Austria: Why the ÖVP does not come to rest – politics
Two Kapazunder, the Styrian governor Hermann Schützenhofer and his Tyrolean colleague Günther Platter, have announced their withdrawal. That is to be noted, even if one can say that anyone who is 70 years old and has been in office since 2006 or 68 years old and has been in office since 2008 has the right to rest.
Platte had recently announced that it wanted to go to the 2023 state elections. Apparently, however, the Tyrolean does not want to end his career with a whopping minus in the election result, which the polls and the lousy image of the ÖVP currently suggest. It is also somehow in keeping with the ÖVP that both are leaving during the legislative period and have presented their successors without any fuss and without any major internal party say. In terms of democratic politics, that’s not the best way. Of course, everything is sold as a change of generations. Oh well. One successor is 51, the other 59, and both don’t want to do much differently. One might think that would do the party quite well at the moment.
And another head of state, Markus Wallner from Vorarlberg, could be lost to the party: if more details become public about how tax money and membership fees of party-affiliated clubs were dealt with in Bregenz. The Court of Auditors, which questioned this practice and the ÖVP’s balance sheet for the 2019 election year, will also have something to say about this.
The chancellor shows up for good news – and disappears as soon as things get uncomfortable
Which brings us from the periphery to the center of events, to Vienna. When there is good news to report, such as the large amount of money that Schwarz-Green is spending on an “anti-inflation package”, then Chancellor Karl Nehammer becomes very visible. When things GET awkward, he disappears and lets a state secretary in parliament give zero answers. Or he delegates responsibility entirely: In a lively ORF interview, for example, which dealt with the gossip from the Federal Court of Auditors because of the questionable annual report for 2019, he pointed the finger at the preferred federal manager, who, ironically, was a short plant. But the Secretary General responsible – that was him.
And when it became known on Thursday that the European Court of Justice had overturned a law of the turquoise-blue government under Kurz, indexing family allowances, he preferred to let his successor Laura Sachslehner tweet, who likes to use the wrong tone. It was regrettable, she wrote, that an important ÖVP project had once again been overturned by a supreme court – although it was a central integration project.
I beg your pardon? The fact that foreign workers receive fewer social benefits if they pay the same amount into the tax pool as Austrians, but their children live abroad, should have helped integration? Everyone knew that this idea was not EU-compliant. Sachslehner leaned back with age-old short slogans: One continues to fight to put “political Islam in its place”. That will reassure the Romanian nurses, who received less child benefit than their colleagues from Austria.
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