Political Entrepreneurship Josef Lentsch

Political Entrepreneurship Josef Lentsch Political Entrepreneurship How to Build Successful Centrist Political Start-ups Josef Lentsch NEOS Lab Vienna, Wien Austria ISBN 978-3-030-02860-2 ISBN 978-3-030-02861-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02861-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959839 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: Nicole Heiling This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland “You have read a lot about startups in business, but if you want to know how Silicon Valley style startups look in politics, read this. Its author is not only writing about political entrepreneurs, he is one of them.” —Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and permanent Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna “No one understands better what it takes to take a political start up from ideation to the parliament than Josef Lentsch. In ‘Political Entrepreneurship’ he combines first- hand experience with a thoughtful review of what we know about entrepreneurship in the interest of society.” —Johanna Mair, Professor of Organization, Strategy and Leadership at the Hertie School of Governance, and Co-Director Global Innovation for Impact Lab at Stanford University “Josef Lentsch has produced a fascinating, commanding guide to the new, insurgent players shaking up traditional party systems and reinvigorating liberal politics. Political Entrepreneurship is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand today’s fragmented and disrupted European politics—and the European politics of the future.” —Jeremy Cliffe, Charlemagne columnist, The Economist “The rarest of events has occurred—a new political species has appeared in the European eco-system, the centrist political start up. From Macron’s En Marche in France to Spain’s Ciudadanos, a new type of political actor has emerged. Few are better positioned to tell this Europe-wide story than Josef Lentsch who has had a front-seat view on this important political transformation that is shaking Europe. A dramatic and important account.” —Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of Government, Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die For my sons Jann and Piet Preface On 27 September 2013, I flew from London, where I and my family were living at the time, to Vienna. My 2-year-old son was sitting on my lap. His 6-month-old brother had stayed behind with my wife in London. It had been a year since the founding of NEOS, an Austrian political start-up. After a long and exhausting summer, during which I had helped mobilise Austrian voters abroad, and shuttled between London and Vienna as a Founding Board member, Election Day was approaching. It had been a frantic campaign. The polls had only picked us up in the final weeks. Would it be enough? Two days later, I was standing in a large crowd in front of the TV in the NEOSphere, the headquarters of NEOS on the top floor of a non-descript building in Neubau, Vienna’s gentrified-hip seventh district. We were all staring at the screen, anxiously waiting for the first exit poll, expected at 5 pm. We had no hope of winning. Success for us would be clearing the 4% threshold above which we would be represented in parliament. The exit poll projection was expressed as a bar chart. The first column shot up. Then the second. Both the Social Democrats and the Conservatives had lost. In third place, the far-right Freedom Party had gained. No surprises. The Greens had won as well. Now came the other new kid in town, the populist Team Stronach. They had made it, too. Finally, our turn. The seconds seemed longer than normal. Finally, the pink column shot up and stopped just below 5%. The crowd erupted. In a split second, the tension was released in screaming, jumping, hugging and crying for joy. A piece on the Austrian election in the New York Times a couple of days later said: “The new party, known as NEOS, in German short for New Austria, was the surprise of the day.” We had made history. It took me some time to understand that we were not—not by a long shot—the only ones. That there were many other groups across Europe who had identified the same problems we had and arrived at the same conclusion: If not us, who? If not now, when? *** ix x Preface Politics, I have found, is an exhilarating but often bruising team sport, played 24 h a day, 7 days a week. For politicians, it takes self-discipline to draw appropriate lines, time and again, between their private and public lives. It takes integrity to stay grounded and stick to one’s values. It takes self-reflection to keep stepping out of the system and questioning whether one is still working in the spirit that led to one getting involved in politics in the first place. This place. Politics, NEOS co-founder Matthias Strolz likes to say, is the place where we meet to agree how we want to live well together. In this sense, it is essential. There is no substitute for it, apart from war, which von Clausewitz said was “the continuation of politics by other means”. I was born in 1976, in a stable Western democracy, towards the end of the Cold War. The town where I grew up was 15 min by car from the Iron Curtain. I was 13 when the Berlin Wall fell. Just a couple of months earlier, a few kilometres from my house, the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary had jointly cut the barbed wire fence between our countries. I was 19 when Austria joined the European Union. I am part of the MTV generation. Sandwiched between Generation X and the Millennials, we were perhaps the first global generation and the last to grow up without personal computers. We were witnesses to a dramatic change in politics as well as technology at a critical stage of our lives. We knew that things could be different, that things could change for the better and that politics could be a force for good. I have been Director of NEOS Lab, the think-and-do tank of NEOS, for 5 years now. It has been a wild and, at times, a bewildering ride. We entered the political arena with high hopes and an overdose of optimism. Many of us, including me, had been, or still were, entrepreneurs, bringing their hands-on, can-do attitude to the political arena. We had to learn that the political status quo can be frustratingly resilient to change and that politics is a craft that requires constant honing. The trick is to learn to work the system without becoming a part of it. We did not always live up to our own expectations. Once your hands are dirty, what’s a little more dirt gonna do? Political entrepreneurs are no saints. Some of them may be heroes (I really think so), but all are human, fallible and prone to fail. When we stumbled, we got back on our feet. There is a Japanese proverb: “fall seven times and stand up eight”. This is what entrepreneurs do. They eat failure for breakfast. As Max Weber, himself a failed politician, proclaimed 100 years ago in his lecture on “Politics as a Vocation”: Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfast- ness of heart that can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. (Weber 1919) Preface xi Promoting what today seems almost impossible politically, in the interest of progress and a better future for us all, is what the political start-ups I describe in the pages that follow were founded for. This is not just a national struggle. Politics today is regional and global. What was previously a struggle between the Left and Right has turned into a struggle between open and closed societies and economies.

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