🇦🇹 Austrian Elections & Politics 6.0 - Upper Austria election: 26 Sept. 2021

[palandio]

Is the dark grey spot right in the middle of Vienna the neighbourhood where all the turbocharged upper BouRgeOisiE whose housing is worth seven digits lives?

It’s where they work or where their offices and expensive shops are.

It’s Vienna’s 1st district, where parliament and the stock exchange is.

Similar to the City of London.

The wealthy bourgeoisie is living in the 3 western districts, those coloured more darkly for ÖVP and NEOS.

But who are the voters that turn Vienna's 1st district into the ÖVP's strongest place in all of Vienna?

Is it stockbrokers and other yuppies?

Is it the long-established bourgeoisie? (The 1st district has been an ÖVP stronghold in Red Vienna for decades!)

Is it a mix of both? Or other groups? Who are these voters?

[palandio]

For the record, Austrian communists are unreconstructed tankie nutters who spend most of their time travelling to Belarus, Donbass and North Korea, giving interviews to local media and praising their political system. This curious approach has roots in the party's history: KPÖ was the only communist party that initially condemned the 1956 and 1968 Soviet invasions only to turn around and support them a few years later - despite the fact Austria took in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the persecution that followed.

See also:

Styria is the strongest region for KPÖ, the Communist Party of Austria. They have multiple seats in the state parliament and in 2019 won an impressive result in Graz municipal elections that gave them the city's mayoralty. Surely this must mean that they are a relatively moderate party focused on social activism rather than tankies with a screw loose?

KPÖ state MP calls Ukraine "a cripple of a nation", says it should pay reparations to Donetsk and calls Balkan countries "puppet states".

This is, unsurprisingly, something of a pattern for the party. As the mayor of Graz will have you know, both sides should withdraw their troops.

*sigh* what is it with German-speaking leftists...

I guess that in addition to the obligatory "we swear the Akademikerball isn't just about cosplaying as Nazis" stuff from the FPÖ we'll now get the left-wing version of that from the KPÖ. Fun!

There has been an ideological split within the KPÖ for a long time. The federal KPÖ is more on the far-left alternative side, while its (until now) most succesful regional chapter, the Styrian/Graz KPÖ has remained unreformed anti-revisionist tankies; at least in theory, in practice they focus more on the issue of affordable housing and left-wing populism.

The Salzburg KPÖ has called the war in Ukraine "Putin's war of aggression" and suggested humanitarian support for Ukraine:
https://www.kpoeplus-sbg.at/putins_angriffskrieg_keine_sponsoring_gelder_von_gazprom
https://www.kpoeplus-sbg.at/ukraine_hilfe_stadt_salzburg

Apart from that the Salzburg KPÖ has borrowed a lot from the Styrian playbook: A focus on affordable housing, left-wing populism, donating a part of their compensation to the poor, etc. Its electoral strength seems to come both from abstention and protest votes and from disappointment with a Green party that is participating in a coalition with the conservative ÖVP and an SPÖ that is torn by infighting and ineffectiveness. The KPÖ's stronghold is in the city of Salzburg where they are already represented in the city parliament and where affordability of housing has become a big problem.

[palandio]

An excellent lesson on how not to do a primary from the SPÖ.

The membership vote was unbinding and there are no plans for a run-off. I'm not sure if the geniuses that designed the voting modalities will allow Doskozil to run the party now that they know he has the support of only a third of its members. Or maybe that was the intention: That he wouldn't be able to run the party.

After all Doskozil is exactly the guy that the Vienna wing of the party holds accountable for allegedly having been a "sniper" against Rendi-Wagner over the last years.

[palandio]

Burgenland governor Hans Peter Doskozil will be the new leader of the SPÖ. He won 33.68% in the internal leadership election. It was a close result: 31.51% voted for Andreas Babler, 31.35% for current leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner. This means FPÖ-SPÖ probably becomes more realistic. On the 3rd of June, there will be a party congress to make things official - Babler and Rendi-Wagner are expected to accept the result according to Austrian state media ORF.

People have previously pointed out that SPD infighting and leader unpopularity are why they failed to rise off the ÖVP collapse, leading to things like the KPÖ gaining relevance and the FPÖ currently leading the polls. And this guy is new and supposedly popular. So I would be curious to see if voters intentions remain the same in a month or so.

Doskozil is not new, he's very well known in Austria. But he would certainly be a significant change from Rendi-Wagner. A former police officer, conservative in style, a left-of-center populist in politics. He has been able to transform his personal popularity into votes for the SPÖ in Burgenland, a narrow, mostly rural strip of land on the Hungarian border. It will be interesting to see if he can win meaningful numbers of new voters in the center and the populist quadrant on the national level, too. On the other hand urban and socially progressive voters might leave the SPÖ, but it's unclear how important they are numerically in the SPÖ voter base.