Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Zack, zack, zack—three short, harsh-sounding words that have suddenly taken on a completely new meaning in Austria. Usually, the three Z-words uttered together in quick succession would not have had any negative connotations. On the contrary, the expression described a particularly eager, speedy way of working. If you had done something zack, zack, zack then it meant that it had been achieved pretty easily, quickly, and without coercion.

But since May 17, 2019, this saying has gained an added layer of meaning. On that day, a secretly filmed video emerged in which Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s Vice-Chancellor and leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), explained the power mechanisms in the country to a woman posing as the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch.

In a duet with his party colleague Johann Gudenus, he boasted about how easy it was to buy influential newspapers in Austria and award highly valuable state contracts to large companies. If one could gain control the Kronen-Zeitung, the biggest tabloid newspaper in the country, then it would be easy to bring in new journalists—“zack, zack, zack,” Strache said, while lounging comfortably on the sofa of the Ibiza villa and wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt.

Throw out the unpleasant reporters and replace them with docile writers. Zack, zack, zack—that’s how quickly it could be done. The oligarch’s niece turned out to be a skillful actress, the night in the Ibiza villa a trap that had far-reaching consequences for the two right-wing populist politicians and for Austria itself.

A Symbol of Complacency

This triple zack has been on everyone’s lips ever since. It has become a linguistic memorial—a symbol of the complacent willingness of members of the government to abuse their power. The three words have been emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers, quoted in just about every comment online and used ironically by the Austrians to describe what has happened in Austria since “Ibizagate.”

First, the main protagonists in the video, Strache and Gudenus, resigned from their offices. On the same day, Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, leader of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), ended the coalition government with the FPÖ and called new elections. Shortly afterwards, the opposition parties Liste Jetzt and the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) tabled a parliamentary motion of no confidence in Kurz, which was adopted by a majority with the votes of the FPÖ.

And so, for the first time in its history the Republic of Austria has a transitional government of experts appointed by the president, led by a new chancellor, Brigitte Bierlein, who was previously president of the Constitutional Court. New elections will be held at the end of September. All this happened in less than 14 days. Zack, zack, zack.

Events have moved so fast that by now, the Ibiza video has been pushed into the background. Now, only two years after the last general election in October 2017, all the parties are facing another summer of campaigning. The Greens, who lost all their seats last time round, have a good chance of reentering parliament; the Liste Jetzt, a spin-off of the Greens, will probably lose their seats.

Astonishingly Little Damage

The SPÖ is deeply divided and has been unable to react with enough skill to profit from the chaos caused by the outgoing ÖVP-FPÖ government. The New Austria and Liberal Forum (NEOS), which only entered parliament in 2013, is doing a bit better, thanks to its resolute party leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger, and is seriously considering entering government after the election. The FPÖ under its new leader Norbert Hofer, who was the party’s presidential candidate in 2016, is presenting itself as the real victim of “Ibizagate” and is trying to pretend that it is relaxed about the departure of its leading figure Heinz-Christian Strache. Internally, that is far from the case.

Nevertheless, it is astonishing how little damage the scandal seems to have inflicted on the FPÖ: only nine days after the video was released, the party still achieved 17.2 percent in the European elections—in 2014 it was 20.5 percent. And Sebastian Kurz? Having done even better in the European elections than at the last national poll in 2017, the head of the ÖVP is confident of victory and eager to take back the Chancellery. The forced end of his government after less than 17 months has hugely annoyed Kurz, the youngest ever head of government in Europe. He strictly rejects the argument, made by many commentators and the opposition parties, that he made the right-wing populists of the FPÖ acceptable and thus contributed to the current chaos.

Austria’s deeply divided parliament is currently and quickly overturning various laws that were passed under ÖVP-FPÖ. For instance, it reintroduced the total smoking ban in restaurants, which Kurz’ government had lifted in the spring of 2018 despite strong criticism by doctors, labor lawyers, and others. But the issues that were raised by the Ibiza video and that should urgently be addressed, such as illegal party financing, the fight against corruption, or the sometimes far too close relations between the media and politics, are being simply ignored.

On the contrary. Strache may have resigned from his party office, and he may have not accepted his mandate as an MEP, despite attracting 44,750 direct votes in the European elections. But his family still has a lot of influence. Zack, zack, zack, and his wife Philippa Strache will be running for the FPÖ in the September national election. Zack, zack, zack, and Strache himself plans to become the party’s top candidate in the Vienna local elections in 2020. It seems Austria won’t be rid of those three Zs any time soon.

The post Words Don’t Come Easy: “Zack, Zack, Zack” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

Sebastian Kurz knows how to party. Last Wednesday, he invited all of Vienna to a Sommerfest in the baroque Schönburg Palace, and he didn’t miss the opportunity to welcome every guest with a handshake. Wearing no tie, yet flawlessly dressed up, Kurz represented the new feeling in Vienna: In Europe, we are somebody again.

“Yes, but who?”, asked a few guests who had observed Kurz’s recent political travels. Austria’s conservative chancellor had just journeyed to Bavaria to visit the state’s Premier Markus Söder and support him in the “asylum fight” against Merkel. Meanwhile his Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache visited Italy’s new interior minister and agitator in chief, Matteo Salvini, and rhapsodized about a “Copernican Revolution in Europe’s asylum policy.” Two days after that, Kurz went to Budapest for a summit of Visegrad leaders, whom he has been defending from criticism. Kurz has even had time to call for an “axis of the willing”—an alliance of countries that want to proceed with a restrictive refugee policy. Kurz counts Vienna, Rome, and Berlin (or rather the CSU as the most conservative party in Angela Merkel’s government) among the willing, but also Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Kurz envisions these countries supporting militarized border controls and “protection centers” outside EU borders instead of the internal redistribution of refugees.

Is Kurz really the “rock star” of Europe’s new conservatives, as Trump’s ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, declared to the right-wing readers of Breitbart? Is he really, right at the start of Austria’s presidency, aligning himself with Angela Merkel’s opponents and thereby positioning himself as a future conservative president of the EU Commission? The next EU elections are in 2019, the following ones in 2024—when Kurz will still only be 37 years old.

Perhaps is it really “the hour of Merkel’s antagonists,” time for the “axis of no principles”. That’s how Matthias Strolz, the former leader of Austria’s liberal and pro-European party NEOS, described the situation in an article in the German weekly DIE ZEIT. Strolz and Kurz were once friends. Today, Strolz does not hesitate to paint the Austrian chancellor as a henchman of international right-wing populists and Trump supporters—a man so perfectly equipped to destabilize Europe as if he had been designed for that purpose.

Perhaps Kurz is just a child of his time. A prototype of the next generation of European politicians, for whom the EU is not an indispensable union that arose out of the ashes of World War II, but an aging vehicle that must be completely renovated if it is to remain attractive for a generation that only knows the Iron Curtain from history books.

Celebrated as a Wunderkind

Kurz is young in years but old in political experience. He’s spent half his life in politics. As a teenager, he got involved with the youth organization of the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party). In his mid-twenties, he became state secretary for integration, and then foreign minister—understandably, he was too busy to finish his law degree. Kurz comes from a moderate, middle-class background in Vienna. His mother is a teacher, and his father worked for Siemens until he started his own business. Sebastian was an only child, well-cared for and given every support. Disruptions, detours, rebellion—there was none of that.

His private life today is also unspectacular. Kurz lives with his high-school sweetheart, no kids, no pets—though he does like dogs, he explained in one of his rare private interviews. He also likes playing tennis and hiking in the mountains, and used to go windsurfing on Lake Garda in Italy. All in all, it’s an average-Joe background, perfect to identify with for many voters. It’s noticeable how carefully Kurz orchestrates his private life and controls the reporting about it. As a child of generation Facebook, he knows how to shape his image.

Europe is watching Österreich’s new chancellor with fascination, but also growing unease. After his electoral victory, the international press celebrated him as a “Wunderkind,” practically a Mozart reborn. But recently he gets compared more often to a different figure from Austrian history, namely Klemens von Metternich, the powerful, scheming master of ceremonies at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. One thing is for sure: this 31-year-old is no longer being underestimated.

“A Europe that Protects”

The motto of Austria’s Council presidency is “A Europe that protects” (a slogan borrowed from France’s President Emmanuel Macron), and Kurz takes that literally. To create this Europe, he believes that the EU needs a new, stronger border control comprising Frontex police and military units who can also take action in third countries and at sea. It should be able to send people back to “protection centers,” camps based outside the EU, where asylum-seekers would be held and processed before any of them would be allowed to cross Europe’s borders. These camps could be on the North African coast, though the new prestige project of the Austrian government foresees establishing them in the Western Balkans, perhaps in Albania, a country eager for EU accession.

As a foreign minister, Kurz helped close the West Balkan route to Europe in 2015 against all resistance and doubters. He praised the “Australian model” of setting up internment camps on nearby islands. Now he is working on closing off Europe’s external borders, as that would make superfluous the whole debate about distributing refugees within the EU according to quotas. Kurz does not foresee any compromise on that issue during Austria’s presidency. Closing off the external borders would also take the heat off the CSU’s proposal to reject asylum-seekers at the German border.

Already in the Austrian election campaign of 2017, Kurz styled himself as the savior of the West. He took over the ÖVP, a party that had shaped much of the country’s history after World War II, and converted it into a citizen’s movement. Now, the young chancellor is in his element at the EU level. He is testing what worked for him in Austria on a greater stage.

The election researcher Fritz Plasser analyzed Kurz’s rise in a recent book. “The refugee crisis of 2015 was the fault line. It created an epochal crisis topic that drove out everything else,” he wrote. By 2016, two-thirds of Austrians had the impression that something was going wrong.

Act Like a Startup

But Kurz is smart enough to do more than promote himself as an anti-refugee rabble rouser. Of course, he rode a wave of migrant-related worry into the Chancellery. But at the same time, he remained the neat, polite, almost sycophantic son-in-law who charms the grandmother just as easily as her granddaughter. There is nothing radical about his behavior or manner, unlike his vice-chancellor Strache and many other members of his coalition partner, the far-right FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party). He is the perfectly anodyne right-wing populist, a hardliner in the garb of a Christian Democratic Socialist.

If you’re looking for Kurz’s fundamental convictions, you will not find them on the classical axis between Christian socialist and free-market liberalism. As a teenager of the 2000s, he was shaped by September 11 and the global financial crisis. As an Austrian, the country’s “years of change” from 2000-2006 were a decisive experience. Back then, there was also a right-wing conservative coalition in power, with Wolfgang Schüssel (ÖVP) as Chancellor and the FPÖ as a junior partner. That government quickly set about dismantling Austria’s tradition of grand coalitions defined by social equilibrium and consensus. An air of neoliberalism, of freedom and personal responsibility, swept through the land. The feeling was that if you couldn’t cope, it was your own fault.

Kurz is so heavily influenced by such thinking that he doesn’t even question it. He and his political movement act like a startup looking for sponsors, crowds, and likes on the political market. Added to that is a deep skepticism about everything the establishment represents—even though Kurz himself comes from the establishment. Political correctness is “over-the-top.”

If the line about the “axis of the willing” was clumsy, given that there is a dark history of axes led by Berlin, Rome, and Vienna, it doesn’t bother Kurz. For him, the accusations from German commentators that he was using “Nazi rhetoric” are just part of senseless debates from a time when even his parents weren’t yet born. “I have a problem with people dictating which words I can use. I have a healthy grasp of history, and I don’t like to let Nazis take words like “axis” or “homeland” (Heimat) away from me,” he has argued. Older people might find that cynical, see it as calculated pandering to the politics of the past. But when Kurz uses it, it is just a sign of how much history his generation has forgotten.

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© REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler

With the exception of Kurt Waldheim’s in 1986 – which raised questions about the former UN Secretary General’s activities during World War II – presidential campaigns in Austria have never received much attention. In this country of nine million people, the presidency is an almost entirely ceremonial office. Yet the first round of presidential elections caused a political earthquake that is being felt far beyond Austria’s borders.

Indeed, in neighboring Germany, a country with a very similar political system, the establishment is catching a horrifying glimpse of its own fate. Here as in Austria, the post-World War II party system is facing fragmentation. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel still enjoys immense personal popularity, the writing is on the wall for the parties that make up her government.

So what happened in Austria? On April 24, for the first time since the end of World War II, neither the Social Democratic nor the Christian Democratic candidate got into the second round. These two parties, which used to collect about 80 percent of the vote in presidential elections, now only received 22 percent – combined.

The winner of the first round was Norbert Hofer (45), a rightwing populist who had campaigned on an anti-Islam platform. In the run-off, he will be facing Alexander van der Bellen (72) from the Greens, a retired economics professor. Neither the Christian Democratic nor the Social Democratic candidate even came in third. That place was taken by a former judge, a political newcomer who privately raised €900,000 for her campaign.

Austrian voters were clearly dissatisfied with the coalition government of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats and their squabbles. They are also worried about the country’s economic development and – most importantly – angry about the government’s refugee policy, which radically shifted within six months from opening the country’s doors to closing off its borders. This particularly benefited Hofer’s Freedom Party.

A Systemic Crisis

“Good God, it’s a fiasco,” said Günther Platter, head of the regional government in Tirol and a member of Austria’s People’s Party, the country’s Christian Democratic party. “We are in a systemic crisis,” added Christoph Neumayer, the head of the country’s powerful Industry Federation.

For more than 70 years, ÖVP and SPÖ have shared the spoils of power in Austria. Blacks or Reds, as they are known, have led every postwar government. Good jobs in the state sector, public broadcasting, the trade unions, and every state agency and publicly held company, were divided up between their followers.

Voters have had enough of this. Their dissatisfaction has shrunk both the Reds and the Blacks, forcing them together into ever more unpopular “grand coalitions”. Even together, both parties amounted to only about 50 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in 2013.

In Germany, the trend is pointing the same way. Decline first hit the Social Democrats (SPD). From more than 40 percent of the vote in 1998, they are down to around 22 percent in the polls now. Merkel’s conservative bloc has been more resilient, but it is also declining. After achieving 41.5 percent at the last Bundestag elections in 2013, it now stands at about 33 percent in the polls.

On the left, it was SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s policy of social and labor market reform that tore apart the Social Democrats and encouraged the rise of the populist Left Party. On the right, Chancellor Merkel is now facing a very similar development with the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). This rightwing populist party – very similar to Hofer’s Freedom Party – agreed on its first, stridently anti-Islamic party program at a party congress on May 1.

Conservatism Transformed

Merkel has led the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for an incredible 16 years; during that time, she transformed Helmut Kohl’s staid, conservative party into a modern, centrist, urban movement. The CDU abolished conscription, modernized family policy, gave gays nearly equal rights, and decided to end nuclear power. Most recently, it was Merkel who welcomed the refugees to Germany and got the CDU to adopt the slogan “Islam is part of Germany.”

For the longest time, her enormous personal popularity concealed the fact that her policies actually opened up a vacuum to the right. But now, Merkel’s critics mutter about how she broke with the wisdom handed down by Franz-Josef Strauß, a wily, power-conscious conservative who had enormous influence over West Germany’s politics in the 1960s and 70s.

“There cannot be any democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU (the CDU’s Bavarian sister party),” Strauß declared in 1986. In this spirit, both the CDU and the CSU for many years took great care to represent enough rightwing positions – that is, until Merkel began her radical overhaul of German conservatism.

From Three-and-a-Half to Six

In 1986, Germany was essentially still run by three parties – the conservative bloc, the Social Democrats and the small Liberal party. The Greens had only just appeared. Now, three decades later, add the Left Party and the Alternative für Deutschland, and you have an untidy, unstable six-party system which is beginning to make it very difficult to form governments.

The spate of regional elections in the spring ended up with a series of coalitions involving Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Greens, who are almost exclusively allied by the desire to keep the AfD out of power. While popular heads of regional government can do quite well under such circumstances, the minority partners in government generally suffer, shrinking the number of coalition options for the future even more.

It is a situation that many Germans are profoundly uneasy about. Collective memory here is still deeply scarred by the political instability of the Weimar Republic with its plethora of small parties. It is this experience that made West Germany’s founding fathers introduce a five-percent threshold for any party wanting to enter the Bundestag. This threshold still stands, but now seems powerless to stop the system’s fragmentation.

Add to that another effect of Germany’s electoral laws: small parties – and this is what all the German political groups are turning into – have few incentives to present parliamentary candidates with broad political appeal and charisma. They will rarely manage to get any of their own elected directly anyway.

So what matters most in elections are the lists that the party as a whole present. To get in at the top of the list, you need to be good at your party’s power games. But such a selection is bound to produce a very different set of politicians, one that is likely to produce even more disenchantment with the political class.

Of course, it is far from certain that the AfD will continue its rise. With the refugee issue receding and the party caught up in internal quarrels, it is dropping in the polls. Yet voters aren’t turning back into the loyal, steady supporters of just one party that they were in the early post-war decades. Germany’s politicians – including Angela Merkel – are well advised to pay close attention to the writing on the wall.

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