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Austria: social democrats return to power
THE GENERAL elections in Austria on 1 October saw
the surprising victory of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ). After being
in opposition since 2000, it became the largest party again, with 35.3%
of the vote. The reason for this was the strong demand by big parts of
the population to get rid of the ÖVP (People’s Party) Chancellor,
Wolfgang Schüssel, who carried out brutal neo-liberalism with
Napoleon-like arrogance. The ÖVP’s vote fell from 2,076,833 in 2002 to
1,616,493. Two racist parties – the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and
the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) – together got just over
15%. The Austrian section of the CWI also stood, as Socialist LeftParty-List
against Capitalism and Racism.
The ruling ÖVP’s election campaign claimed that
everything was wonderful in Austria. But in the last six years the
government has implemented attacks on pensions, the health service and
education. Work is increasingly casualised, women driven back into the
home, and youth out of the universities. This was combined with the
influential state TV becoming even more uncritically pro-government. A
huge number of public jobs have gone to government stooges or been
created for them. Pre-election opinion polls showed a victory for the
ÖVP, but the wish to get rid of this government was overwhelming,
something that was seen in June 2003, when one million workers held a
one-day strike against Schüssel’s pension cuts.
The evening of 1 October saw a surprised SPÖ
chairman when Alfred Gusenbauer realised that his party had emerged as
the strongest. But the SPÖ is a weak winner, as it lost 128,513 votes
from the last election in 2002. The SPÖ’s vote was stable in rural areas
but it lost votes in its traditional working-class areas of support.
Forty per cent of their voters just wanted to get rid of Schüssel. Among
pensioners the SPÖ was the strongest party, but 75% under the age of 30
voted for other parties. And, wherever it is in power, the SPÖ’s
politics are hardly any different from those of the ÖVP. On Vienna
council, where the SPÖ has an absolute majority, it has started
privatising the entire social service sector. Health and care for
elderly and disabled people are run for profit not need. In Carinthia,
the SPÖ went into coalition with the federal state governor, the
far-right BZÖ (ex-FPÖ) extremist, Jörg Haider.
Another surprising result was that the new BZÖ party
just made it into parliament. The BZÖ was created out of the split from
the FPÖ by Haider and FPÖ government ministers in spring 2005. The BZÖ
has no real rank and file but used a lot of money from government
ministries and Haider’s governorship in Carinthia to promote its
candidates.
The election campaign confirmed the analysis of the
SLP (CWI Austria) that the BZÖ was not a ‘liberal’ split-off from the
FPÖ. There was a disgusting race between the BZÖ and FPÖ about who is
more racist. Asylum seekers were generally presented as liars who live
in luxury. Both parties argued for massive deportations. The FPÖ polled
11%. This was far less than the 26.9% it won in 1999, but up on its 10%
vote in 2002. After the split in 2005, many commentators declared the
FPÖ finished. SLP explained that the split would lead to an even more
right-wing turn by the FPÖ, with the fascists inside it getting to the
centre of the party. We also said that far-right extremism would not end
with this split. Today’s FPÖ leadership is made up of men who have no
fear of having links with fascists and are open to historical
‘revisionist’ ideas: to rewrite history, ‘relativising’ the historic
crimes of fascism. The FPÖ uses a mixture of pseudo-social rhetoric and
aggressive racism. Combined with the weakness of the left, this is the
basis for its electoral success.
In regard to immigration and asylum, all the major
parties have turned to the right. Instead of speaking about social
problems, they speak about a ‘migration problem’. Government
representatives blamed school students from a migrant background for the
bad results of Austrian pupils taking the international Pisa-study. Of
course, they did not mention the massive cuts in education. The ÖVP
interior minister claimed that 45% of Muslims in Austria are unwilling
to integrate into society. This gave a further boost to the racist and
anti-Muslim mood created by the FPÖ. This is the background to the
increase in attacks on migrants by right-wing and fascist youth.
Due to the extreme bureaucratic and financial
barriers put up by the state’s electoral bodies, the SLP was only able
to stand in Vienna. We approached the Communist Party (KPÖ) for a joint
election list, but they said SLP members would have to stand on the
KPÖ’s ‘open list’. Recently, the KPÖ got good results in one Austrian
federal state, Styria, where it won up to 20% in Austria’s second
biggest town, Graz. In this area the KPÖ does social-type work,
especially for housing tenants. Its main representative in the region,
Ernest Kaltenegger, is regarded as an incorrupt, unprivileged, and
therefore, untypical, Austrian politician. The KPÖ thought that it could
repeat this success on an Austria-wide level.
But the KPÖ does not do similar work in other parts
of Austria, nor did Kaltenegger stand on its general election list. The
KPÖ had two one-hour programmes on state TV but did not use them to
promote socialist ideas. Its main election slogan was: ‘To give, not to
take’. It did not campaign against the FPÖ. The KPÖ gained 20,000 votes,
getting 47,578 (1%) in total. But that was far from getting into
parliament, which some sections of the KPÖ leadership were aiming for.
The only party that actively organised protests
against the racist rallies of the FPÖ was the SLP. We had very positive
responses to the ‘against capitalism’ part of the list name. The SLP
produced literature in seven languages, which was warmly welcomed. We
got 2,257 votes in Vienna, a good result but less than in 2002. The
difference this time was that the KPÖ got much more press coverage, not
because of its campaigning work, but because it stood all over Austria.
So did the anti-corruption campaigning journalist Hans-Peter Martin, who
got 14% in the last Euro-elections and could not therefore be ignored by
the media. At the same time, some people thought the KPÖ had a chance of
being elected to parliament. But if you compare the activity, the
clarity of programme, and the socialist approach, the SLP was far more
successful than the KPÖ.
Negotiations to form a new government are just
starting. The most likely possibility, at the moment, is a grand
coalition between the SPÖ and ÖVP. But the ÖVP will demand an extremely
high price. It cannot be ruled out totally that there might be an
ÖVP-FPÖ-BZÖ coalition. It is also possible that no government is formed,
leading to new elections. Whatever the government, attacks on the living
standards of the working class, on health, education, and immigrants,
will continue. It will be quickly clear that the ‘fairness’ the SPÖ
promoted during the campaign will not bring relevant benefits for the
working class.
An important factor in future developments will be
the role played by the ÖGB, the trade union federation. After a major
financial and political crisis earlier this year (see socialistworld.net),
efforts to change the ÖGB have been half-hearted, at best. But the mood
among the trade union ranks is changing. Just days after the election, a
65% majority at one of the ÖGB’s Vienna regional conferences voted to
support a resolution moved by a SLP shop steward and general election
candidate, calling for democratic decision-making, the right to elect
and recall all union officials, for all officials to receive the average
wage of the workers they represent, and for a "fighting policy not
social partnership; the trade unions must be orientated to their
members’ interests and not those of big business".
The ÖGB leaders’ demands on a new government are
very general and no steps are proposed to fight for them. The leaders’
demands in current wage negotiations are extremely soft, only demanding
‘an increase’ in wages, without even saying that inflation has to be
covered. There is anger among the rank and file over this. At Austrian
Airlines, which is traditionally a combative workforce, workplace
meetings are taking place to discuss possible strike measures against
attempts to cut 350 jobs.
The attacks of the incoming government on workers,
the unemployed and young people will provoke reaction. The trade union
bureaucracy has partly lost its authority and, therefore, its grip on
the membership. This increases the possibility for struggles of the
working class, struggles that will help prepare the ground for a new
workers’ party, with mass support, to contest the next general
elections.
Sonja Grusch
Socialist LeftParty
(CWI) Vienna
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