On 27 February, nearly five months after the last Parliamentary elections were held in Austria, the country’s three main centrist parties announced a coalition agreement. The centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP), the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), and the liberal NEOS party—respectively, the second, third, and fifth-placed parties in the election—agreed on a common platform and ministerial arrangements, in negotiations strongly supported by the nominally independent President of the Republic, Alexander van der Bellen.
Austrian politics since the 1990s were often defined as stability through chaos. And yet, when Herbert Kickl, the leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and winner of last September’s vote, announced that negotiations with the ÖVP had failed to produce a coalition agreement, the country was thrown into uncharted waters.
Five months had passed since Austrians had gone to the polls. The FPÖ, running on an unapologetically right-wing platform, personified by Kickl, its leader and candidate for the Chancellorship claimed the first place for the first time in its history, in a victory described as ‘historic’ in domestic and foreign media. A former Minister of the Interior during the ÖVP–FPÖ coalition led by former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Kickl is regarded by most of Austrian mainstream society as an ‘ideological hardliner’ within a party that already lies at the limit of political acceptance for historical and ideological reasons. In previous occasions, cooperation with the FPÖ had been made possible by the party’s smaller or equivalent status vis-à-vis the Christian Democrats. This time, however, the FPÖ had been given a clear popular mandate by the sheer force of its numbers. Its path was clear: either taking the helm of the governing coalition, or taking the helm of the opposition.
‘President van der Bellen’s move was perceived as a clear attempt to deny the FPÖ the possibility to form a government’
The tentative coalition’s failure followed a previous attempt by the three centrist parties to form a coalition under then-Chancellor Karl Nehammer. That attempt was itself the result of an unprecedented decision by the President of the Republic, Alexander van der Bellen: namely, to give the mandate to Nehammer—the outgoing Chancellor—instead of Kickl, the leader of the first-placed party. Although under the Austrian Constitution the President has full discretionary powers in the granting of a mandate to form a coalition, van der Bellen’s move has broken with a decades-old tradition of giving the first mandate to either the election winner or, if previously agreed, the head of the likeliest coalition. President van der Bellen’s move was perceived as a clear attempt to deny the FPÖ the possibility to form a government, notwithstanding the election results, and to maintain power at the hands of the centre-leaning elites that have dominated Austrian politics since the restoration of democracy.
That initial gamble, albeit ultimately unsuccessful due to differences between the parties over budgetary issues, would pave the way for the aftermath of the second round of consultations. Following Kickl’s announcement that the negotiations had failed, President van der Bellen returned the mandate to the ÖVP calling on the party to, once again, attempt to form a grand coalition. While previously the President’s decision could be justified by the argument of continuity with the previous administration, this time the party’s mandate was clear: to form a government, as quickly as possible, and without the FPÖ. No matter the costs.
Vienna was once known for a political system founded upon consensus-driven governance and societal pillarisation around the two parties that wrote the country’s post-War history: the SPÖ and the ÖVP. If political scandals were more recurrent and debates more heated than in neighbouring Germany, it was more a feature of the system than a defect thereof. Both SPÖ and ÖVP elites in the early years of post-War democracy were veterans of the turbulent years of the First Austrian Republic, when political violence between Socialist and Catholic-oriented political militias and militants was rampant. The vision that guided Austrian policymakers in the late-1940s and 1950s, and would remain dominant until the end of the Cold War, was one of consociational democracy, ie a system where seemingly unsurmountable differences between different sectors of society are managed by political elites through compromises. Diverging political views were tolerated and encouraged. Threats to the stability of the system—and any hints of a return to the bellicose politics of the pre-War era—were not.
A Little-Known Chancellor
The present coalition negotiations are already the longest-running since the end of the Second World War. In European capitals such as The Hague, Brussels, or even Berlin, a five month-long wait for a governing coalition is considered a nuisance, albeit one that is a necessary part of Parliamentary democracy.
In Vienna, such a long wait is unprecedented, and the meandering and arbitrariness displayed by several important actors throughout the process contributed to further eroding the already-damaged public trust in the political system. Discontent has contributed to both incensing the FPÖ’s base and to broadening it, mostly at the ÖVP’s expense. If in September Kickl’s party won 29 per cent of the votes, barely three points ahead of the ÖVP, the latest Opinion polls show that, should early elections be held, the FPÖ would be the preferred choice of at least 34 per cent of Austrian voters. The incoming government, regardless of the policies it may pursue or the ministers it may nominate, is unlikely to restore Austrians’ faith in their mainstream parties. The optics of a government formed and led by the party that lost the most votes in last September’s election, with a mandate to shut off the election winner from power—notwithstanding their political collaboration at State-level in five out of the eight Austrian Länder—further adds to the new government’s popular legitimacy issues.
‘The incoming government…is unlikely to restore Austrians’ faith in their mainstream parties’
In all the chaos of the third round of negotiations, one lingering question persisted: who would be the next Bundeskanzler? Since Nehammer’s resignation as both Chancellor and ÖVP leader, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, an ÖVP veteran, had become acting Chancellor—a position he insisted he did not intend to hold at the long term. At the Party level, Christian Stocker, a member of the Austrian National Council—the elected, lower house of Parliament—and former ÖVP Secretary General, was selected as its interim leader. In less than two months, Stocker, a calm, centrist party fonctionnaire from the outskirts of Vienna with a background in local politics went from a little-known figure to the de facto Chancellor-designate, as the three parties agreed the ÖVP should take the highest office. The weight of the Chancellorship all but guaranteed Stocker’s eventual victory in the ÖVP leadership contest. However, for the time being, he is significantly less known amongst Austrians than either of his deputies in the coalition, namely SPÖ leader Andreas Babler and longtime Neos leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger.
Stocker’s demeanour, style, and political background are reminiscent of an ÖVP of yesteryear. The son of an ÖVP Parliamentarian, Stocker was born and raised in Wiener Neustadt, a municipality in the State of Lower Austria neighbouring Vienna, where he served as Deputy Mayor for over two decades. He appears to eschew the ideological conservatism and mercurial personality of Sebastian Kurz and the folksy bonhomie of Karl Nehammer—while sharing the former’s ability to quickly switch between coalitions and the latter’s centrist preferences. One might almost be forgiven in assuming this description to be of an ÖVP grandee of the 1980s or of a State governor in a heavily Christian democratic state, rather than that of a Bundeskanzler answering to a Parliament presided by an FPÖ politician.
Stocker’s old-fashioned, almost managerial Christian democratic character and his almost accidental path to the Chancellorship add to the contradiction between the electoral results and the resulting government. A Parliamentary system operating under a proportional voting system, such as that of Austria, does not guarantee that the first-placed party will have a majority of the seats. Nevertheless, from a political point of view, it is undeniable that voters have overwhelmingly rejected the previous ÖVP–Green coalition, with both parties suffering major losses, and voted for change rather than continuity. Established political forces, however, tend to favour continuity, rather than change, and, in Austria, echoes of the era of consociationalism can still be found in the two traditional parties’ ability to forge compromises.
Today’s Austria, however, is a different country from that of the famed mid-century political arrangements: politics has become more complex, voters less pillarized, and, most importantly, the formerly two-party system has now a third component—one that is both ideological enough to stand in stark opposition to the other two and pragmatic enough to collaborate when necessary. Stocker’s task to steer the three-party coalition and the government will be a complex one, and one where success is far from guaranteed. The FPÖ, emboldened by the electoral results, will be a combative opposition, seeking to capitalize on the coalition’s lack of unity around key issues such as migration and finances, to force an early election. Alea iacta est.
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