Austria elections: a reckoning for the establishment 

The recent elections in Austria saw polarisation to the left and to the right. The old government was punished, but the weak programmes of the Social Democrats and the Communist Party failed to create enthusiasm. Instead, the FPÖ won the election, basing themselves on fierce demagogic opposition to the status quo.

The government was voted out, and both governing parties (the ÖVP and the Greens) lost massively. Only 1.28 million eligible voters, or 26.3 percent, voted for the traditional conservative party, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), meaning that the ÖVP lost half a million voters. And this despite the fact that the ÖVP’s suspected corruption was de facto kept completely out of the election campaign. 402,000 eligible voters (8.2 percent) still voted for the Greens – that is 250,000 fewer than in 2019. 

765,000 voters in total, or almost 17 percent, thus turned their backs on the governing parties. This is not a slight shift, but a general reckoning with a failed government programme. It is an indictment of their handling of the coronavirus crisis, economic crises, wars, inflation, falling incomes, the crisis in schools and hospitals, severe weather disasters and, most recently, rising unemployment. 

There is frustration and a mood of anger. 57 percent believe that the country has developed negatively – a figure that was only 32 percent five years ago. Almost half feel under financial pressure and have to restrict their everyday spending.

FPÖ capitalises on discontent

In the 2019 election, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) was in crisis due to the well timed release of the ‘Ibiza video’ in which the party’s leader offered government contracts to the fake-niece of a fake-Russian businessman in return for financial support. However, the party’s new leader, Kickl, has brought the party back to the fore with a demagogic anti-elite stance. The FPÖ gained 636,000 votes in the election. Voters who switched to the ÖVP under Sebastian Kurz in 2019 have now gone back to the blue party (FPÖ), contributing 443,000 of its votes, according to voting trend analysis.

The FPÖ achieved this by consistently taking up the protest mood, demagogically polemicising against the ‘party of unity’, i.e. that all the other parties stand for the same thing. It also correctly drew the link between the war in Ukraine and massive inflation. In doing so, the party built up political trust among people in all strata and classes of society. They were the only party to raise this question, which is having a decisive impact on the Austrian economy and its industries.765,000 voters in total, or almost 17 percent, thus turned their backs on the governing parties. This is not a slight shift, but a general reckoning with a failed government programme / Image: Der Funke

At the same time, the FPÖ has been mendaciously stylising Muslim migrants as a central social problem for years. Last year, after October 7, all other parties followed in its footsteps. As a result, it has set the political agenda on these questions, which is perfectly suited for those in power to push forward a policy of attacks on social spending and militarism. 

The role of the FPÖ – in opposition as well as in government – is ultimately to promote the constant division of the working class along the lines of origin, nationality, sexual orientation and religion. We communists are fighting the FPÖ's influence in the working class because it is a reactionary, organically bourgeois party that only appeals to the workers demagogically in order to hand them over to the capitalists in the next moment (see, for example, its support for pension counter-reform in 2003, and its support for a 12 hours working day in 2018). Their divisive and systematically racist, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric weakens the working class's ability to fight.

However, the success of the FPÖ also presents the bourgeois with their own headache. It drives a wedge between them and the policy they have been pursuing vis-à-vis Russia for the past two and a half years because, when it comes to the EU and Russia, Kickl is closer to Hungary’s Orban than anyone else. 

The FPÖ, its voters and Kickl want to re-emphasise so-called ‘Austrian neutrality’, and move away from the self-destructive sanctions programme of the EU. In this, they express the desire of a wing of the bourgeois who want a return to the cheap energy of the past and maintain their juicy finance profits in the Russian market, which are under pressure from western sanctions. Obviously, these gentlemen don’t see the value of sacrificing their profits to the benefits of their US competitors.

The European bourgeois are therefore very concerned of the influence that the FPÖ might have on the Austrian government and the EU. The liberal President of the Republic, Van der Bellen, has been preparing for many months to do anything in his power to nominate only a government which stands firmly with the overall strategic interests of Brussels and Washington.

The left and Gaza

On the other side of the political spectrum, the reformists are doing nothing to strengthen the workers' movement. The largest opposition party, the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), was hardly able to benefit from the prevailing social discontent. It achieved 1.03 million votes, 20,000 votes more than its historic low in 2019. Due to the increased voter turnout, this still resulted in a slight drop in its share of the vote (21.1 percent). 

The SPÖ's main loss was not to the FPÖ but to non-voters (-180,000). In other words, the SPÖ leadership failed to convince its own voters to turn up. Its programme failed to inspire. Nor did they have much success in winning over voters from the government block. The most important gains for the SPÖ came from former Green voters (+148,000). 

During the election campaign, SP leader Andi Babler never tired of recounting his rise from working-class child to SPÖ leader, emphasising the rights of the poor and calling for taxes on the rich. However, the credibility of Andi Babler's programme to tax the rich in order to avoid austerity was openly undermined by the right-wing of his own party. 

Workers could see that the programme was not a serious proposition. The SPÖ's reactions immediately after the elections showed they were right. The SPÖ threw their election program overboard immediately in order to give Nehammer and the ÖVP, who had been voted out, another five years in office. 

Young people might have voted for the SPÖ as a bulwark against FPÖ participation in government. However, this is not a carte blanche to form a racist austerity government with the ÖVP instead, which the party leadership is now preparing to do.

We issued a critical election recommendation to vote for the Communist Party (KPÖ), which received broad media attention in the week before the election. People who wanted to push for a more left-wing way out of the crisis tended to vote for the KPÖ.

At the time, we noted that the KPÖ leadership was not prepared to tackle the burning issues of the day and respond in a communist way. They didn’t give an answer as to how to fight against war, oppression, racism, the crisis of capitalism, and the inevitable social attacks. The party kept silent about all this as far as it could. Instead, the party leadership stubbornly stuck to presenting itself as the party that gives ‘concrete benefits’ like food banks etc. This opportunism towards the liberal media weakened the party's electoral chances. 

The independent candidacy of the Gaza List is the direct result of this political unwillingness of the Communist Party leadership to enter into conflict with the bourgeoisie.The party was able to attract a smaller share of voters than in the EU elections in May this year (2.4 percent instead of 3 percent). In the latter, at least they raised the issue of rearmament and its link to cuts, with the slogan, “housing instead of guns”.

The failure of the left to provide a real alternative to the questions of inflation, imperialism, the health service etc. left the door wide open for the racists to capitalise on all the discontent in society. The rise of the FPÖ, particularly among the working class, is the responsibility of the leaders of the left who would rather cosy up to the conservatives and the mass media than stand up for the interests of the workers.

Polarisation

If one were to group the political parties into three groups: right-conservative (FPÖ, ÖVP, MFG), liberal-centre (NEOS, Greens, Bier) and workers' movement-left (SPÖ, KPÖ, KEINE, Liste Gaza), we can clearly see an increasing polarisation. On the one hand to the right, who gained 148,950 votes, and on the other to the left, which gained 129,559 votes. The Liberals, on the other hand, lost votes.

The self-declared ‘second election winner’, the liberal NEOS, only gained 59,000 votes, less than the KPÖ (+84,000). The new, liberal, BIER (beer) party succeeded in taking votes away from the SPÖ and KPÖ after having been promoted in the media. However it is notable that votes for the three most active pro-western warmonger parties (the NEOS, the Greens and Bier) taken together shrunk by 104,299. In other words, NATO-imperialism has no support among the mass of the population.

In contrast to these liberals, all four parties of the left and the labour movement have grown, despite their lukewarm policies. It is clear that Austria is not facing a reactionary period or the end of democracy. Such assessments blame the problem on the attitudes of workers and young people. However, the problem is not the working class and the youth, but the policies of the reformists.

N.B: On Thursday, in the aftermath of the election, 20,000 people, most of them young, took to the streets of Vienna to block the rise of the FPÖ to government. This healthy response shows that we are not entering a period of reaction, but of polarisation. The communists need a bold program that not only fights the most reactionary political expression of capitalism, but capitalism itself.