the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union actually requires it to ban the Nazi Party.

Now, I can make judgments about Austrian politics without having to rely on the current state of the US practice of democracy. But I do think Americans need to keep some sense of perspective. Strache, the leader of Austria's third biggest party, was screwing around with dumbass rightwingers playing with their guns in the woods when he was 20. Having avoided shooting himself in the foot, his mentality hasn't evolved much beyond that.

But Jesus God, look at what we have in the United States. The President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State are criminals. War criminals for the invasion of Iraq and the torture policy. Remember how the happy gang, including that famous honorable "moderate" Colin Powell, sat around designing in gruesome detail the torture of particular individuals? They have politicized justice in a blatant way. They openly broke the law on surveillance, and got the "opposition"-dominated Congress to give retroactive approval to it. They administered the Iraq contracts is a way so mind-boggling corrupt it would have made the 19th-century robber barons blush. The Republicans are carrying out blatant voter-suprresion activities on a massive scale, using approaches straight out of the Southern segregationist playbook. The Supreme Court overrode the results of the 2000 election to install Dick Cheney and George Bush in power. And the President has claimed and put into proactice the right, so far tolerated by out sad version of a Congress, and only partially challenged by the Republican-dominated courts to disobey any law he chooses, and even to violate the explicit provisions of the Constitution as long as he claims his actions are justified on grounds of "national security". And what isn't involved with national security in our Cheneyized national security state of today?

I really view our current American government as a semi-democracy. We literally would not qualify for membership in the European Union, because we don't meet their minimal requirements for democractic practices and the rule of law.

Getting back to the much smaller problems of Austrian democracy, the ÖVP could theoretically form a government with the Greens and the FPÖ, or with the FPÖ and the BZÖ. But having the FPÖ and the BZÖ in the same coalition would be virtually impossible as a practical matter because of the leading personalities involved, apart from the democratic deficits of the parties.

My preferred outcome of the Austrian government negotiations would be a red-green minority government. That's a real possibility. It would give the reds and Greens a chance to put through some constructive programs and then run on them in the next election. And it would allow the ÖVP to act as the leading opposition party and take protest votes from the FPÖ and BZÖ.

If only our democractic deficits in America were as modest as Austria's ...

Tags: austria, austrian politics, österreich, österreichische politik

"Rechtsruck" (shift to the right) in Austria

If it was good enough for George...

Austria's banks aren't making international news in the current world financial meltdown. Yet. Actually, Austrian banks have been pursuing profits in recent years the old-fashioned way: providing regular banking services to people who need them. In particular, they have expanded their regular commercial and retail banking businesses into eastern European countries like Rumania. Austria, despite being a small country, benefits greatly from its historical business ties to eastern Europe going backt to the days of the Habsburg's Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It happens that I'm visiting in Austria at the time it is making international news. Austria and Mississippi have one thing in common when it comes to making world or national-US news. It usually only happens when there is a natural disaster or a political one. (An exception was the good news that a Democrat won a previously Republican Congressional seat in a special election earlier this year.)

Reuters/Yahoo! News provides the colorful headline, Far right surges in Austria vote, instability looms 09/29/08. Back in 1999-2000, the last time an Austrian election generated these sorts of headlines, I was a hardliner in terms of preferring to see a strong diplomatic response from the US and other EU countries.

It turned out that the other EU countries' decision to not invite Austrian diplomats to the normal rounds of dinners and parties for a couple of weeks was strong enough. More importantly, Austria's then-President Thomas Klestil used his authority as the elected President to reject a couple of proposed cabinet ministers who were particularly obnoxious in their uncertain devotion to the Austrian Constitution and the rule of law.

More to follow in a later post on the particulars of the Austrian election, more than probably most American readers care to know. Short version: the "far right" parties in Austria are less radical in their ideologies and more devoted to the rule of law than the Cheney-Bush administration - seriously. Two of the five parties in Parliament are "far right" for real. Our Republicans really are more so.

But one aspect of this election genuinely surprised me. Obviously I haven't been following the Austrian news as closely as I would like to, because I hadn't heard this before last week. In the national parliamentary elections held this past Sunday, 16-year-olds were able to vote for the first time. No, that's not a typo, that's 16, one-six.

Now, my circle of Austrian and German acquaintances is not especially conservative. But everyone older than teenaged that I've heard talk about this so far is shocked at the thought that 16-year-olds can vote!

I'm shocked, too. Shocked, I tell you, shocked! I mean, how can anyone expect mere 16-year-olds to exercise the mature, sensible political judgment that adults like Rush Limbaugh, Shaun Hannity and Bill O'Reilly exhibit on a daily basis? I mean, what 16-year old could make an analysis, or even understand an analysis, like one of our leading columnists, Maureen Dowd, displays in the New York Times twice weekly? (Zeus knows, I sure don't understand it.)

Now that I think about it a bit, I think that no one under 30 should be allowed to vote. And, hey, requiring voters to own at least $100,000 in property would be a good idea, too. Because why should people who don't have a financial stake in their country and communities be allowed to vote? It's well known that the richer you are, the more sound your judgment is. That's why investment bankers, hedge fund managers and mortgage lenders are the most prudent, sensible, responsible people you can find.

And who was it anyway that came up with this notion that women should be able to vote? Come to think of it, Austria recognized women's right to vote (1918) before the United States did, too. It was just after the socialists took over in a revolution. So there you see what a commie subversive idea that whole thing was.

I mean, if "one family, one vote" was good enough for George and Martha Washington, why isn't it good enough for us? Everybody knows that women get all impulsive because of, you know, hormones and stuff. But take a sober wealthy CEO white guy like Dick Cheney, or a sturdy-jawed manly-man like John McCain, who could imagine them ever making impulsive or reckless decisions?

So far, though, none of my Austrian friends and relatives that I make these arguments to seem to be convinced. I don't get it. I guess it's true what they say: In Austria, the clocks really do tick differently.

Tags: austria, austrian politics, österreich, österreichische politik