5 octobre 2016 Note °4 Eurocité, 12 Cité malesherbes, 75009 Paris [email protected] www.eurocite.eu Progressive Politics in : A Never-ending Presidential Election and other Challenges

Mario Gavenda Mario Gavenda is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Vienna and recent graduate of the postgraduate programme at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. His current research project deals with the impact of the politicisation of EU affairs on political parties and their internal dynamics, and his wider interests concern European integration, political parties and the politics of globalisation.

[Picture: John Fonseca, 28 July 2007, Creative Commons License]

! ! Amidst political turmoil across Europe, Austrian politics has silently been caught in a watershed moment, attempting but comically failing to elect a new president since April. In a dramatic run-off in May 2016, (backed by the Greens) prevailed with a lead of merely 30,000 votes over the far-right FPÖ () candidate (50.3% against 49.7% of votes). Austria had averted the fate of becoming the first European country with a far-right president and instead elected a former opposition leader of the moderately left-wing Greens instead. However, in July the Austrian Constitutional Court ordered the rerun of the second round, due to procedural mistakes in the counting of postal ballots in several districts. After the repeat election had been set for 2 October, a significant number of damaged envelopes of already sent-out postal ballots foiled this attempt already before election day. The parliament has now decided that the postponed rerun of the run-off will be held on 4 December between Van der Bellen and Hofer in a potentially even more polarised and heated political climate. This analysis will first recapitulate the initial elections, before discussing the prospects for the rerun, and finally situate these events within a discussion of the state of the Austrian left. ! ! ! ! ! 1. The presidential election of 2016: The first attempt ! Elections for the office of Federal President are usually not the most spectacular feature of Austrian politics. While the constitution does indeed give comparatively extensive powers to the post, the officeholders have traditionally refrained from interfering into everyday politics and limited themselves to a largely ceremonial role. This is not surprising, as all presidents since 1945 had been nominated by either the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) or the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), the two main pillars of Austria’s stable post-war political order. This presidential election can be seen as an illustration of the erosion of this political order. The two parties have been governing together in a ‘Grand Coalition’ for the past 10 years, with however only a small parliamentary majority remaining since the 2013 elections. The candidates nominated by the SPÖ and ÖVP both suffered a crushing defeat with only 11% of votes respectively. Both were clearly outperformed by the independent former Supreme Court judge Irmgard Griss (19%), who had not held any previous political office and ran without financial support from any party. The front-runners however were the candidates of the two main

2 opposition parties, that is, Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and Alexander Van der Bellen, a long-time leader of the Greens. While Van der Bellen’s reputation as a highly respectable centre-left politician earned him an expected 21%, Hofer came first with a shocking 35%. The second round thus saw a face-off between the representatives of the right- wing and the left-wing opposition. The contest that took shape shows remarkable similarities with the dynamics we can observe in European (and American) politics more broadly today. The electorate was split – rather literally – in two halves, pitting voters with contrasting attitudes against each other. On the one hand, those who welcome European integration, are prepared to take in refugees, and are generally more positive about opening the country towards the world. On the other hand, the citizens who feel threatened by immigration, globalisation and social changes. Political science has for a good number of years now theorised this divide as a new cleavage between “integration” and “demarcation”. Recently, the media has also begun to pay attention, for instance in the depiction of a clash between “drawbridges up” and “drawbridges down”. These attitudes can be attributed to a remarkable degree to specific social groups. While voters in rural areas and workers (with 86%!) overwhelmingly voted for the far-right candidate, the Green Van der Bellen achieved his best results amongst people with higher education and in the cities, above all the capital Vienna (over 63%). This dynamic is strikingly similar to the one seen in Brexit referendum a few weeks later, and reminds us of the serious challenges progressive and pro-European parties encounter in such a political environment. Even more so, as the populist anti-system narrative of the far-right has managed to depict Van der Bellen as part of a cosmopolitan political elite despite him or his party never having held any national executive office. ! ! 2. Perspectives for the rerun: A different election? ! The most immediate challenge for the left in Austria is to repeat the election result in December. Claims about voter behaviour in such an unprecedented context remain speculation, as many of the parameters of political debate will have changed from the May election until December. Much will depend on the public mood in relation to national and EU politics, for example as regards the upcoming decisions about the CETA free-trade agreement between the EU and Canada, to which Austrian public opinion is strongly opposed. Discontent with European decisions may spur support for the Eurosceptic Hofer, as could any incidents that can somehow be related to questions of asylum and immigration. The campaigns that had already started for the October election day can offer a glimpse into what can be expected from the two candidates until December. As for Hofer’s populist right-wing FPÖ, the successful appeal and postponement have provided the party with a renewed opportunity to insinuate that the system is rigged to the detriment of ‘the people’, despite repeated reminders that no indications for manipulation were found in the initial election. For Van der Bellen and the Green party, a second campaign was from the outset a logistical and 3 financial challenge. By August, the campaign had already collected more than 1 million euros mostly in small donations, a remarkable sum in a country where election campaigns are traditionally funded by political parties and public money. This allowed Van der Bellen to be more present in rural areas in which Hofer had been more successful in May. It remains to be seen whether this dynamic will continue now that the election has been postponed for another two months. A further factor to consider in the rerun is the capital city of Vienna. Here, Van der Bellen won a resounding victory in May with over 63% of the votes. This was disappointing for Hofer, Vienna has long been seen as a main battleground between the SPÖ and the FPÖ, for instance in the municipal elections in 2015, when the SPÖ prevailed after polls had long suggested a neck-and-neck race. Thus far there are no signs that the FPÖ has found a strategy to counter this weakness. For example, on 18 September, another election rerun for a district council in Vienna has seen the Greens successfully mobilise voters and even overtake the SPÖ to win the district mayoralty, while the FPÖ did not improve on its results from last year. ! ! 3. The Austrian left in the current rupture: Threats and chances ! These last Viennese elections in October 2015 were won by the Social Democrats with a pro-refugee message and offer a glimpse into the strategic quandaries the left faces. The Social Democrats have long oscillated between confronting and accommodating populist warnings of immigration and European integration. During the summer of 2015, Austria, following the German government, actively welcomed refugees stranded on the route between Greece and Hungary. As the far-right expectedly mounted opposition to this decision, the social-democratic mayor of Vienna chose to forcefully defend the ‘culture of welcome’ and was rewarded with 40% of the votes as opposed to the far-right’s 30%. This showed – just as the presidential elections – that it is possible to win elections at least in the urban areas without ceding ground to xenophobia. At the same time, this masks an uncomfortable development for the social democrats. While the SPÖ did well in Vienna’s inner-city districts with large student and middle-class populations, it continued to lose votes to the FPÖ in its traditional working class strongholds. The electorate seemed increasingly split along the same lines as in this year’s presidential elections, cutting across the usual voter coalition of the left. For the SPÖ presidential candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer it was not possible to pursue the same strategy, as the federal government had performed a U-turn in its refugee policy and unilaterally closed off the borders to its Southern neighbours in the early months of 2016. This was one further dent in the credibility of the governing parties and contributed to the dismal showing of their presidential candidates. In the SPÖ, the consequences were already drawn before the second round, with the replacement of party chair and Chancellor by the manager of the public railway company, Christian Kern. While Kern thus far enjoys very favourable personal approval rates, the central question for Austrian social democracy remains: How to win back the trust of the working class while remaining firm in its

4 principles of anti-racism and constructive European engagement? While this question has troubled the left across Europe in the recent past, there are two specific problems for the SPÖ. First, it is committed to a grand coalition in which the conservative coalition partner has no appetite for its demands (such as the reintroduction of wealth and inheritance taxes). Second, the party is internally split in a central question: How to deal with the FPÖ? Many party officials outside Vienna advocate a possible cooperation or even coalition, emphasising labour market protection and welfare for Austrian citizens. This then meets the fierce resistance of the party’s more left-wing supporters, represented strongly in the influential party structures in inner-city Vienna. Thus far, no resolution of this party-internal struggle is on the horizon. Certainly the horizon of the Austrian left is not limited to the Social Democratic Party. After all, the almost already elected president comes out of the Green camp that regularly unites more than 10% of votes in national elections. However, the party does not manage to make significant inroads into the wider electorate beyond its core constituencies, and the presidential elections show that in particular working class voters are highly averse to the party. What is particularly striking is that a party that has never participated in national government (but does so in a number of regions) has been successfully portrayed as part of the unaccountable political establishment by the populist right. While some voices inside the party call for a more ‘left-wing populist’ strategy, the party leadership seems to continue to rely on ideological moderation and electoral professionalism. Finally, what about the prospects for a new party on the left, in the wake of the rise of Podemos, Syriza or the Corbyn movement? Several attempts in the recent past have ultimately failed. Besides the historical fact that the radical left never managed to challenge the dominance of social democracy, sociological factors are an important part of the answer. It is important to bear in mind that the nucleus of support for new left challengers often comes from young, urban and well-educated voters with a specific set of grievances of their own (which I will, for lack of a better term, call “millennial grievances”), rather than from the more conventional working class. To be sure there are national variations, but particularly in Austria disaffected working class voters have been mobilised by the far-right to a large extent. On the other hand, the “millennial grievances” that could still drive a left- wing protest vote – high unemployment and precarious work among graduates, university tuition fees and student debt, unaffordable rents – seem not to be as acute in Austria as in more troubled economies. The vote of this group is thus currently contested between the Greens, the SPÖ and the liberal upstart party Neos. This however does not suggest that such grievances do not exist; they certainly do and may very well grow over the next years. If the established parties of the Austrian left, in concert with their allies elsewhere in Europe, do not come up with new recipes to turn around the current trends, they risk losing not only the working class but also their younger voters. ! ! ! A left-wing european think tank, EuroCité aims to craft a progressive vision and programme for Europe with its high-quality publications and public events. EuroCité is a hub for European activism, as well as a fertile thinking ground for new ideas in a dynamic, multinational and innovative environment.

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